Don Freas on A Way to Engage Creativity

“What You Plan is Too Small to Live.”

Hello, dear friends.

I’m delighted to welcome to Writers at the Well poet/sculptor Don Freas, author of In-Between: Creativity Set Free and Swallowing the World: New and Selected Poems. In today’s post, Don shares what his recent experiment with Sumi painting reveals about the stymieing effect of preconception, and the bliss of letting your work surprise you.

In his book, In Between: Creativity Set Free, Don Freas highlights personal breakthroughs that carried him deeper into the practice of artistic creation.

If you enjoy Don’s essay below, check out my podcast interview with him, in which he discusses what he calls the “material meditation” of making art. “When you look back at your work,” Don says, “your own accrued shape appears in the spaces between the things you’ve fashioned.” You can find this fascinating conversation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2359469/episodes/15986584, and on Spotify, Apple, etc., under, “Writers at the Well.”

As with all of my guests, I offered Don over a dozen questions from which he could select several to answer. Don, thinking outside the canvas, elected to roll all the questions into one, and answer “all of a piece,” which is precisely how he approaches his art. Enjoy!

xo, Tess

ALL OF A PIECE: Engaging Free Creativity by Don Freas

I like to make things. I have an urge to craft forms that have not existed before. I like to be surprised by what comes out. These aspects that inform my work mean my preconceptions about what I set out to make are likely to be influenced (or polluted) by images of how things have been made before. The skills I’ve developed in fifty years of making are both valuable assets and potential deal-breakers.

To take a current example: I’ve been learning some new methods of expression. I took a Sumi painting workshop from a calligraphy master. Day one I was all thumbs, of course, not knowing what the brush, ink, and paper could do. I also wasn’t sure how to proceed without planning the process before the actual brushwork begins. I had the ink in a bowl, I had the brush, I had rice paper held down with rocks at the corners. Alok had given us a random, resonant quote to keep in mind. I intended to use that quote to inspire the stroke. What felt impossible was to proceed without a script, such as “I’ll strike a curve, then scrub the brush up and down for a few inches, then proceed with a sweeping vertical run and see what I want to do from there.” No, that’s not Sumi-e in the way it’s being taught here. The stroke itself comes from emptiness, from some naturally occurring gesture that will surprise me. That’s where the mystery is. That’s the thing so difficult to activate, or talk about.

“Ink Swirl 01” by Don Freas

by Don Freas

In sculpture, I was able to invent tricks to get out of my own way. It started with scraps from furniture projects. I produced a series of parts, tapered and beveled in particular ways. I figured out how to glue them together to discover what sort of form the overall structure might take. I could guess, but I wouldn’t know for sure until the glue dried and the clamps came off. At that point I could decide if I had a form worthy of finishing, or if it felt like just a part of something, a piece that needed additional parts. But what? The inherent uncertainties led to a fascinating process of following the form one step at a time until I came to a good reason to stop, finish the piece as is, and exhibit the surprising result.

The abstract form of Sumi-e that the workshop exposed me to creates a visual shape in a few seconds. I’m standing there with the loaded brush, the paper, a line from a poem in my mind, and when I feel totally present to all of that, the brush lands on the paper, does a dance, and lifts off again. I contemplate the outcome. Do I like it? Does it intrigue me? Am I curious as to how the image might reflect the resonant quote?

“Ink Swirl 02” by Don Freas

Beguiling, all the way through. From prep to quote to finished piece the process contains a moment of uncontainable presence that drives the outcome. One quote we painted to was “What you plan is too small to live.” That’s what I’m trying to say now about the process. I came out of the workshop with about sixty attempts at paintings; perhaps fifteen achieved something—not perfection but something of interest. I made them, and I didn’t.

“What you plan is too small to live” by Don Freas

But wait a minute—off to the side, drops of ink slowly swirl in the bowl of clear water used to prepare the brush—could that turn out to be the more interesting creation? In this whole process with the long tradition of calligraphy, maybe the rosette in the square water bowl is the most interesting unplanned outcome, large enough to live.

So, in talking about creation, where do I start? There is no beginning and no end—or is it all beginning, all end? Why do I want to be surprised? I can answer that: I want to be surprised because anything that I project is going to be drawn from things I have seen, maybe a conglomerate of things I’ve experienced. That’s too much control for what I seek.

My goal is a form I couldn’t have imagined. I can open myself to unknown outcomes by getting out of the way, watching with peripheral vision for what has come about at the center and at the liminal edges. By such a process something new is added.

“There’s Nothing to Worry About” by Don Freas

I let intention go and photograph the water bowl—precisely because it’s even further outside of my control. The accidental, available to be brought to awareness: that may be one of the results I’ve been seeking. What else have I overlooked?

The process is unitary, whole, it includes everything. I have to be there, in the calm and steady present, eyes wide, to catch what I don’t know I’m looking for. THAT’S what matters to me—in any form, sculpture, writing, painting, even in making a coat hook, or an essay on creativity. I want to discover what I couldn’t have imagined. I won’t find it unless I’m engaged in a making process, and I won’t find it there unless I embrace all that happens. If the work has surprised me, has added something, it may offer the glimmer of change to you as well. 

-Don Freas

Don Freas takes us beyond everyday existence into a deep exploration of alternative ways of perceiving.

Don Freas is a self-taught craftsman and poet who holds a BA in Writing from The Evergreen State College, and an MFA in Poetry and Literature from Bennington College. He lives in Olympia, Washington, where he exhibits at Childhood’s End Art Gallery. Visit www.DonFreas.com to learn more and follow Don on instagram@donfreas and FaceBook@donfreas.