I love the writing of Hope Jahren, an American geochemist and geobiologist. Her memoir, Lab Girl, published in 2016, shows the tenacity and grit required of a woman in the sciences, but there are many passages in it that I relate to as an artist. One section describes the incredibly deep dive that she makes into her research as well as the impossibility of conveying all the challenges she meets along the way in her final research reports.
She says: “I have become proficient at producing a rare species of prose capable of distilling ten years of work by five people into six published pages, written in a language that very few people can read and that no one ever speaks…
Although my publications contain meticulous details of the plants that did grow, the runs that went smoothly, and the data that materialized, they perpetrate a disrespectful amnesia against the entire gardens that rotted in fungus and dismay, the electrical signals that refused to stabilize, and the printer ink cartridges that we secured late at night through nefarious means. I know damn well that if there had been a way to get to success without traveling through disaster someone would have already done it and thus rendered the experiments unnecessary, but there’s still no journal where I can tell the story of how my science is done with both the heart and the hands.”
The image that that conjures up for me is that of an iceberg, 1/10th of which is visible above the waterline, while 9/10ths remains submerged in the depths below. This is exactly what the process of making art is like. The 1/10th is the final piece that people see. But everything that goes before that - the mistakes, the false starts, the disasters, the endless questions to oneself about what the hell you are doing and what the hell is it exactly that you WANT to be doing, the small successes that show you a potential path forward - all that is almost never seen by or shared with an audience. And that stuff is the part that is the most creative, that demands your attention, that intensely excites you, that demands most of your time. You want to share it with the world, but there aren’t many venues in which it can be shared and appreciated.
The closest artists come is when a curator puts together a show about “the creative process”. That kind of show exists in order to showcase exactly what it goes into the making of a piece of art or a project, but they are unfortunately few and far between. I’ve often thought if we artists could share more of our process, that art would be more greatly understood and appreciated.* As it is, we continue to exist as icebergs in a sea that is uncertain of the value we bring to the world.
* (Teaching is similar. Parents and students have very little knowledge of the amount of preparation that goes into teaching and don’t understand how much time it takes to evaluate student work. The coronavirus has revealed to many just how much work goes into teaching. One can only hope that that those lessons will be remembered once in-person school can take place more regularly again.)