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On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity

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When we give up the tendency to compare ourselves to others - when we just do and don't judge - then we can create art.

Author Langer states in On Becoming An Artist, that most of us find it safer to put off doing creative things out of fear of making fools of ourselves. She asks: "What exactly are the obstacles that keep us from doing what we are drawn to do?"

Not everyone should strive for perfection but be part of the "school of the untaught." We can do art, be an artist for our own enjoyment -- without comparing ourselves with anyone else. Van Gogh was not famous in his lifetime. People do not like all the same kinds of art/creativity.

Langer's premise is based on mindful thinking. Mindfulness is simply the process of noticing new things.

Her writing made me think about how many times we are "our own worst enemy." We will start our creativity (paint, music, draw, write, whatever) tomorrow ... when we have time ... when we're empty nesters, etc. We do everything but create.

"Someday" could be tomorrow if you read and take to heart Langer's message. In our creativity we need to distinguish the end product from the art/experience of creating it.

Too many of us believe that a "rich creative life" belongs to a few select people. Wrong, creativity is in everything we do.

Refrain from judging and just do. Start your personal renaissance. Becoming An Artist may just be the jumpstart you need.

I bought this book with high hopes that it would contain some good advice about creating. It has some, but Langer surrounds it with a limp, academic prose that is at times painful to read. Langer uses the communal "We" throughout the book, which I find irritating and distracting.

Langer also relies heavily on personal anecdotes to illustrate her points, and many of them leave the reader wondering whether she could have found better examples.

I expected more from this book, considering that the author works as a Harvard professor of psychology.

The main points of this book are:

1. Pay attention to what you are doing when you are doing it.
2. Don't evaluate your work or let the evaluations of others interfere.
3. Welcome mistakes as learning opportunities.
4. Become comfortable with uncertainty.

A much more interesting book to read instead of this one is The Creative Habit, by Twyla Tharp, a well-known choreographer who provides anecdotes from her career, ideas about the creative life, and practical exercises in an entertaining and attractive format.

There is so much fear associated with performing, creating, or expressing any artistic endeavor. Langer holds up a mirror to these fears by describing many scientifically based experiments that reveal where the real problems lie:
1. Being critical of others prevents us from being vulnerable enough to be moved by something unique and wonderful. Allowing yourself to be vulnerable makes artistic expression more meaningful.
2. Assumptions about "prodigies," "talent," and "real" art, are often based on one experience, or one comment we may have overheard. The people we compare ourselves to may not claim to be any more of an expert than we are.

I am completely inspired by this book! Perhaps if enough people let go of their critical, doubtful selves and begin expressing themselves artistically, they would begin to understand how invaluable the arts are. Rather than talking about the arts as a core subject in schools, books like this convince me that "the basics" and all of general education would gain tremendously by learning from the arts.

For an artist, increasing creativity may mean a lot of different things. It may mean finding new ways to look at the world that can then be transformed into a work. It may mean developing techniques that allow the artist to convert what he see into a work. It may mean removing some psychological obstacle that is preventing the artist from looking at the world in a particular way, or transforming that vision into a work. Or it may mean allowing oneself to get started in the entire process. "On Becoming an Artist" seems to be aimed at this last situation.

The author, a psychologist, believes that anyone can create art if they are mindful, as she defines that term. Being mindful appears to mean having an open mind that is continually ready to consider the world anew. If individuals creating art are mindful, Langer says, they will, among other things, be authentic, not consider evaluation, not worry about mistakes, be free of rules, not be concerned about comparisons, and not worry about talent.

While I have not read Langer's other books about mindfulness, this goal does not seem to be just about dealing with phobias, but rather about adopting a method of living one's life akin to a kind of secular Zen Buddhism. While it may be beneficial to practice mindfulness, I had the feeling that this book developed out of her own prior work on mindfulness and her personal experience as a painter, rather than out of a sense that she could help artists to be more creative. What she urges is adopting art as a form of pastime for the benefit of the artist without any concern for the message or the audience. There is nothing wrong with that, but practicing artists who are interested in extending their creativity will be interested in going beyond self-indulgence.

I also found the sub-title "Reinventing Yourself through Mindful Creativity" to be a little misleading, It suggest that Langer will tell the individual how practicing art will make one's life fuller, but what she tells is how to practice art without certain hang-ups that may or may not be useful to the creative person.

For Langer's fans this book will probably allow them to explore the concept of mindfulness in greater depth. There probably will not be much here to help the practicing artist to be more creative.

There is some value in this book. It offers a helpful emphasis on being attentive to the task at hand, being wholly involved with it as it really is. By looking at your own work without preconception, it becomes possible to grasp the happy accident or to use the flow of creativity to the fullest. Working without concern for what everyone else will say, it becomes possible to enjoy the moment for what it is, not for what someone says it should be. That much I can go along with.

