Jeffrey Brown and the Creative Process

I've been obsessively reading the graphic memoirs of Jeffrey Brown lately, and that has me thinking a lot about the natural course of a writer's or artist's career. It's really easy to see, in a graphic artist's work, the progression of that person's skills. Drawing skills, perception, storytelling skills, everything. I had picked up Jeffrey Brown's AEIOU many times in comic shops, and always put it back because I wasn't immediately attracted to his drawing style. But then I found a copy of Clumsy at the Book Trader, and I fell for his work completely. I'm now on the latest of his six graphic memoirs (I think it collects most, if not all, of his memoir work published outside the other books).

The coffee shop I'm working in today is also playing all of the Decemberists' albums on shuffle, which is another way to illustrate the way I'm thinking about art and the creative process lately.

I went through this phase of consuming lots and lots of art in the last few months. I watched documentaries about visual artists (Beautiful Losers, Our City Dreams, Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight, The Universe of Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, and a whole bunch of movies about graffiti artists). It kind of worried me that I was consuming so much art and not creating much, but I tried to just trust my instinct and go with it.

Through the stories of the graffiti artists and through Jeffrey Brown's work, I've cycled back to something I often believe and then sometimes forget: an artist's life has a natural progression, and if the artist can get out of the way and let that progression happen, he or she will be happier and more productive. The graffiti artists, even the ones who eventually made money for what they were doing, did it just to do it. Just to see what they could do, just to do one thing and then to do the next thing. Jeffrey Brown wrote his books just because that was what he did (and because he was reacting against being "taught" how to be a painter in an MFA program). He wrote Clumsy in his sketchbook, and he made photocopies and sent them to lots of publishers, and they all rejected him, and he wrote another book and self-published the first book, and he kept going and made his life as an artist. And it was less important that he made money being an artist than that he got to be one. Getting to make art is something that is your own -- it's something nobody in a free society can take away from you.

The Decemberists had to make Castaways and Cutouts in order to make Her Majesty the Decemberists in order to eventually get to The Crane Wife and beyond. And The Crane Wife, incidentally, is not a better album, just as Jeffrey Brown's Little Things is not better than Clumsy, even though his drawing skills and options for framing scenes, etc. etc. have obviously advanced significantly.

For me, I experienced the purest form of this creative process when I was knitting things a couple of years ago. I started with an egg, which I realized could be a Cooties-like bug if I added a couple more sections. I moved from there to adding different shapes and making a Yeti, George Clinton, a monkey, a wolf, to working all in white, to making things big and small, to actually dreaming about what I could do next. I knew I was never going to make a living at knitting -- it was a hobby, and because nobody cared about what I was doing and nobody was paying me for it, it was pure experimentation and pushing the boundaries of what I could do.

Commercial novelists, on the other hand, are supposed to appear, fully-formed, with polished books ready for the bestseller list. I don't think that was always the case, but I think it is now. That's why my rebellion against all the pressure I put on myself to write a commercially-viable novel resulted in my Pictures of Lilies blog and in a whole bunch of short pieces that are almost like poetry. I was kind of hiding -- I stopped reading novels entirely, and I did all these little things I thought I would never ever publish, just because I couldn't stop writing. I always loved writing, even though I came to hate the process of writing a novel.

Ideally, an artist aligns him or herself with other artists who are in the same place in their careers, but the great thing about reading is that you can feel like you're friends with people or a part of their group even if you've never met. I identify with graphic novelists, and with poets, and with visual artists, and "non-traditional" novelists like Selah Saterstrom, and the thing to do is just to keep being part of that community of your own choosing, adding people along the way. (This post came about as a result of a conversation with my friend, poet Paul Siegell.)

Anyway, I'll write more about Jeffrey Brown's books, but I wanted to post this now to say how thankful I am that he did all his stuff and put it out even when nobody seemed to care -- that his whole creative process is on paper, for us to see, and to show us where we can go if we can just be brave enough and hopeful enough to take each next step.