On a Creative Life | The Torrance Gallery Sunday Journals — No. 19

September has brought school uniforms back onto Edinburgh’s pavements, and with them that unmistakable feeling of starting again: new notebooks, sharpened pencils, slightly-too-large blazers and the vague sense that this year, surely, one is going to be more organised.

Then I came across a letter from the great American writer Kurt Vonnegut wrote to a group of schoolchildren in 2006.

His advice was wonderfully simple. Practice an art — music, dancing, drawing, painting, poetry, fiction, whatever takes your fancy — not for money or recognition, and not even necessarily to become very good at it, but because of what the act of making does to you.

Sir Ian McKellan reads part of Kurt Vonnegut's letter at Letters Live, London

Then he gave them homework. Write a six-line rhyming poem. Make it as good as you possibly can. Don’t show it to anyone. And once it is finished, tear it into tiny pieces and throw them away. The point, of course, was that the poem itself wasn’t the reward. Making it was.

Vonnegut’s letter also made me think of my grandmother. She was never an artist in any conventional sense, and I don’t think she ever really had the opportunity to explore quite how creative she might have been. But she was compelled to make things. She crocheted, baked, gardened, re-upholstered sofas and made wedding dresses for her children. Her gardens were riots of colour — not conventionally beautiful or carefully designed, but exuberant, generous places that brought enormous pleasure to her and to everyone around her.

My Grandmother, Irene, in her garden.

She would sit and draw with us too, demonstrating alongside us rather than simply watching from the other side of the table. Much of what I know and love about gardens and growing things comes from her: collecting seed, saving it for the following year, noticing what had worked, trying again and seemingly making something out of nothing.

None of it was made for an audience. There was simply a need to create, nurture and transform whatever was at hand. I think that is why Vonnegut’s advice resonates with me. Creativity does not have to announce itself as art. Sometimes it appears in a sketchbook; sometimes in a garden, a dress, a cake or a newly covered sofa. The important part is the impulse to make.

There is, admittedly, a certain irony in an art dealer endorsing advice to make art without thinking about money. We do, after all, spend quite a lot of our time putting prices next to things! But perhaps that is precisely why the distinction matters. By the time a work reaches a gallery wall, we see the finished object. It has been selected, framed, photographed, catalogued, titled and given a price.

Wild Gorse by artist and Edinburgh Drawing School tutor, Jason M. Bentley

What we don’t see are the years that came before it. The drawings made as a child. The books read. The poems returned to. The abandoned pieces. The teachers, writers and other artists who shifted something in the way a person looked at the world. The work made when nobody was particularly interested in seeing it.

Joyce Gunn Cairns is a wonderful example of that broader creative life. Her love of literature runs deeply through her work, not simply as a source of subjects but as part of the way she thinks. Writers and poets recur throughout her drawings, and poetry itself sometimes enters the work. Her portrait of Colm Tóibín now sits in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Ireland — a remarkable destination for a work that began, like so much art, simply with one person looking closely at another.

Colm Tóibín is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, critic, playwright and poet. Tóibín has sat for Joyce Gunn Cairns since 2004.

There is something very fitting about that connection between drawing and literature. Both are acts of attention. Both ask us to linger over character, gesture, mood and what might sit beneath the surface.

The Bright Field, a portrait of the poet R.S. Thomas, inscribed with his poem of the same name, Joyce Gunn Cairns, Limited Edition Print, approx 60x40cm.

And then there is Alan Cameron, whose work is still filling the Garden Room and attracting such a warm response.

Autumn by Alan Cameron, original pastel, 43x43cm framed

The more I have learned about Alan through his widow, Ann, the clearer it has become that creativity was not something he switched on when he picked up a pastel. It ran through architecture, landscape, gardens, clothes, food and the way he looked at the world around him. His pastels are extraordinary, but they feel like one expression of a much wider instinct to notice, arrange and make.

Perhaps that’s also what Vonnegut was getting at.

A creative life is not defined by whether somebody becomes a professional artist. Art does not have to justify itself by becoming a career, an exhibition or even an object somebody else gets to see. Sometimes its value lies entirely in the act of paying attention for long enough to make something.

And even when a creative life does lead somewhere public — into a national collection, onto a gallery wall, into an exhibition — the origin is often much more private.

Someone reads a poem and cannot quite forget it...

...picks up a pen.

...notices the sky.

...saves seeds for next year.

...makes something because, for whatever reason, they need to.

A gallery is inevitably concerned with finished things. We frame them, light them, label them and put them on the wall.

Vonnegut’s letter is a useful reminder of everything that happened before.

So, with the schools back and September properly underway, perhaps his homework assignment is worth borrowing.

Draw something. Write something. Read a poem. Plant something. Sing badly in the shower. Make something for no particular reason at all.

You don’t even have to show anyone.