One of Our Best Operatives is Missing . . .

As both a visual and verbal storyteller, I’m bound to come up against the stubborn blank wall of imagination empty on occasion, if not often. Long ago I began using the trick of “forced randomness” to fill in the blank until something more substantial would either emerge from the resulting prescription or I’d get a welcome brain-wave from another source to rescue me. As I learned, it’s simply making the first mark on the page that’s generally the hardest part: once there’s a mark, whether genuinely random scribble made with the blessed No. 2 pencil or a slightly gibberish-tinged line written in exasperation, I now have something to respond to, to edit, to like or dislike or build upon, in whatever way I’m moved to do. The response may be disgusted continuous pressing of the Delete key or furious “unscribbling” with the big bad eraser (a tool I find I rarely use for actually erasing). If that’s the case, why then, I can work to divine just what was so unsatisfactory to me about the initial move I’d made and then there’s probably fodder in the facts enough to get me started on something more useful, more personally motivated.

If, on the other hand, I see the seeds of utility and interest in that first foray, I’m often well served by turning the whole process into a good healthy bout of problem solving. That’s what real creativity is to me: my flighty little brain’s attempt to figure out what’s missing from the world, real or not, and fill in the blanks. Blank page, blank canvas, blank silence. Aside from beautiful and meaningful moments of personal zen, I’m driven to fill them with stuff that intrigues and feeds me.

Sometimes I’ll use external means to try to force motivation. I might pick up the first book or magazine I see, crack it open to the first page my fingers find, point to a spot on the page, and tell myself that whatever word or image I land on has to serve as my starting point, the guide for making Mark One. I might look out the window and whatever moves first within my view has to be the source. Any of the old standard repertoire of such tricks will likely do. But perhaps my favorite is to give myself a title or an over-arching concept that could conceivably serve as the framework for a whole series of artworks, chapters, stories. I think of it as my “Mr Booktitles” approach, named years ago in honor of a school of “acting”, sometimes embodied by very famous and very popular actors speaking every line of dialog or soliloquy or narration as though it were a stand-alone title from a very badly written book, a method that still keeps me astonished these particular actors–or the writers and directors that should be forcing them to do better–can get hired and admired. Go figure. But the fatuous title approach has served me reasonably well, so I guess I mustn’t criticize. All I do in the instance is create my title and use either the text or the artwork to try to flesh it out, give it some meaning.

The graphite drawing above came from just such an approach, and ended up being the first in a series of five or six drawings that “illustrated” different parts of the “story” represented by the title, a sort of post-Cold-War spy adventure that never did get written and for which the present artwork illustrated, ultimately, the nonexistent prequel to the never-happened story. Not that I wouldn’t write the actual story at some point, but it wasn’t necessary to have it in hand as impetus to get some work on the page in another format. Who knows, it may be that the illustrations had to exist in order for the story to ‘need to’ happen at some point. If that isn’t convoluted enough, I don’t know what is. But at least it gave me a useful jumping-off point for a series of works that remains something of a favorite among my audiences and yes, with me too.