artists – Josephine Moon

Yesterday, I was chatting with my coach and our conversation turned (as it often does) to creativity. The maddening thing about creativity, for me, is that the more difficult life gets, the more I need to lean in to my creativity… and yet, my first reaction to stress is usually ‘freeze’… ‘hide’… or, ‘work harder’ (or eat cheese). Why do I find so many ways to self-sabotage myself? My logic tells me one thing but my adrenaline tells me something else. I should certainly know better by now because I do know better.

Let me diverge here for a moment, taking you all the way back to 26th January, 2013. I had a young baby, my first literary agent, and my first two-book deal. We were living ‘out in the sticks’ but had bought a property (a ‘renovator’s delight’) on the Sunshine Coast, and spent an excruciating amount of time on the road between the places, contstantly exhausted. Add in eight months of serious sleep deprivation, eight months of (late-diagnosed ) hyperemesis gravidarum before that… and a whole bunch of other stuff… and things were tough.

And right now? Life is tough, again, for so many reasons. So I went back through my old posts to see if I could find some wisdom, and came across this.

“This weekend, my inner child was horribly disappointed. We’d planned our first party for our eight-month-old baby — a ‘bush welcoming’ under the enormous fig trees on our new property for over forty people. I’d planned a time capsule, face painting, bubbles, rope swings in the trees, a barbecue, play equipment, icy poles and more. My sister had baked cupcakes with wee frog pictures on top and made lanterns for the trees. I’d ordered a helium balloon in the shape of a frog prince.

And then it rained. And rained, and rained and rained. Large parts of Queensland are flooded right now. Our new property (still a virtual construction site while we’re renovating) was running rivers of water and mud. We had to cancel. And I was somewhat heartbroken. Wondering why I was teary, it suddenly struck me that my inner child was heartbroken.

If you follow my writing, you’ll know how much I adore Julia Cameron’s wise words from her internationally bestselling book, The Artist’s Way. And you’ll know that her sage observation of we creative types is that our inner artist is a child, and to get the most out of our inner artist child we need to let her play. ‘Our artist child can best be enticed to work by treating work as play,’ she says (The Artist’s Way). Turning up to ‘work’ has ‘more to do with a child’s love of secret adventure than with ironclad discipline’.

The only compensation for an injured heart is to offer more love and fun.

So hubby and I packed up our lovely bubba man and drove to an even tinier town than ours (Moore) to visit an art show in the local hall with entry by gold donation. We wandered the many aisles marvelling at people’s creativity (the way someone could get so much expression into a tiger’s face, or the many uses of teabag tags), allowing our brains to stretch and grow while bubba man crawled and shuffled on the timber floor and tried to pull down the temporary display stands. Then we had ice cream. All while the rain drummed and drummed on the roof.

My inner artist was mollified. I’d had fun. I’d had a small adventure. I’d seen totally new things and thought of totally new ideas.

It’s what we must do as artists, to always seek a new adventure.”

Back to today, 2024, and I returned home from my coach and spent some time with art. I pulled out an unfinished drawing I’d started and spend some time with it to see what else might like to develop. When writing, this would be called ‘drafting’. Here, though, it’s just ‘play’.

Does this lady have a great role to play in the world? No. But she did her job for today. She reminded me to start with the ‘work’ that fills my well – because we cannot draw from an empty well.

And after saying it for the past twelve years… I am going to, finally, share the life changing work of The Artist’s Way with you. Stay tuned for more details.

I recently saw a one-act play. It was part of a number of one-act plays being showcased in an afternoon. I took a last minute invite into the theatre. Then came the terror.

This particular play told the story of three little girls who’d all been murdered by a depraved man. We witnessed (with fabulously effective lighting and sound effects) his stalking, snatching and killing. The girls relayed to us how they felt–the fear, the intuition, the terror. And we learned what he did to them after he’d killed them.

Even as I write this, my heart pounds, my hands sweat and I feel like vomiting. This was how I felt in the theatre. I desperately wanted to flee but felt trapped. I blocked my ears but could not block out the sounds. I closed my eyes but it made no difference.

At the end of the play, a woman a few seats down from me leapt to her feet and fled. I followed. We made our way out of the curtains and exit doors and burst into the sunshine, stared at each other in horror and burst into tears.

‘That was horrendous!’ I gasped.

‘I don’t want that in my consciousness. I don’t want to hear that. I don’t want to see that,’ she cried. And therein lies the problem: what you’ve seen you cannot un-see; and what you’ve heard you cannot un-hear.

‘Neither do I. I have a four-year-old,’ I said. ‘Was there some kind of rating on that?’

We both fumbled for the program. No, there was no rating or advice about viewing. There had been young teens in that audience (maybe twelve or thirteen). The synopsis gave nothing to indicate the sheer viciousness of what we were to be subjected to.

Assault. That’s what it was. A random attack on our psyche–serious mental and emotional disturbance from out of nowhere.

Obviously I am an artist and I champion the rights of artists to make provocative work. So be it. Make what you like. But what you don’t have the right to do is inflict something so clearly designed to instigate serious affliction on someone else without some kind of warning.

Sometimes a work of art will take us to dark places for the explicit purpose of showing us movement in a story–from dark to light, from despair to redemption, from grief to love. There is a purpose to that darkness. But darkness that is that sophisticated (and it was cleverly written, sure, and it was expertly executed by the production team, certainly) and has no light, not a single shift, not a ray of hope, is just immature, thoughtless exploitation of our most precious resource: our own sensitivity to each other’s pain.

And lest you feel I might be a lightweight when it comes to things like this (which, hand on my heart, I confess I am), I think only someone who lacks a human spirit or consciousness would be unaffected by hearing how this man dismembered these girls and buried their little kneecaps under the staircase of their mothers’ home.

It is not okay.

I feel graphically assaulted, viscerally wounded and I will not bury my distress under the collective artists’ cop-out catch cry of ‘it’s art, you can’t censor it, it’s meant to provoke!’

You might be an artist. But you are a human being first and foremost and your first responsibility is to your fellow humans. Always.

Be the light in the darkness; don’t BE the darkness.

Produce what you like. But make sure you give us choice.