Painting and drawing is something I’ve always done. At one time it seemed to be the thing I was best at, so I aspired to being a professional illustrator. What I discovered, however, was that it’s actually a highly personal activity and that I don’t work well to commission.
It’s sometimes seemed to other people that I’m a sort of artist, but others are surprised that I do anything of that sort at all given that I spend a lot of my work time programming. I don’t like the label ‘artist’. It implies i should be performing activities I neither find helpful or inspiring. I don’t habitually draw from life, nor do I keep a sketchbook. I take photos, collect books, watch films and reflect.
When I first began training to join the Triratna Buddhist Order, I had the good fortune to have Aloka — an Order member and painter well know in the Triratna Community — as my study leader on my first couple of study retreats. He said that he’d often felt that his inner life was more exciting than an awful lot of what was routinely going on around him. At the time I saw this as an incredibly challenging statement (and even a bit baffling). I realised that, although I was caught up with my inner life, it certainly wasn’t expressing itself in any upliftingly creative manner!
In another context he raised the point that we’re all subject to a truly staggering amount of sensory input. His view was that it all goes in and it has a cumulative effect. For some years I struggled with the artificial idea that I needed to be inspired to create something fresh, uniquely mine if not innovative. The truth of the matter was that I was better off just giving myself up to that weight of cultural influence and expressing what seemed natural, even if it was derivative. In other words I was better of taking the character of Robin Hood as my starting point, blending the Errol Flynn’s interpretation with a twist of Robin of Sherwood why waste my time fighting against or even trying to disguise my influences? And why bother to explain, much less excuse if I’m not trying to steal anyone else’s copyright?
So if you see anything that looks like it’s been influenced by something or someone else, well it probably was.