The imprint of effortless flow
Sometimes flow doesn’t happen when we try and instead is the imprint of effortless flow when we don’t try…
I’m back in my studio creating after more than a week focusing on other projects. And all I wanted to do was make marks. It’s the thing I return to when I need returning, to enter again into that creative flow.
“Flow is a state of mind in which a person becomes fully immersed in an activity. Positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi describes flow as a state of complete immersion in an activity.” Source
Flow feels like effortless movement to me. It’s when outside distractions and my own inner chatter fall away and I just play. Non-flow feels like something is stuck – in my idea, in my hand, or in what I create – and it takes effort. The outside distractions are that, and my inner chatter is mostly judging. With flow, I’m into it. With non-flow, I’m not. Trying to flow doesn’t, and it didn’t this time.
I had learned Lao reading and writing in a course earlier in the summer. My idea had been to express a few Lao characters through the process of expressive mark making using water-soluble graphite.
But it just didn’t flow. I struggled. I had to stop. The Lao characters themselves seemed to be relieved, no longer having to contort into erroneous shapes they didn’t appreciate anyways.
So I tried something else. My studio is filled with nature collections from twigs and bark, to dried leaves and grasses. I wanted the comfort of holding something in my hands, dipping it in ink, and seeing what marks we could make together. I chose one long, fragile, fraying blade of grass and began. But even after warming up, there was still no rhythm, no dance between us, and we both sadly felt it.
Then I thought maybe wrapping the long grass together in a bundle would help, to give us some presence, something. We tried again, we did, then soon bowed out to each other in slight awkwardness.
Next I chose a husk of some sort – wider, but still dried and fragile. Between my fingers I tore it into smaller strips, dipping each one into ink, again seeing what marks we could make. The husk blades were unyielding and stiff. Each one of them. Wrapped together they softened, but not by much, and they were tired after one go of it. I felt defeated.
I was starting to put things away when I saw it, what was made without even trying – the imprint of effortless flow right there on the plate! Without outside distractions or inner chatter, it had received the imprint of what was happening all around by being in effortless flow.
The plate had been absorbed in only being itself to hold the ink, random marks, natural found objects, and my hands. The imprint it gave was effortless flow.
“The imprint of effortless flow” was originally published as an exclusive post to my Patreon supporters in September 2021. Now it’s public and available to you, too!
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