Patience is the Unsung Hero of Creativity
The underrated power of taking your time
It is tempting to think of creativity as an explosive act, picturing Jackson Pollock prowling around his canvas, dripping paint from a pot, or Jack Kerouac typing furiously on a single ream of paper 120-feet long.
Movie depictions of artists at work tend to reinforce the idea. One can think of Kirk Douglas as Vincent Van Gogh roaming the Provence countryside in Lust for Life, swept up by seizures of creative energy. Or as the art critic Robert Hughes memorably put it, “gritting his mandibles in St-Remy.”
Not all films about artists are so frenzied. Last week I saw the recent biopic of the artist Alberto Giacometti, The Final Portrait, with Geoffrey Rush in the lead role. Whilst Giacometti may have been an eccentric man, much of the film is about creative patience in it’s various forms: waiting, discarding, over-painting, re-modelling, hesitating, starting again, pondering, eating, drinking, beginning new work, returning to old work, and all the other labyrinthine ways by which a work of art gets made.
And this unsung method of working seems like a far more insightful perspective on the creative process, and one worth celebrating.