I just can't agree with other parts of this book's message. Somehow, Langer's "mindfulness" has a mindlessness about it that I can't accept. Many kinds of art demand thorough planning and preparation of a kind that Langer seems to discard. Even painting for fun can benefit from thought and organization, without demanding iron-bound rigidity in following one's plans. Discipline, the antithesis of Langer's meandering, free-flowing "mindfulness", helps a beginning artist develop skills that eventually translate into fluency. When the brush becomes a natural extension of the hand, then the artist can focus more deeply and fully on the artwork and less on the mechanics of making a mark. I agree that criticism can be discouraging, but I also know that high levels of achievement demand a clear-eyed ability to spot the weaknesses in one's own work. That crucial faculty of self-critique can only be learned by engaging in critique, of one's own work and the work of others. I have to conclude that the artist to whom Langer wrote this book is a casual hobbyist or a dabbler. No one who wants to make a living in fine or applied arts can afford the looseness of the approach described here, and the dedicated amateur will fast outgrow it.

My profoundest reservations, however, are tangential to the main thrust of the book. For a working academic, I found her massive reliance on her own unpublished writings odd. Peer review is no guarantee of quality work, I know, but is this work really so hard to get accepted into print? If so, why? And, despite her experience in clinical psychology, her description of suicidal thought in terms of excess criticism is simplistic at best.

There are lots of other books out there on developing the artist's skill and spirit - those will probably serve you better.

//wiredweird

I discovered this book at a public library, and then bought a couple of copies as gifts, and then went back to Langer's earlier titles to get insight into the development of her positions on mindfulness.

This book is not by any means aimed toward people who have a "mindfulness practice", but nonetheless, I think it is a particularly good book for meditators and contemplatives, as an adjunct to their practices, as it takes mindfulness out of the realm of calm silence and into the hurly burly of "the world" - where we have to act/do/create, and deal with others' responses and opinions of us, etc.

A high point of the book, which perhaps deserves to be developed into a whole other book in its own right, is the last chapter - called "The Mindful Choice" - a remarkably succinct summary of strategies for decision making. This is again an area where many of us are confused and burdened by conditioning. Langer tellingly brings guesses, predictions, choices, and decisions into the same arena of human experience, but along a sliding scale of perceived importance, and gives us immediately practical guidelines for moving along more freely in our lives, by bringing the dimensions of meaning and significance and creativity all together into one comprehensive exercise in wisdom development.

I read this book 3 years ago and I credit it with finding my way towards more creative expression through painting. The book completely inspired me to try new things and the insights have helped me through many daily situations. Not sure what some people here expected, but I venture that they might not have understood some of the gist of it. This book is not about how you become a commercially successful artist, quite the contrary; it is about how every "normal" person can reinvent him/herself to use more of those buried creative abilities. To me it was more than a inspiring read, it was transformational.

The word 'someday' can be another word for 'never', when prejudices, unproductive thinking patterns, and negativity get in the way of creativity and artistic expression. All it takes to become an artist, psychologist Ellen Langer maintains, is to start doing art. Her insights on preconceptions and barriers to producing art encourage readers to just go ahead and create.

I was somewhat disappointed in this book. The author suggests that it is important for us to become engaged in creative endeavors and to become mindful of the world around us. She is, of course, right. She proposes that instead of describing our style of painting as Abstract or Pop Art or Self-Taught, that a new school of art is needed: "Unschooled Art". (Art for the sheer love of creating without any regard to established rules). I love this idea. Overall though, I didn't find much new in this book. The author quotes many famous artists; she notes clinical studies in which she was involved; and she gives us examples of her own creative struggle. But it is overly wordy and it becomes repetitious after a while.
If you are lacking in inspiration, I'd highly recommend "The Art Spirit" which is a compilation of the teachings of artist Robert Henri.

Ellen does it again! Possibly the most practical and impactful advice ever given by a scientist, psychologist, or artist.

Backed by decades of research, which she makes very approachable, and anecdotes from her own experience as an artist, she shows us how we are all very creative - every single one of us. The only thing limiting the life-enhancing benefits we can enjoy from this free-flowing creativity we all have is our own mindless perception of it, and Ellen shows us a proven, very easy way to get there - be aware of new things, "it is seeing the similarities in things thought different and the differences in things taken to be similar." While simple, the elegance runs deep and the huge implications for our creativity and how we experience life are proven.

Think of the wonders humanity could produce in the next ten years if we each realized this and used this practical advice, shifting how we see ourselves and others and the contributions we can uniquely and creatively make to the world, once we are more mindful.