The Hand, the Eye and the Heart

Photograph: David Parry/National Portrait Gallery/PA

There are some artists I admire almost as much for their insights on the creative process as for the work they make. David Hockney is one of them. The book A Bigger Message records a conversation between Hockney and his friend Martin Gayford about a series of paintings. At one point they’re discussing why Hockney has chosen to use watercolour in one of his works. He explains …

I used watercolour because I wanted a flow from my hand, partly because of what I had learned of the Chinese attitude to painting. They say you need three things for paintings: the hand, the eye, and the heart. Two won’t do. A good eye and heart is not enough; neither is a good hand and eye. I thought that was very, very good.

From the moment I read these sentences the notion stuck with me. Here’s why: I think it’s true not just for painters but for creatives in all media, and because often when evaluating your work, it’s easy to get fixed on the weaknesses you perceive in one of the three - your hand, your eye or your heart. Maybe you feel your poor execution, your hand, has done a disservice to your idea, or you’ve failed to find an original perspective with your eye, or there’s something that rings a little false about the emotion you’re exploring. Yet in isolating just one of these areas it’s easy to miss a deficiency elsewhere; something that once made good will take your work to another level. So I’d like to consider the hand, the eye and the heart in the context of all kinds of creative work and share some observations on how you can ensure they’re working in harmony.

Let’s begin with the hand, which is really another way of talking about craft or technique. There’s no better way of improving your technique than engaging in a daily practice of doing the thing you wish to become better at. Which sounds kind of obvious, but you’d be surprised at how long some writers go without writing or artists without drawing. The reason is often because they feel that if they don’t have a significant project to work on there’s no point in picking up a pen or a brush. In fact the opposite is true: it’s during these fallow periods when you have the most time to practice your practise.

Over the past couple of years I’ve taken up an activity recommended by Julia Cameron in her book The Artist’s Way. It’s called ‘morning pages’. The idea is simple: at the beginning of your day you write three pages. There’s no prescription on content, you simply write whatever comes into your head. The rules are that you do this every day, with a pen or a pencil, not a computer, and you don’t read the pages back. If you have nothing to write then it’s OK to write ‘I have nothing to write’ repeatedly until your three pages are full (though I’ve found something somehow always spills out).

A couple of things have happened since I began the morning pages. It’s become a kind of confessional. Those little things that nag away at my subconscious, that bug me during the night and that would get in the way of daytime writing, I put down on paper before I do anything else and their hold over me is lost. I’ve also noticed that because of the free flowing nature of the writing – using a pen, no evaluation etc – sometimes I’ll chance upon an accidentally eloquent turn of phrase I can use later, or, if I’m particularly lucky, an idea for a longer piece of writing.

Julia Cameron recommends this practice of morning pages for artists of all persuasions, not just writers. Though if you happen to be more visual than verbal, another activity to try that could improve your hand is the one undertaken by the artist Maggi Hambling.

The artist Maggi Hambling with her ink dropper

Each morning she rises early, and in that liminal space between dreaming and wakefulness, she takes an ink dropper in her left hand (she’s right handed) and with her eyes closed moves it across the page. Then she has breakfast. When she returns to the studio that accidental, unselfconscious image often becomes the foundation of the rest of the day’s work. I know another artist who simply takes a photograph at the same time every day, no matter where she is. And the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård likes to pick a word at random and begin by writing about that.

Finding a simple, daily, unselfconscious activity that is free of the burden of being ‘a project’ is I think one of the best ways to develop your hand. And, if my own experience is anything to go by, it’s likely that in doing this activity you’ll chance upon an idea so vital that in time it may come to overtake your main project.

So what about the eye? Well, this is not just about how you perceive the world but where you perceive the world from. When you look around at your peers, fellow writers, artists or musicians, you will most likely feel that there are those who are more talented, maybe have more resources or better networks than you do. But no matter their advantage, you have one thing they don’t: in the words of Dr Seuss, ‘Today you are you, that is truer than true, and there is no one alive who is youer than you.’ No one else has your experience, your emotional landscape, your psychological makeup or your unique perspective. And the truer you can be to this unique perspective, the better your work becomes.

