The Two Hands
Being an artist, it doesn’t matter if you’re left-handed or right-handed, because realistically, each of us works with two hands: the obsessive hand, and the critical hand. Which is your dominant hand?
CC photo credit: oooh,oooh
The obsessive hand and the critical hand are two sides to each artist that guide and direct how and why we make work. Introduced to me by a professor during my undergraduate studies, the idea has stuck with me over the years as a way of articulating my own responses (as well as my hang-ups) to workmaking. They’re as vital to your artistic ebb-and-flow as summer and winter are to harvest, but can be just as drastic to your own artistic cultivation if they’re out of balance.
Just as Summer is a fertile time of the year, the obsessive hand is simply that: it’s the part of you during artmaking that pushes the work forward in terms of sheer creating power. The obsessive hand drives you to create, churning out one idea after the other. When working on a specific piece, this hand takes care of covering the canvas, chipping away at sculpture, happily shooting video, or building up material. It feeds your work.
Winter is a time for the world to step back and recharge, and your critical hand demands this as well. If the obsessive hand produces the harvest that feeds your work, the critical hand makes sure your process isn’t devouring too much, exercising regularly, and eating the right things. The critical hand is the part of your process that asks if something is necessary or distracting, helps you edit down to the essentials, and fine-tune until you get closer to resolution.
So, uh, what’s wrong with those? The problem isn’t one hand or the other, it’s when one hand dominates the work. Just like we’re right-handed or left-handed — or cold- or warm- natured, for that matter — we all have a tendency to favor one hand over the other at different points in our lives and in our making. You know what that’s like, and we’ve all been there. It’s the time when you couldn’t stop making work…but looking back, didn’t feel like they really caught or portrayed what you wanted to say: obsessive. It’s the time when you felt paralyzed, like you couldn’t create anything at all: critical. It’s the time when you had all of these ideas, but couldn’t seem to make any of the projects resolved because the ideas just came too fast to know which were worth pursuing: obsessive. And it’s the time when you did made work, but could never finish a piece: critical.
The two are so intertwined sometimes that striking a balance is hard, and it can even be hard to recognize which is which. So…how do YOU do it? Leave your comments, and give your solutions; next week we’ll talk about how some artists balance their obsessive hand and their critical hand, and how to break yourself out of an endless artistic winter or a draining creative summer.