so when I was in art school I developed a shake in my hand and this was the
straightest line I could draw now in hindsight it was actually good for some
things like mixing a can of paint or shaking a Polaroid but at the time this
was really doomsday this is this is the destruction of my dream of becoming an
artist the shake developed out of really a single-minded pursuit of pointillism
just years of making tiny tiny dots and eventually these dots went from being
perfectly round to looking more like tadpoles because of the shake so to
compensate I'd hold a pen tighter and this progressively made the shake worse
so I'd hold the pen tighter still and this became a vicious cycle that ended
up causing so much pain and joint issues I had trouble holding anything and after
spending all my life went to art I left art school and then I left art
completely but after a few years I just couldn't stay away from art and I
decided to go to a neurologist about the shake and discovered I had permanent
nerve damage and he actually took one look at my squiggly line and said well
why don't you just embrace the shake so I did I went home I grabbed a pencil and
I just sort of let my hands shake and shake I was making all these scribble
pictures and even though it wasn't the kind of art that I was ultimately
passionate about it felt great and more importantly once I embraced the shake I
realized I could still make art I just had to find a different approach to
making the art that I wanted now I still enjoyed the fragmentation of pointillism
seeing these little tiny dots come together to make this unified whole so I
began experimenting with other ways to fragment images where the shake wouldn't
affect the work like dipping my feet in paint and walking on a canvas or in a 3d
structure consisting of two by fours creating a 2d image by burning it with a
blowtorch I discovered that if I worked in the larger scale and with bigger
materials my hand really wouldn't hurt and after having gone from a single
approach to art I ended up having an approach to creativity that completely
changed my artistic horizons this was the first time I'd encountered this idea
that embracing the limitation could actually drive creativity at a
time I was finishing up school and I was so excited to get a real job and finally
a forward new art supplies I had this horrible little set of tools and yeah I
felt like I could do so much more with the supplies I thought an artist was
supposed to have I actually didn't even have a regular pair of scissors I was
using these metal shears until I stole a pair from the office that I worked at so
I got out of school I got a job I got a paycheck I got myself to the art store
and I just went nuts buying supplies and then when I got home I sat down and I
set myself to test it really tried to create something just completely outside
of the box but I sat there for hours and nothing came to mind the same thing the
next day and then the next quickly slipping into a creative slump and I was
in a dark place for a long time unable to create and it didn't make any sense
because I was finally able to support my art and yet I was creatively blank but
as I searched around in the darkness I realized I was actually paralyzed by all
of the choices that I never had before and it was then that I thought back to
my jittery hands embrace the shake and I realized if I ever one of my creativity
back I had to quit trying so hard to think outside of the box and get back
into it I wondered could you become more
creative than by looking for limitations what if I could only create with a
dollars worth of supplies at this point I was spending a lot of my evenings in
well I guess I still spent a lot of my evenings in Starbucks but I know you can
ask for an extra cup if you want one so I decided to ask for fifty surprisingly
they just handed him right over and then with some pencils I already had I made
this project for only 80 cents it really became a moment of clarification for me
that we need to first be limited in order to become limitless I took this
approach and thinking inside the box - my canvas and wondered what if instead
of painting on a canvas I could only paint on my chest so I
painted 30 images one layer at a time one on top of another with each
representing an influence in my life or what if instead of painting with a brush
I can only paint with Crotty shops so I dip my hands in pain I just I just
attacked the canvas and I actually hit so hard that I bruised a joint in my
pinky and it was stuck straight for a couple weeks or what if what if instead
of relying on myself I had to rely on other people to create the content for
the art so for six days I lived in front of a webcam I slept on the floor and I
ate takeout and I asked people to call me and share a story with me about a
life-changing moment their stories became the arts as I wrote them onto the
revolving canvas or what if instead of making art to display
I had to destroy it this seemed like the ultimate limitation being an artist
without art this destruction idea turned into a year-long project that I called
goodbye arts where each and every piece of Arts had to be destroyed after its
creation in the beginning of goodbye art I focused on forced destruction like
this image of Jimi Hendrix made with over 7,000 matches then I opened it up
to creating art that was destroyed naturally I looked for temporary
materials like spitting out food
sidewalk chalk and even frozen wine the the last iteration of destruction was to
try to produce something that didn't actually exist in the first place so I
organized candles on a table I lit them and then blew them out then repeated
this process over and over with the same set of candles then assembled the videos
into the larger image so the end image was never visible as a physical hole it
was destroyed before it ever existed in the course of this goodbye our series I
created 23 different pieces with nothing left to physically display looking at
limitations as a source of creativity changed the course of my life now when I
run into a barrier or I find myself creatively stumped I sometimes still
struggle but I continue to show up for the process and try to remind myself for
the possibilities like using hundreds of real live worms to make an image using a
pushpin to tattoo a banana or painting a picture with hamburger grease
one of my most recent endeavors is to try to translate the habits of
creativity that I've learned into something others can replicate
limitations may be the most unlikely of places to harness creativity but perhaps
one of the best ways to get ourselves out of ruts briefing categories and
challenge accepted norms and instead of telling each other to seize the day
maybe we can remind ourselves every day to seize the limitation thank you