Childhood vs. Adulthood (putting eyes on things)
KeithHandy posted in Your Brain, Your Soul on June 29th, 2009One thing that sometimes stifles my creativity as an adult, even as an adult artist, is the ability to desire a certain thing — a certain shape, a certain color, a certain chord, a certain instrument — and hold an image in my mind until I can create an exact-as-possible expression of it. It’s great to have this power, but all the while, I’m letting a zillion little useful things float by, untapped.
When I was little, whatever happened to be in the room would become part of my art, or part of my “play”, if there’s any difference. I didn’t go searching for things. For example, I once had this discarded black trench coat with a red lining, and also one of those big “Hoppity-Hop” balls… I hung the ball from the basement ceiling and draped the bottom half of the trench coat over it, threw a scarf around the neck, and presto, instant fat-bellied ghost. In my mind it was a scene from a movie waiting to be made. I was sad when that coat was taken down and discarded, presumably by one of my parents; I’d like to find it again and re-create that character. But the artist isn’t supposed to be looking for that old coat, it’s supposed to be seeing the next thing as it comes.

Frank Zappa had a phrase, “put the eyebrows on it”, which meant to put that extra bit of attitude on a musical performance. In a way, my phrase could have been, “put the eyes on it”, because I had a tendency to see the cartoon character in the ordinary object. Whatever I had, whatever I came across, somehow the raw magic was already in it, and I was going to use it in my next movie.
Now I find myself getting stuck, getting hung up, postponing the child-like behavior until I “get this thing taken care of” or “find this piece I need”. This isn’t always a bad thing; a few weekends ago, I decided a certain spot in a piece of music ought to have a timpani line followed by a gong hit. A few Google searches, and I found some high quality samples of both timpani and gongs (neither on the sites where I expected to find them, but on the greater Internet nonetheless), and they worked beautifully. For this kind of thing, I love being an adult.
In some other areas, though, I’m letting stuff slip by. I’m neglecting useful objects because I’m not seeing the eyes on them. I’m strongly considering going to a craft store, buying a whole bunch of eyes, and just sticking them on things. This is probably what might be classified as “weird”, having eyes on all of my stuff, everywhere in the room, looking at me… but it may be the only way to re-awaken that part of my mind.

