Creative Process Is Supposed to be a Disaster

What I learned from 3 years of staring at blank canvas

Andrea Jurjević, Rainbow, 2024

A tall roll of canvas leans in the corner of my living room, between the fireplace mantel and a bookshelf. It almost blends with the wall. I look at it daily, as it’s diagonal from my sofa chair. I’ve had this canvas for three years, ever since my friend Lena gave it to me, with the rest of her art supplies, when she moved from Atlanta to London. My current apartment is too small for the large paintings I used to make, though I keep imagining unrolling the canvas, cutting two 48x62 pieces, pinning them up, and dousing them in paint.

I’m a sucker for the blank page and the blank canvas. Always have been. Their crisp, clean surfaces calm me. A blank substrate holds an absolute absence, a nothingness rich with potential, that from which everything rises, stories both verbal and visual. Just seeing that canvas is inspiring. I am looking at it now, as I write this, the way I do in the evenings before walking to the kitchen where I sit at the counter and work on smaller paper pieces.

And here's what I’ve been learning: Working on smaller paper isn’t terribly different, or less tricky, than working on a large canvas. Both seduce with promise. Both surprise me with how they respond to my hand. Both frustrate me in the ugly middle stages. Both force me to slow down, to take a break, to start again, to revisit, work through, to think, to keep going, to not be precious, to remember that neither the process nor the result is about me. Both show me that artmaking is like hopping onto an evermoving train. I can always jump on, but the ride is more fun if, before boarding, I shed the bulky coat of my ego.

I’ve done this tension-dance with my creative process for years, the periods of activity and dormancy, the ups and downs, the elation when a piece is completed, and the manic, murderous self-doubt when I feel stuck, the delusion of getting carried away.

One thing I’ve been learning is to not see what I make as a reflection of my ego. When I finish a painting or a poem, it feels like I’ve stumbled onto it. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time, looking out for ideas carried in the ether like dandelion seeds, then I wove them into the work. They were there, for anyone to pick them.

But with time, my ego started playing a more subtle game. I became plagued by thoughts that now that I’ve published several books, ideas should come to me faster, easier. That, too, is a trap. It’s the ego putting itself in the center, mistaking the creative process for an extension of me and mine, a capital-S Self-expression.

I’m teaching myself to relax and see the slow low periods not as a reflection of my worth or a proof of my own inadequacy, but as precisely where I need to be. Mid process. In the mess and uncertainty of it. This is how creativity works. It’s a natural part of it. This is what is supposed to happen. I can relax because I’m on track.

I keep most of my belongings in moderate order—my closet, fridge, bookshelves, etc. But when it comes to my creative life, I’m not an orderly person. I don’t follow daily routines. I don’t have goals, plans or lists. I’m led entirely by intuition. If there is intention, it’s focused on hunches, curiosity about where the process might lead. I sometimes think of myself like a dog hunting for truffles. I search for something, and I only know what it is once I recognize it.

Perhaps those who are more organized would scoff at me, but even they must face the chaos of making. No matter our personalities, every artist needs a healthy mindset that accepts that the creative process is messy and, by nature, chaotic. Fighting that reality only brings doubt, disappointment, and feelings of failure.

So, what do I do when I hit a wall? I lean into my promiscuous side. I jump from one project to another. I might work on five things at a time, moving in no predictable manner from my poetry manuscript to a book translation to working on a couple of painting series. I take a break from creating by doing research and lesson planning. By sketching to warm up. By going for a run. Cleaning the house. Listening to an inordinate amount of astrology videos. Rolling off my bed in the morning and writing in my underwear until nightfall. Sometimes I destroy what I make. I cut up a painting into smaller pieces or gesso over it. I delete a draft and start new ones. And I’m not nervous about losing ideas because I know there’s more where they came from.

I’ve got a crate of unresolved paintings. I wouldn’t call them failures. They are just … creative waste. I also have notebooks filled with ideas and way too many draft files on my laptop, ranging from promising one-sentence beginnings to unfinished short stories and a couple manuscripts that beckon to me with their thick index fingers. These unfinished projects used to make me feel anxious. I thought I had to use them all, finish them the way I was taught to finish the food on my plate.

I used to let my mind spiral with thoughts like “What the fuck am I doing?” or “This is crap” or “What’s this overworked hideousness that I’ve wasted paint on?!” And I didn’t realize that by thinking like this I was feeding my own resistance, a rigidity from which I couldn’t truly work.

These days I try to soften my mind by reminding myself that the messy, uncertain place is precisely where I need to be. It makes no sense to be asking things like “Where is this going?” or “How’s this going to turn out?” while standing in a dark tunnel making something that has never existed before. The whole point of creating something new is that we shouldn’t know where things are going.

If we decide what that something is prematurely, we’re likely making derivative work, not a piece of art. A painting isn’t meant to look pretty early on, if ever. A poem is not meant to have meaning forced onto it. A painting can look like chaos until the last few marks. In fact, a single mark can pull everything together and harmonize the piece. Likewise, a poem should hold space for uncertainty. It should surprise the poet in its making.

These days I’m trying to avoid expectations. I try to savor the process and see the work as something that I offer myself to. I’m returning to that canvas roll with deepened understanding. Creative “waste” isn’t waste at all. It’s a state of abundance where ideas lead to more ideas, where one creation prompts many others. And that’s precisely why instead of fighting it, I try to ease into the chaos of creation.

I’m curious about what other people’s creative chaos looks like. Anyone else jump between projects? Do you have your version of my canvas roll, that thing you look at daily but don’t touch?

Love, Andrea