How to Be More Expressive in Art
For an artist, the ability to express oneself through a medium is the essence of the creative experience. Yet, there is in most artists an untapped reservoir of creative potential, and every creative person goes through dry spells in which ideas seem hard to come by. If you are an artist who desires greater powers of expression, you can work at this by distancing yourself mentally, using such techniques as going outside of your field, journaling, practicing absurdism, drawing on negative energy and reformulating the central problem of your art.
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Instructions
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Distance yourself mentally from your artistic process. Overfamiliarity, possessiveness and the echo chamber effect of self-absorbed thoughts can shut down creativity. The antidote is to think as if your idea belongs to someone else or to yourself at some other time and place. Picture yourself working on the project in another city, country or even outer space. Imagine yourself far in the future or in your own past. Go to a public place, look at other people and imagine how they might approach this same work.
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Venture outside of your field. If you are a choreographer, spend an afternoon at a baseball game or track meet. If you are a musician, try taking an architectural tour of a city. For visual artists, go to a rock concert or learn to cook a new dish. The key is to generate new tastes and sensitivities, to think at a different level of generality and to combine differences in ways you hadn't previously considered.
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Practice journaling. Write down as many of your thoughts as possible in a given day or week. Include thoughts such as, "I hate journaling," and "I can't think of anything to write." Practice exercises such as following chain reactions in the natural or human world and observing the boundaries of concepts, such as shades of light and color, interdependence and object peripheries.
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Practice absurdism. Read absurd short stories from authors such as Franz Kafka, Lewis Carroll, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino or Samuel Beckett or watch the films of Luis Bunuel, Andy Warhol, Charlie Chaplin or the Marx Brothers. Write a nonsense poem, spend time playing with small children or do something backward. The goal is to force your mind to work harder at making meaning from its environment.
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Draw on negative energy. Document your gloom, boredom, apathy, irreverence, irritation or malevolence. Engage in creative destruction by, for example, getting rid of something that has been occupying mental and physical space. Watch a violent movie or play a violent video game. Shape your negative emotions into powerful tools for overcoming obstacles in your creative process.
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Reformulate the central problem of your art. Go back to the artistic stage of formulating the problem. If you are working on a tragic play, consider what it would be like if it were a comedy instead. If your work is a painting, think about changing the color scheme, adding a new figure or portraying the scene in reverse. If you are a novelist trying to figure out how your character grows up, think about what would happen if he died and the narrative were carried on by someone else.
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References
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