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Here's an observation by author Aldous Huxley ("Doors of Perception" ,"Brave New World") regarding the paradox of creativity: reconciling the discipline of doing the work with the necessity of allowing room for the artistic and intuitive subconscious to kick in:

Take the piano teacher…he always says, Relax, relax. But how can you relax while your fingers are rushing over the keys? Yet they have to relax. The singing teacher and the golf pro say exactly the same thing. And in the realm of spiritual exercises we find that the person who teaches mental prayer does too. We have somehow to combine relaxation with activity… The personal conscious self being a kind of small island in the midst of an enormous area of consciousness… What has to be relaxed is the personal self, the self that tries too hard, that thinks it knows what is what, that uses language. This has to be relaxed in order that the multiple powers at work within the deeper and wider self may come through and function as they should. In all psychophysical skills we have this curious fact of the law of reversed effort: the harder we try, the worse we do the thing.

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Because the world is so full of death and horror, I try again and again to console my heart and pick the flowers that grow in the midst of hell.

                                                                                                                            –– Hermann Hesse

At some level, all endeavors, not just those labeled "art", may call upon our creative instincts.

The experienced practitioner has the good sense to listen to and respect the muscle memory and intuition born of years of practice, as described here by custom builder Mark Ellison:

“Your body just knows how to do it,” he said. “It understands weight and leverage and space in a way that your brain would take forever to figure out.” It was the same sense that told Ellison where to set a chisel or if another millimetre of wood had to come off. “I know this carpenter named Steve Allen,” he said. “He turned to me one day and he said, ‘I don’t get it. When I do this work, I have to concentrate, and you’re just talking your fool head off all day long.’ The secret is, I don’t think. I figure something out and then I’m done thinking. I don’t bother with my brain anymore."

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My work is always better when I am alone and follow my own impressions.

                                                                                                          –  Claude Monet

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You have to really be courageous about your instincts and your ideas. Otherwise you'll just knuckle under, and things that might have been memorable will be lost.

                                                                                                                         –– Francis Ford Coppola

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Musician Bruce Springsteen was interviewed this past week by The Daily Show's Trevor Noah:

Trevor: When you create, do you still have doubts sometimes?

Springsteen: Any good artist wrestles with their insecurities. It’s your insecurities that move you forward. If you were simply completely comfortable with who you are and what you’re doing and what you’ve done, I don’t know if you would have the fire in you to move forward. It’s your doubts and your questions and your searching for new and different answers that move you forward in your work.

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Photography, videography ––likely all creative pursuits that involve the use of tools –– have practitioners who's passion and reverence for those tools begins to subjugate the creative impulse, leading them to believe that what stands between them and perfection is the lack of the proper equipment.

Beginners, especially, are vulnerable to this way of thinking, often sidelining creative ideas until they are in possession of whatever item they're convinced is vital to the project.

By concentrating on the tools, the artist may miss the moment –- the very reason the tools exist.

We were reminded of this dilemma after a coming across a clip of the late actor Bruce Lee in the movie "Enter The Dragon", who counsels his young protoge:

Don’t think…. Feel!

Lee points upward:

It is like a finger pointing away to the moon. Don't concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.

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 The beauty was always there, but moments of true awareness were rare.

                                                                                                                      –Jane Goodall

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This looking and not seeing things was a great sin, I thought, and one that was easy to fall into. It was always the beginning of something bad and I thought that we did not deserve to live in the world if we did not see it.

                                                                                                                 –– Ernest Hemingway 

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I have lived on a razor's edge.

So what if you fall off – I'd rather be doing something I really wanted to do.

I'd walk it again.

            – Georgia O'Keefe

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