In our art-toxic culture, we have pernicious myths that darken our views on artists and on art. Chief among these myths is that of the suffering artist. Mark Bryan refers to this as the Edgar Allan Poe school of artistry: "Get drunk, die broke in the gutter."
       Yesterday I spoke with a wonderful writer whose work I have long admired. We were both knee deep in drafts–I myself in this one; the other writer in a novel.
       "You know how it is, Julia," the writer said to me. "You have to suffer. Hemingway, all those guys. Everybody has always had to suffer for art, right?"
       "I don't know," I ventured. "Some of my best stuff has seemed to come through pretty easily and fully formed. What about you?"
       "Well–even when it's easy, it's still hard," the writer insisted, and we quickly got off the phone.
       In America, we have traditionally confused the progression of alcoholism with the depressive are of many an artistic career. Alcohol is a depressive drug. M any of our most revered writers and painters have suffered from serious alcoholism, and the darkening depression endemic to the progression of their disease has colored both their careers and our views about what makes "serious art."
       Alcoholism is often linked to suicide, and yet we act as if it were Hemingway's artistry that pulled the trigger on that shotgun. Alcoholism is a common precipitant of fatal car crashes, and yet we talk about Jackson Pollock's death as though it were his art that bedeviled him.
       A great many lives, only some of them artists', have been ruined in pursuit of alcohol, drugs, and promiscuous sex. In our culture we often confuse the darkening progression of alcoholism with the progression of a "serious" artistic career. We act as if writing caused F. Scott Fitzgerald's fragility.
       It is my belief that we are in the middle of a quiet revolution. With the advent of twelve step groups, we have learned, as a nation, the novelty of a non-hierarchical spirituality–one based on experience, not theory. In other words, people are no longer believing in "God as told to them by." Their "vision" of God is lightening.
       Since art making is an act of faith, the new autonomy many people feel is beginning to show up in a new kind of art: lighter-hearted, and less depressive–to be blunt, less alcoholic. The old adage "There are no second acts in American lives" no longer rights true. (And it was only true in the first place because so many of our great writers have a generation of sober writers, filmmakers, actors, and painters. We are enjoying solo albums by artists who are working in sobriety. And they are playing a different tune.
       The myth of the suffering artist needs to be dismantled. It makes everything a big deal, a high jump. There's no place for trying things out, baby steps, a flyer or two–not if everything is so ego-based, not if everything is about how serious we look.
So pervasive is our mythology about the suffering artist that it is a common artistic posture, a badge of honor worn to prove the seriousness of our creative expression. What no one is admitting in all of this is that making things is fun. A working artist is a playing artist. As Carl Jung says, "The creative mind plays with the objects it loves."
       Artist Timothy Nero is blunt: "The whole suffering artist thing is hogwash. Aft is made from life. That means it's made from joy. It's made from pain. It's made from whatever the artist is going through."
       True, that "whatever" is sometimes a spiritual discontent, but not always, and very often the act of making art so alleviates that discontent that what is felt in the act of creation is not agony but something a lot closer to ecstasy.
       Dress designer Jo Dean Tipton, who creates by painting on silk, describes it this way: "When I am working, time goes away. My surroundings disappear. If music is playing, I no longer even hear it. I am completely in the world of what I am making... and it's wonderful."
       As it happens, I love words, and I have been a poet for thirty years. I have participated in some readings and some poetry "slams" (the poetic equivalent of boxing matches), and I have noticed that depressive poems very often are deemed somehow more roadworthy than better-crafted, lighter ones.
       Of course, we have long observed that comedies are slighted in the race of Oscar. Weepy, serious films tend to carry the day–The Lion King being a recent, long-overdue exception.
       The mythology surrounding "serious art" is a real problem for many creative artists. When a note of levity or hope creeps in, so can a fear of no longer being taken seriously. Not only does this make artists into poseurs and channel their work along acceptably serious lines, it can make the prospect of creating any art at all seem daunting.
       "We have to suffer for our art, right?" my writer friend asked me.
       I believe that if we believe that, we surely will suffer. We may not even notice when we are not. In my experience, it is not the act of making art that is painful. It is the desire to make something and not acting on it that causes pain. When we are engaged in our creativity, we are in love with our process. Yes, there may be stretches where the going gets rough, but that happens in any love affair. To my eye, what is really painful is not practicing our creativity. That, to me, smacks of unrequited love: the wishing, the yearning, and the inability to engage.
       If this sounds like too much idealism for you, I would ask you to experiment a little the next time you are depressed. When the blues hit, make something. Make anything: a cake, cookies, curtains, a new bookcase, a nasty little ditty about whatever is bedeviling you.
       The minute we are engaged in creating something, the something of our choice, we are back in our won power and no longer at the mercy of the powers that be. (Whoever we conceive them to be.)
       This is probably as good a place as any to talk about the fact that the blues is not the only mood that can be used as fuel for creative expression. In fact, "mood" need not be used at all. There is a persistent notion that we m ust "wait for the muse to strike," as though creativity were so mysterious and capricious that we can, at best, hope to snare it as we would a rare butterfly.
       The reality is just the reverse. We are the ones who are capricious. We are the ones who do not show up. We are the ones who disappear for long periods of time. Creative energy is a constant and we can always tap into it.
       Consider these words of Douglas Anderson in The Planet of Waters: "Rivers course through the oceans of earth. You call them 'streams' or 'currents.' In just the same way, great streams of living music wander the universe. All the universe is an ocean of music...."
       Listen, too, to the wisdom of theologian Dr. Ernest Holmes: "Out of the limitless creativity of God, I accept the flow of new ideas... The Divine Spirit is flowing through me in an individual way and I accept the genius of my own being. All the Presence there is, is flowing through me in an original manner. I accept Its right action, Its new ideas..."
       Too often, however, we resist such openness. We only want to tap in when we feel an intense mood and hope we are "guaranteed" a "quickie" masterpiece instead of an experience of a less exalted variety.
       Creativity involves process, and process involves change. The truism we often hear is that we often resist change because change is difficult or change is painful. This is not quite accurate. It is the resistance to change that is difficult or painful. In the same way, it is the resistance to our creativity that causes us to equate it with suffering. It is important to remember that "effort" and "suffering" are two different things.
Creativity requires energy, sustained creative energy. Sustained energy requires two things: stamina and openness. When we are open, our creative energies, which are the energies of the Universe are able to flow though with minimal wear and tear on our own systems. When we are closed–and we are closed or blocked when we have belief systems that hamper the flow–we will experience our creative energy as a bumpy and dangerous ride.
       Creativity gets a bad rap. It is widely considered dangerous, out of-control, crazy. It is considered these things because, like electricity, it contains voltage, spiritual voltage, and should be worked with as a smooth flow rather than in huge electrical storms or bursts. Because how to be in control and creative at the same time. We either shut down our creative flow to a trickle or we turn the dial wide open without regard for keeping our feet on the ground through simple, sensible self-care. In other words we either abstain from our creativity or we indulge in it as binges. Neither extreme is a right use of our powers.
       Listen for a moment again to Dr. Ernest Holmes from his 1934 pamplhety 'Creative Ideas":

