L  U  K  E     A  L  L  S  B  R  O  O  K

     As a human it’s my sad tendency to think that the world is about “me.” But occasionally, I have had the experience which I’m sure you’ve had, when a special person or an extraordinary event breaks into the narrow enclosure of the self, and life flows in. I believe this is what happens when a beautiful picture is created. Somehow, the artist is given the gift of dis-interested love for something outside him or herself, and the necessary skill to capture and express that thing with paint. But every artist is tempted away from this self-forgetful enjoyment, motivated by a desire to cultivate a popular style, or flaunt a spectacular proficiency.

           

    How do I get to that place of true inspiration? I can’t make it happen, any more than I can make a great friendship happen, and in both cases, my efforts to force the result may be counter-productive. Inspiration is a thing that happens to me—it’s a gift. But what is my part? A great painting certainly won’t materialize unless I stretch the canvas, mix the palette, and take a look around me. I must set the table for the angelic guest. There is nothing inspiring about this stage of the process. My latest exhibition has been taken down. My studio is empty. Perhaps there are bills to be paid. Ahead of me are uncertainty and discouragement, tedium and work.

 

    The beginning of my creative process starts with looking. That means getting into the car and driving out into the countryside. I am looking for a place that does something inside me, something I know for sure when it happens. Finally, I pull onto a dirt road and dust kicks up behind the car. Everything feels old. There is a white clapboard farmhouse with a screened-in porch. The shade of the long porch, the shade of an elm tree, and the shade of a sheltering vine have all become one thing, part of the land. I round a turn and my heart starts to thump. It’s like reading the first few pages of a great book. I get out of the car and start to walk. The oak trees must be over a hundred and fifty years old. They line the side of the road like living columns. There is a breath of cool air, and through the flitting leaves, like a patchwork quilt, I see the crisp shapes of the mountains. Everywhere I look I see a painting. It’s like those paintings are already finished. I just have to do the work.

 

    For the next year, I will come here and paint, hour after hour, sweating in the sun or chilled by biting wind. I will know this place so well that it will become a part of me. I will see a hawk kill a squirrel in one of the oak trees. I will stand ankle deep in the river, straining my eyes to see the patterns of color that let my brain know that I am looking at clear rippling water. There will be some dead ends. “That didn’t work. Okay, try this. That didn’t work. Okay, try this.”

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     I want the beauty of the things I see to drive the paintings forward. And that’s why I feel it’s a distraction from the real purpose of painting to be concerned about my own “style.” Flannery O’Conner said that great art should be based on observed facts “that make actual the mystery of our position on Earth.” The undulating lights on a sandy river bottom can move me so deeply that they speak to that mystery. They whisper to me that I don’t inhabit a meaningless universe, that there is a spiritual reality above and beyond the facts of the material world. Consider the endless variety of paintings in an art museum. An artist might paint an apple, a battle scene, or the graceful curve of a neck. The work might be loosely painted or rendered with endless detail. What is the common thread? Somehow the artist has made loving contact with the Truth out there, in reality. The artist has forgotten himself in the revelation of that thing.

 

    C.S. Lewis said: “But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away "blindly" so to speak…Even in Literature and Art, no man who ever bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring two-pence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself and you will find your true self. Lose your life and you will save it.”