Salvation in Sicily

The Future, a pencil sketch from my time in Sicily

I wanted to share a little more around the background behind the recent shift in my work to give a bit more context and in case it can help others who are feeling stuck. I’d been aware for quite a long time that something was wrong, a niggling pebble in my shoe, and, like lots of people wanting to create change in their lives, it took a long time for me to actually be able to effect it.

“Change happens when the pain of staying the same outweighs the fear of change”, said a wise person once, not too sure who, but this is without a doubt what happened for me. Talking about needing to change but not doing it and not knowing how, made me boring to listen to but also frustrated, sad, angry and my confidence and self-esteem were on a steep downhill slope.

There was a gnawing need to reveal myself in my work in a way I hadn’t felt before and ultimately there was no option but to stop, draw a line in the sand and take stock for however long whatever needed to happen to happen.

Of course, the difficulty as a self-employed artist with a longish career in the rear mirror was that it felt like I was giving up everything I’d built and had no idea where I was going. I knew that the way I made my work was no longer relevant for me, that my work would have to look very different if I was still going to make it, hence probably losing my following, my “brand” though I hate that word, and my income.

Hunting around on Substack, reading stuff about reinvention and transformation, I stumbled upon this gem from Czech former president and writer, the late Vaclav Havel.  It was a beautiful musing on the life of an artist where he contemplates the three choices an artist faces after achieving success. It was the first time I’d seen anything written down that described my predicament..

“Sooner or later, however, a writer (or at least a writer of my type) finds himself at a crossroads: he has exhausted his initial experience of the world and the ways of expressing it and he must decide how to proceed from there.

He can, of course, seek ever more brilliant ways of saying the things he has already said; that is, he can essentially repeat himself.

Or he can rest in the position he achieved in his first burst of creativity, subordinate everything he learned to the interests of consolidating that position, and thus assure himself a place on Parnassus.

But he has a third option: he can abandon everything proven, step beyond his initial experience of the world, with which he is by now all too familiar, liberate himself from what binds him to his own tradition, to public expectation and to his own established position, and try for a new and more mature self-definition, one that corresponds to his present and authentic experience of the world.

In short, he can find his "second wind." Anyone who chooses this route—the only one (if one wishes to go on writing) that genuinely makes sense—will not, as a rule, have an easy time of it. At this stage in his life, a writer is no longer a blank sheet of paper, and some things are hard to part with. His original elan, self-confidence, and spontaneous openness have gone, but genuine maturity is not yet in sight; he must, in fact, start over again, but in essentially more difficult conditions.”

Vaclev Havel from his essay “Second Wind”, Open Letters Selected Writings 1965 - 1990

I was travelling around Sicily last autumn while in the throws of this creative block/mind fuck, having not made any art for months, with a book by another writer I came across on Substack which was actually a much lighter read than the title suggested..  Paul Millard’s The Pathless Path, like Havel’s essay, definitely talked about stuff I needed to hear at the time, although it’s not a book only for creatives.

 “ The Pathless Path is about having the courage to walk away from an identity that seems to make sense in the context of the default path in order to aspire towards things you don’t understand. It’s to experiment in new ways, to remix your own path, to develop your own personal definition of freedom, and to dare to have faith that it will be okay, no matter how much scepticism, insecurity or fear you might face.”

Paul Millard, The Pathless Path

 I’d started making small pencil drawings, very quick, just of anything that came to mind in my head that I connected with emotionally. I titled them. Some were terrifying. I wasn’t in a great place – well, I was in Sicily, which is incredible, but you know what I mean. An Alain de Boton quote which also cropped up in the book above had me crying behind my sunglasses in the searing Catania sun.

“We cannot continue to fly high over the past in our jet planes while refusing to re-experience the territory we are crossing. We need to land our craft, get out and walk, inch by painful inch, through the swampy realities of long ago. We need to lie down – close our eyes and endure things, metaphorically on foot. Only when we have returned afresh to our suffering and know it in our bones will it ever promise to leave us alone.”

Alain de Boton

Reading that started to give me clues to what had happened. I’d disconnected emotionally from my work (and also from my life - easier that way sometimes) somewhere along the way. How to possibly sort myself out was becoming clearer but it was going to be tough. The wee pencil sketches seemed to show that I’d landed my craft right there in the Piazza, and I’d started to walk across that vegetable-strewn, hot tarmac territory of my personal history in bare feet. I started thinking a lot about my youth. Excavating, revisiting, unearthing long forgotten messy, emotional stuff; the stuff of most people’s childhoods. Ouch, it hurt. But I kept drawing.

And that’s how and where I started coming back to life creatively last year.

The view from tear-drenched sunnies: vegetable street carnage in Catania, Sicily