Dear Artist Experimenting With a Material You've Never Worked With Before

A new creative medium meets you without expectation. Something happens in that encounter that the long-established practice has organized away.

Dear artist in the position of beginner, which is different from every other position in the creative life,

Dear calligrapher who has chosen something unfamiliar, for reasons that may have been clear at the time or more instinctive than articulable,

Dear painter who is trying ceramics and whose hands have knowledge of how to attend to a surface without the particular knowledge of what this surface requires,

Dear filmmaker who is trying embroidery, working with a needle and thread in a medium your hands have no history with, noticing what the unfamiliarity produces,

Dear artist who has been making in the same medium for a long time and who is now, by intention or by necessity, in the position of doing something the hands have yet to learn,

Dear ceramicist who is trying dance, or a dancer who is trying printmaking, or someone whose primary medium has become less available and who is meeting a new material for the first time,

Dear human who has chosen the risk of the unfamiliar and who is in the middle of what that costs and what it opens,

This is for you.

Photo by Dragos Gontariu on Unsplash

The position of beginner in a new creative medium is often felt or described in terms of what it lacks: the skill, the fluency, the developed aesthetic judgment, the physical knowledge that comes from time and repetition. What it tends to carry, though, is a quality of attention that skilled practice has long since organized away, a relationship with the material that is unmediated by habit, and a form of unknowing that exists only at the beginning and that accumulated expertise tends to close off.

The new creative medium meets you without expectation. It has no knowledge of your previous work, your established aesthetic, the choices you have made enough times that they have become automatic. It encounters you fresh. And the freshness runs in both directions.

There is a quality of attention that beginner’s mind in a medium requires that skilled practice tends to organize away. The expert practitioner has learned to manage many of the medium’s demands automatically, which is what expertise produces and which is why it is useful. The automaticity also means that the medium’s qualities stop being noticed as qualities and become simply what making is. The beginner notices everything because nothing can yet be taken for granted. The material’s resistance, its behavior, its preferences, its surprises: these are events rather than background.

That quality of attention to the properties of a material is, as it turns out, what the Sensory Recall works to recapture for materials you know well. The beginner has it for free, because the material’s behavior cannot yet be predicted and every behavior deserves noticing. This is a creative resource that exists only at the beginning and that the long relationship tends to move away from.

Also particular to the beginner’s position is freedom from the weight of your own established aesthetic in this medium. The work you make in an unfamiliar new creative medium arrives without the expectation of what your work in your known medium looks like. The comparisons that follow you in your primary practice, from outside and from inside, are less immediately active when you are working in a medium where no one, including you, has an established expectation of what you should do. This can be liberating, alongside and through the difficulty and frustration that beginner’s work in any medium tends to involve.

And there is something to say about what the beginner’s body already knows when it meets an unfamiliar material. The somatic knowledge built in every medium worked in across the creative life, including childhood mediums and brief experiments and materials touched once and set down, is in the body. The new creative medium arrives into a body that already has a history with materials, a developed sensitivity to physical engagement with things made for making. The beginner’s mind is more than empty. It is meeting something new with everything the body has accumulated from everything it has touched.

That accumulated physical intelligence informs the encounter with the new material even when you cannot consciously direct it. The hands know things about how to hold and move and apply that the mind has yet to learn to articulate in the terms of this medium. Sometimes the first thing made in a new creative medium is strange and interesting in ways that the deliberate, skilled work in the known medium has rarely been, because the accumulated somatic knowledge is operating without the filter of conscious aesthetic control.

What if you approached the experiment with the unfamiliar material as an encounter rather than as a test? What if the unknowing, the beginner’s attention, the freshness of the meeting, were the point rather than the obstacle to the point?

The new creative medium has no expectation of you. Meet it from everything you have accumulated. See what happens when your full creative history encounters something that has no idea what you are capable of.

Love,

Kathryn