The problem is that when we’re setting out on a creative pursuit, in the early stages of a career, our work inevitably seems derivative and unoriginal, largely because we’re imitating those we admire. There’s a great analogy, which I came across in the writing of Oliver Burkeman, by the Finnish photographer Arno Minkkinen. It’s called The Helsinki Bus Station Theory …

There are just a few main bus routes out of Helsinki. Three or four kilometres out of the centre these lines branch off into many different routes. Arno says that each stop is like a year in an artist’s life. You pick a direction and set off. The problem is that early on your work is often compared to older, better established artists because you’ve yet to find your own voice; you‘re following a well-travelled route. And a lot of people are so dispirited by this that they get off the bus. But if you get past this, then over time, the more work you produce, the more you find a voice that is your own; in other words, the truer you are to your own eye. But in order to get there, in Arno’s own memorable words, “You have to stay on the fucking bus.”

Another observation on the eye – if that doesn’t sound like too tortured a phrase – is that as human beings we’re often better at seeing than we are at looking. I recently read the brilliant Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barret. Her hypothesis is that the brain is, fundamentally, an energy saving device: its function is to enable us to pursue our biological imperative of reproduction in the most efficient way possible. To this end, our brains constantly predict the world around us, and so long as the data received by our senses - especially sight - conforms to our prediction, we waste no energy on taking the time to see something as it actually is, rather than how we presume it to be. This becomes a problem for any artist, given that great creative work depends upon looking at the world with particular acuity.

A simple technique you can try to develop your own vision is one devised by the little known yet hugely inspiring artist, educator and nun, Sister Corita Kent. Corita would encourage her students to cut a small rectangular hole out of a piece of cardboard to create what she called a ‘finder’. Then together they’d visit somewhere full of life, say a busy traffic intersection, and Corita would encourage the students to look at the world through their finder. Because they could only ever see a tiny part of the scene they were forced to slow down, to isolate a point of interest, apart from the whole, and – most importantly – to really look.

One of Corita’s original students with a ‘finder’

In her own words, “You have to look at the world [in] small pieces at a time. Look at it. Just a small part of the world.” It’s an approach that is valuable not just for visual artists, but for writers too. It can be hard to begin to draw a character in words, to communicate their quirks, to represent their idiosyncrasies, especially if you attempt to do it holistically. But if you set out simply to describe a detail, like the way they tie their shoes, you may find the hard stuff like character and personality and experience spills out almost on its own.

And so we come to the heart. What Hockney – and the Chinese originators of the expression – mean by ‘the heart’ is of course open to interpretation. I like to think it has two meanings. The first being intention; the spirit with which you approach your work. If you create only to achieve fame or fortune then you’re likely not just to be disappointed but also, frankly, to make rubbish art. If you begin with the intention to be as true to the impulse that makes you want to write or draw as possible, to be as faithful to your idea as you can, then you will probably still not achieve fame or fortune, but you will have made better art.

The second meaning I understand by ‘heart’ is courage: the drive to persevere in the face of setbacks. No successful artistic career was ever achieved without heartbreak. Relationships, finances, self-esteem and even your sanity could be tested once you make the decision to commit yourself to a creative life. But the biggest challenge to your fortitude may well come once the work is finished. I recently read an interview with the preternaturally talented writer Ocean Vuong. He explained,

Even if people love your books, what comes out in publication is only close to what you had in your imagination, if you are really lucky. And I think that is such a beautiful thing. To be a writer is to traffic in failure.

Few of us are as talented or as sanguine as Ocean. That moment when the initial flush of satisfaction at finishing a project ebbs and is replaced by disappointment as you contemplate the flaws in your execution rarely feels beautiful to me. But I think I understand what he’s getting at.

To be a writer or a painter or a poet is to attempt to make manifest in the real world something that was ineffable in your imagination. So of course it’s a doomed endeavour. But the fact that we keep on trying, against the odds, is a testament to the particularly human impulse to express ourselves and share stories. And so long as you respond to this impulse with a good hand, eye and heart then you never know, maybe one day the thing you make will be just as perfect as it was in your imagination.