I can plan to do creative things. I can plan it like anything! I work out what it is I want to do and how it should be done, and what I'll need and what the finished thing will look like - I do a lot of different creative things, from crochet through to chain-mail but this is true of pretty much all of 'em. I spend so much time and energy thinking about it, and seeing what it should be like when I have done that I don't actually start it. Or if I do I decide it has failed at the first point at which the plan does not run smoothly. The problem with planning creative acts is not just the action part; I know this because I can work through a pattern from beginning to end, and I can make mistakes on it and undo those mistakes and end up with the finished item without any blows to my self-esteem or bouts of over-whelming anxiety that I am useless at whatever I turn my hand too. But ultimately following a pre-made pattern is just less satisfying. I like it for those occasions when I want something to do with my hands that I don't have to think about too much but my urge is really to create original things, things that are wholly my own. This urge has only grown as I have added new skills to the lists of things I know how to do, and it has grown as I have become more successful at battling the various fears that come with the creative urge. So I need to find ways around the blocks that parts of my brain set up.
I have concluded that if I spend too much time thinking about it beforehand then I do nothing, at least partly because I'm afraid that I won't (or can't) live up to what it is that I see in my head. So I have to just do things, play around and see what happens. As it happens this is something else I find difficult - I suspect part of me believes that 'real' artists, writers etc are able to produce a masterpiece just like that, no errors and if I can't do that too then I must be wasting my time, hence the first deviation from the plan feeling like total failure. I do know this is rubbish, but as anyone with any interest in psychology or philosophy will tell you knowing something to be the case and engaging emotionally with that as true-for-you are not the same thing. So I have decided that inventing and working with methods that render 'perfection' (as defined by my unconscious mind) an impossibility from the start and therefore enable me to believe that nothing which I do during the process matters any more than any other thing will encourage me to believe the 'there are no mistakes' mantra.
So when painting I begin by creating a surface that has already been 'spoiled'. I take my canvas or my board and I cover it with pieces of tissue paper, painted over with medium. However hard you try tissue paper resists being stuck smoothly, and is wonderfully easy to make less smooth, so my surface is covered in all sorts of interesting crinkles and wrinkles, and sometimes rip, thus removing the pressure to do justice to the smooth perfection of the original surface. It may not sound logical, but believe me if you are scared of the blank canvas ensuring it is not blank before you start actually doing your thing really helps. It isn't blank anymore, or, to put it in the way I suspect my unconscious does, I have spoiled it already so what does it matter what I do to it now? This frees me to actually make some marks on the thing, with no idea what result I am aiming for and consequently without worrying about what they look like.
Of course then, eventually, I find myself looking at a canvas that I am quite pleased with but which I am sure is not finished. Then I need another strategy to get past the fear of irrevocably spoiling what I am currently pleased with. I don't have a cast-iron solution to this one yet, but I'm working on it!
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