Perfumes, Sounds and Colors

Why having more than one passion is good for you and serves your art

The 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote a poem called “Correspondences” which states that the world is made of feelings and symbols we can experience that answer each other.  Baudelaire might have had Synesthesia  (a neurological condition that causes the brain to process data in the form of several senses at once), but that’s irrelevant.  I like this poem because I like the idea that there are several ways to experience the same thing. You should experience the world with more than one sense, and it will actually make you a better artist.

                This post comes from a personal frustration: Society tells us we should be passionate about something.  “Find your passion” they say.  Great.  However this admonition comes with the assumption that if you find what you’re good at, you should spend all your time doing it so you get better, and eventually the best.  That’s the real goal.  This is especially true about sports: the point is to win, after all.  Another example is Malcom Gladwell’s “Outliers” which states that you should practice for 10000 hours before you achieve mastery in your domain.  Which basically means you should spend all your time doing this one thing if you want to be taken seriously. 

                How healthy is that?  I don’t doubt that Bill Gates spent entire nights coding in a university basement when he was a student, but that tells me he had zero social life and a pretty sad university experience.  Sure, he became a billionaire, but at the time, I’m sure his parents were worried about him.  And if spending all your nights on a computer in a basement was enough to turn into a billionaire, the world would be awash in them.  Remember that passion is actually etymologically the opposite of action, and something that you are submitted to.  Addiction could be another term for it.

                I have more than one passion, and even within a passion, I get pulled in lots of different ways and wanting to try different techniques and different styles, so maybe I am not that passionate in the end.   Having more than one love interest certainly wouldn’t fly in a romance novel (at least the traditional kind).  Doesn’t matter, I believe that’s a good thing, as far as art is concerned anyway.   I love ceramics, writing and photography, all at the same time.  I’ve practiced all of those things with more or less intensity during my life, because time is always short.  Even now that I am not officially in a paid job, I find time hard to come by to do everything I’d like to do.

                Why not concentrate on the one I’m the best at then?  First of all, in art, being the best is very subjective.  Second, I believe that I am better in my art practice because I am not addicted to one art.  Sure, if I spent 10 000 hours throwing plates and only plates, I would be a master at plates and they would be perfectly round and centered.  But would my plates be interesting?  Artists need to be curious to create new things.  I guess that is the difference between an artist and an artisan: artisans do the same things over and over again, and they do it perfectly, but they don’t create.  However the line is very blurry here, because there are very few artisans that are not going to try to improve what they’re doing, or try to create a new shape, or test a new technique at some point in their career.  But that’s a subject for another time.

I really feel that my art practices correspond with each other.  For example, I love taking pictures of various textures close up (the relief of sand on beaches, rock formations, tree barks, rusty metal) and of course texture is extremely important in ceramics as well.  I love that the stages of creation are very similar in all arts: creating (either throwing a pot, composing a picture in your viewfinder before clicking the button or writing a story), then editing (reframing and editing your photo, trimming and decorating your pot and rewriting/cutting a whole lot of words out of your story), then the final stage.  In ceramics it’s the final firing and the ways you expose your pot to the world.  In photography it’s presenting your pictures online or to your friends.  In writing, it’s getting your writing read by other people one way or another. You could even compare book covers/illustrations to glazes on a pot, just something added to make it look prettier and make the shape/story shine with more contrast). 

                But more than a similar process, every experience I live or ideas I read about give me inspiration for my art.  I love contemplating the natural world and taking pictures of it.  That’s certainly an inspiration for my ceramics.  News features, stories that people tell me, a memory, a rainbow, anything can create inspiration for a story (or a line inside a story), a pot or a photo. More than that, one piece of art can inspire another, within the same medium or a different one.  Art is being reinterpreted over and over.  This is not a new idea: you can use pictures to write books (“Miss Peregrine’s home for peculiar children” for example, but they are others), you can use ceramics to tell a story (sculptures, painted decoration, carvings…), and of course pictures tell stories of their own, or can be used to highlight textures or shapes.  Photography and paintings can be categorized into different styles including portrait, nude, landscape, still life and abstract among others.  But I feel that stories and ceramics can very easily be seen in that way too.  It’s actually quite fun to look at a vase and wonder: What story is this pot telling me?  Is it a nude, rounded like a human body? Or do its sharp edges and geometrical forms convey the vibes of an industrial society that you can imagine around it?  Would it look good in a Jules Verne Novel?  Does the texture evoke a natural place or the shape of ideas?  Some vases exude calm while others are alive with turmoil.  Does the negative space, what is suggested but not said out loud, play a part to appreciate the story this vase is telling me?  Is this vase happy or sad?  It could be happy in colors and sad in shape, so a very conflicted vase.  Aren’t we all?   

                I don’t know any artists who don’t practice more than one form of art, because artists want to find new ways to express themselves.  Usually you have a dominant one, the one you spend the most time on or you’re more famous for, but all of them feed off each other.  Picasso was a famous painter who made a lot of ceramics at the end of his life.  Leonard de Vinci is another famous artist who dabbled in everything and rather well.  But this goes beyond art.  If you’re only interested by one subject in life (let’s say, agriculture) you will not lead a very interesting life.  Sure, agriculture is a very important and diverse subject, and we need people to be passionate about it so we can eat, for which I am grateful, but if the only thing you talk about is plantings and harvests and you spend all your vacations looking at cows and fields, it might get a little tiring to be in your company after a while.  I don’t think it’s a fluke that people who are obsessed with one subject and one subject only are often a little fragile mentally.  A well-balanced individual is going to need more than one interest to balance its mental scale.  This also leads to what we used to believe was a well-balanced education: the idea that you needed to study both art and science to be completely rounded.  Leonard de Vinci again, the perfect Renaissance man.  Unfortunately, this is not the general consensus these days.

There is a downside to being interested in too many things, especially in art: If you scatter your attention too much, you might not be good at anything, because it takes practice and most people also have to feed themselves (I told you agriculture was important!).   But I don’t think being the best at one thing is necessarily the point of art.  The point of art is to express yourself.  I know, it’s quaint to say this but worth repeating.  My pots are not perfect.  Looking at old pots of mine, I sometimes shudder to see how bad technically they actually were.  But they still look a lot better than factory made pot, because they have a soul. They express who I am.  They are unique, and they made me feel good while I was creating them, and even sometimes when I look at them now.  That’s why people prefer handmade products, even if they cannot always afford them. 

Please be eclectic in your passions and try new things, in art and in every other aspects of your life.  It’s good for you.