Julia Cameron presents The Artist’s Way

Julia Cameron: It’s exciting for me to be here. I knew this store when it was just a tiny little mustard seed store and I used to come and sit in the back by Astrology, before there was a Channeling section and I would listen, read and hide out. I think that part of what I was doing here then--although I didn’t know it--was trying to contact for myself a sense of comfort and of ease because I was engaged in a creative path, as I think many of you probably are. I was not yet in possession of the information that having a prolonged creative career is a lot like signing up to run a marathon: You will, sooner or later, be injured. And, what came, for me, out of a long series of creative accomplishments and what often felt like an even longer series of creative set-backs and shin splints was a feeling that we very much needed to have artists sharing with other artists--creatives sharing with other creatives, if you will, the gory details. We needed to find ways to acknowledge injuries when we had them, and to mend ourselves, if you will.

So, I would like to talk just a little bit about who real artists are and the fact that many of us disqualify ourselves right at the gate because we have notion that is being fed weekly by People Magazine, by the L.A.Times, by the New York Times--the ‘Arts and Leisure’ sections of most major publications and it’s a belief system that goes something like this: Somewhere there is this mythical tribe of real artists. And real artists are people who were born knowing that they were artists. They have never had any doubt. [LAUGHTER] Unlike the rest of us, they do not experience fear. What they have is a sort of inner engine of great strength that tells them, “If that person gets in my way again, I’ll kill them because it is more important for me to do my work and to be an artist than anything else.”

Have any of you run across this mythology? I want to talk a little about the damage those myths do to the rest of us. So, I would like us to do a little free associating around what associations we have with artists. What kinds of words pop into our minds when I mention the word artist--could I have a couple of them? “Bohemian”, “wild”, “poor”, “brilliant”, “weird and irresponsible”, “spontaneous”, “creative”. Okay, I want to back up for just a second and show you how some of these beliefs translate to us as we try to get ourselves onto the page, onto the canvas, onto the stage, or into the middle of the room doing it.

Things that sound very benign become extremely pernicious when they go to work on us. Let’s say that we have a belief system that says, “Artists are creative”. Coupled with that we usually have “and they know it and they feel it”. So, they are always in the mood to be creative, right? They’re in the mood. They don’t have something that I call “bad artist days”. These people always feel like being creative and they always can. Okay, so you, moving toward your page, are having a bad artist day and you don’t feel creative, therefore, it follows, you are not a real artist, so what’s the use?

If you have a belief system that says, “Artists are poor”, the way that this works is you’re going to say to yourself either, “I shouldn’t care about that”, “Oh, I’m such a little yuppie”, “Why do I want my car to run?” [LAUGHTER] “Artists are poor”. That means that if you happen to be a spiritual midget like myself and have a lingering desire for something other than abject poverty, you’re going to tell yourself, “I guess I can’t be an artist. I’m certainly not a real artist or I wouldn’t care.” So, what starts to happen is that we will, very often, devise a price tag for our art. We will say, “Either I can have a comfortable life or I can be an artist.”

“Artists are irresponsible”. And take a look at the way ‘irresponsible’ works. What if you are holding down a day job and you’re good at it, you know? What if you are actually a crack accountant. We don’t say to ourselves, “This must prove I’m an artist. T.S. Eliot worked in a bank and so do I.” Okay? What we say is, “Uh-oh, I’m responsible. Artists aren’t responsible, so I’m guess I’m kind of a dullard and I’m not really creative.”

Could I hear another one of those “artists are” words? What? “Crazy”. How many people here think artists are crazy? How many people here think that if they move fully into their creativity, everything is going to shake apart. One of the things that we don’t get told is that blocked artists are crazy. Functional artists are relatively cheerful people. About ten years ago I worked for two years as a special arts writer for the Chicago Tribune, which meant that I interviewed everyone from Akira Kurasawa to Sissy Spacek. It was like 52 interviews in 52 weeks and what I talked to people about was their creative process. I actually had a very good time doing this. And, one of the things that I discovered was that I was meeting a lot of people that other people would consider “real artists”. None of them had ever gotten beyond their fear. They had learned to move through it. They had learned that mood doesn’t matter. I guess that I would really say that doing well creatively is a little bit like getting into bed: there are many times when you are not in the mood and it works out fine. [LAUGHTER]

So there are a number of myths about being an artist that we really need to set about dismantling. And it isn’t mysterious that we have these myths. For one thing, when we read about artists, we don’t have a first-person account most of the time. Recently, I read about a guy who had gone to visit Picasso. He was a young soldier. He pretended to have a limp. He kind of limped up to Picasso’s door, which was obviously the door on which they based the gates in Jurassic Park--these huge swinging doors. He knocked on the door. Picasso did not come to the door. Picasso’s butler came to the door and he said, “Yes.” And the guy said, “I’d like to see Picasso.” And he said something like, “The world would like to see Picasso.” [LAUGHTER] And then, there was a little scratching noise or something and he came back and said, “Oh, Picasso will see you.” So, the fellow came in and whipped out a sheet of paper and said, “Draw me.” Picasso did. The guy said, “Thanks” and left. Got outside, looked at the drawing and said, “I don’t like it. He could do better.”

Meanwhile, World War II happened. So, he went off to the war, came back from the war and decided, “I’m gonna have him do it again.” He remembered to limp--he limped up to the door, knocked on the door. The same little fella came to the door and opened the door and said, “What are you doing back?” And the guy said, “Well, I’d like to see Picasso.” He said, “Picasso’s a very busy and important man.” What he didn’t say was, “Picasso’s having a bad artist day. He’s upstairs fighting with one of those 93 women that he gets involved with so that he doesn’t have to paint. He’s a relationship addict and it gets in the way of his work, but we don’t talk about that.” He didn’t say, “I’m sorry. Picasso’s upstairs throwing up because he decided that Guernica is a terrible painting.” [LAUGHTER] He said, “Let me see if the Master will see you.”

The Artist’s Way was really written to encourage us to look at the possibility that we are creative in many different ways, and to remind us that even your Picassos have bad ‘Artist’ days. I would like to tell you that I didn’t sustain very many creative losses, but that’s not true. I wrote the book because I have been pained by most of the things in the book. There was a year when I had three pictures in a row go into turnaround and I ran away from L.A. and kind of begged, “Dear God, don’t ever give me more movie ideas. They feel too much like miscarriages. I don’t like this.” Okay? I tried to find other things to do. One of things that I discovered in my creative pain--and you may all have also discovered this--is that, you can’t kill it? Creativity is like something out of a John Carpenter movie. [LAUGHTER] You can try to cement it over, but it’s very hydra-headed and it will, by God, come out.