Lift

‘I loathe the process of writing,’ A friend of mine said to me at breakfast recently.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because a blank canvas scares me,’ He replied. Then he quoted the below.

‘Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it…

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.’

Michelangelo

He said that the advantage Michelangelo had over a writer was a block of stone. This got me thinking and I came to realise that actually, for a writer, draft one is the block of stone. And I was reminded of this:

‘You can always edit a bad page. 

You can't edit a blank page.’

Jodi Picoult

Both Michelangelo and Jodi Picoult have it right. What I appreciate about the Michelangelo quote is that it’s poetry in motion, but it’s also real and arduous. And Jodi Picoult’s quote is just plain fact. We all have to start somewhere, with something. The block of stone Michelangelo talks about, had to be extracted from the earth, before it could become a block.  The blank page Jodi Picoult mentions, has to have words put onto it, before it can be edited. And it’s from that block, that piece of paper, that somewhere, that something, that we must lift. 

I believe this is the role of the artist—to lift. To elevate. To see things that are not, as though they are. And then to realise them into being. That’s what Michelangelo did. He took a chunk of earth’s marble and lifted it to vessel of fine art. 

‘Lift’ is the banner over my year. Its meaning is simple, ‘To move something from a lower to a higher position…’. That’s my commitment this year in my creativity and in every area of my life—to see what could be and lift. So maybe you could start with a canvas, with a blank page, a lump of clay, a block of stone. Bring words. Bring form. And lift out and free the art.