4 - The Inner Committee

An addendum

OM.2026.102 - collage on panel - 8 x 8 inches - Green Tara Radiance - Betsy Arizu - USA - Visual Poetry and Color

The following is a more fleshed out essay from a responce I made to a Reg Grant comment on the article about Creative Immersion: When the Work Makes Itself

The Inner Committee

We hear a great deal about the inner critic.

Artists are advised to silence it, ignore it, overcome it, make friends with it, or simply keep working until it gets bored and goes away. And certainly the inner critic can be troublesome. It can stand over the shoulder while we work, questioning every decision before we have had time to discover where that decision might lead.

But the critic is not alone.

Sitting beside the inner critic are several other characters who can quietly interfere with the creative process. They are less obvious because they often sound perfectly reasonable.

There is the inner assumer.
There is the inner expecter.
And there is the inner comparer.

Each has a useful function. Each can also become a problem when we mistake its provisional judgment for reality. Who else might be on that committee?

The Inner Assumer

We make assumptions constantly. We have to. We could hardly begin anything otherwise.

When I start a piece, particularly because much of my work is process oriented, I often begin by taking a stance. I establish certain boundaries. I might determine a size, choose a limited group of materials, establish a particular procedure, select a vocabulary of forms, or decide that I will work according to a certain set of rules.

These are assumptions about what the work might be.

There is nothing wrong with that.

In fact, constraints can be enormously productive. A boundary gives us somewhere to begin. Faced with absolutely infinite possibility, we might never make the first move. So we temporarily reduce infinity to something manageable.

This canvas.
These materials.
This procedure.
This afternoon.
Begin here.

The difficulty comes when the assumption becomes a prediction.

The original premise was only supposed to get the process moving. It becomes troublesome when we begin insisting that the work remain faithful to what we thought it was going to be before it existed.

There is an important difference between saying, I will begin here, and saying, I already know where this must end.

I want the first and distrust the second.

The boundary establishes the playing field. Inside that field, anything might happen.

Indeed, that is precisely why I am interested in making the work.

If I already knew what the finished work was going to be, making it would become largely an act of execution. I would simply be manufacturing something I had already completed mentally.

The creative process becomes much more interesting when the initial assumption is understood as provisional. We take a stance so that we can begin, then allow the work itself to challenge that stance.

The work begins talking back.

The Inner Expecter

Then there is the inner expecter.

Expectation is slightly different from assumption. The assumer thinks it knows what the work is. The expecter thinks it knows what the work ought to become.

We begin wanting something from it.

We expect it to be beautiful. Important. Successful. Original. Saleable. Profound. Better than the last one. Worth the materials. Worth the time. Worth showing someone.

Perhaps we simply expect it to be good.

And almost immediately we have created the possibility of disappointment.

The work has barely begun and already it is being measured against an imaginary finished object.

That imaginary object can become remarkably oppressive because it has an unfair advantage over the actual work: it does not have to exist.

The imagined painting has no awkward passages. The imagined poem contains no clumsy sentences. The imagined song arrives perfectly formed. The imagined project has never encountered the resistance of actual materials.

Reality has to contend with gravity, paint, language, time, mistakes, interruptions, limitations, accidents and our own changing attention.

Imagination does not.

Perhaps one of the most useful things an artist can do is temporarily put aside the categories of success and failure.

Instead, think in terms of experiment.

An experiment asks a different question.

Not: Will this succeed?

But: What happens if I do this?

That small change can completely alter the atmosphere of the studio.

A work that does not become what we hoped it would become has not necessarily failed. It may have shown us something we could not have discovered otherwise. It may contain one passage, one gesture, one relationship, one accident that opens the door to the next ten works.

In a sustained creative practice, what appears unsuccessful today may become essential information tomorrow.

The experiment continues.

The Inner Comparer

And then there is the inner comparer.

This one is particularly difficult because comparison is built into the way we understand things. We recognize differences by comparing one thing with another. Artists study other artists. Writers read other writers. Musicians listen to other musicians.

This is part of education.

The trouble begins when observation becomes self-measurement.

Someone else has a larger exhibition.
Someone else sells more work.
Someone else seems more original.
Someone else has received recognition we have not received.
Someone else is younger yet further along.
Someone else is older and has accomplished more.
Someone else appears to know exactly what they are doing.

Comparison can manufacture disappointment almost indefinitely because there will always be someone against whom we can construct an unfavorable measurement.

But there is an even more fundamental problem. Often there really cannot be a meaningful comparison.

A mature creative practice becomes increasingly particular. It accumulates its own history, vocabulary, obsessions, mistakes, discoveries, methods and questions. The longer an artist works, the more the work becomes the record of a particular consciousness moving through a particular life.

How exactly should that be compared?

We can study another artist’s decisions. We can admire their work. We can learn techniques from them. We can observe how they have organized a career or solved particular formal problems.

But their trajectory cannot be ours. Comparison is useful when it provides information. It becomes destructive when it provides a unrealistic verdict.

From Judgment to Curiosity

The inner critic, assumer, expecter and comparer are not enemies that need to be defeated. They simply need different jobs.

The assumer can establish the initial conditions.
The expecter can propose possibilities.
The comparer can gather information.
Even the critic can eventually help us evaluate what has happened.

But none of them needs to govern the studio.

During the actual making, something else can take precedence: curiosity.

What happens if I move this?
What happens if I remove that?
What happens if I repeat this form fifty times?
What happens if I violate the rule I established yesterday?
What happens if the accident is more interesting than the intention?
What happens if I follow the work instead of forcing it to follow me?

This is the great freedom of thinking experimentally.

An experiment does not require us to know the answer before we begin. In fact, if we already know the answer, there is little reason to conduct the experiment.

We establish conditions and then pay attention.

That may be one of the deepest disciplines of creative practice: learning to begin with enough intention to enter the work while remaining sufficiently available to be surprised by it.

Set the boundaries. Take a stance. Make the first move.

Then see what happens.

Taking that approach, anything might happen.

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