        Every scientist knows that he takes power out of life that he doesn't put it in. And so it is in dealing with that more subtle energy and power we call Mind or Spirit.
One of the first things to do is to learn to accept, and to expect this Power to flow through everything that we do. we must combine our belief in this Power with the conscious us e of it for definite purposes. We have greater abilities and resources than we have yet realized.

• I'll do all this work and the book won't be taken any how.
• I'll turn in this project and the whole team will see how limited my ideas really are.
• I'll do a great job and someone else (______) will steal all the credit, as usual.
• I'll work on this painting for weeks and botch it at the last minute.

Task Dress as a Serious Artist

Drag out all of your basic black. Rip a few holes. Smudge some dark circles under your eyes. grease your hair back in some patently unattractive dork hairdo. Sprinkle your shoes with specks of white. Scuff them. Do not wear a belt. Go to coffee house. Act dour. grimace and scribble furiously, cursing quietly under your breath. finally, announce, "Screw it!" and stalk out.
       You may wish to undertake this role playing with a friend. Go to a coffee shop together. You may wish to invent a fictional project you are working on, one involving only the most dour and existential themes. Additionally, you may wish to give your dramatic character all of the character traits associated with the most clichéd version of a suffering artist: let it be known you have a serious drinking problem, you are promiscuous, you can't earn a living, you sponge off your friends, you are neurotic, self-centered, miserable, contemplating suicide...
       It is your friend's job, as you reveal all of this, to treat you with the utmost care, as if you are indeed some volatile, otherworldly creature. Carry on this posture as long as you can. be very careful not to laugh in the middle or you will destroy the effect.
       As with doll making, this is a deceptively playful exercise, and one which may startle you by what it reveals. For those of you who have considered yourself too "straight' to be a real artist, it may be a revelation to discover that you can "pass." For those of you who have been acting out some version of this already, it may break the code and allow you to look pretty in pink someday if that's what appeals to you.

Task: Dress Like You Might Be Having Fun.

Take a plain white T-shirt. Using an indelible Magic Marker or regular acrylic paint or Versatex fabric paint or oil-based ball point fabric pens, doodle a design that says you are a non-serious artist.
       In the days when he was teaching art, painter Tim Nero would teach color theory by asking his students to come to class one day in what he termed 'disposable whites." He would then arm them with squirt guns filled with liquefied acrylic paint, inviting them to "lighten" up and explore, perhaps even change the spectrum of their artistic behavior–and their art–to something more playful.