Secretive Art — October Memoir Challenge

This week’s theme for the October Memoir and Backstory Challenge hosted by Jane Ann McLachlan is Secrets. As I wrote in my first post, authentic writing requires honesty, but not all secrets need to be revealed. A category of secrets that I keep to myself are the secrets that aren’t mine to tell: Not My Secret — October Memoir Challenge.

A second category of secrets that I don’t share are about works in progress. One of the tensions that writers, and other artists, must contend with is that the act of creation requires secrecy. The art must be honest, but, most of the time, it must be kept secret for two reasons.

The first reason that we produce art in secrecy is to protect the process. A writer needs to write sloppy first drafts with awkward phrases, long passages of nothing that lead into something worth keeping, and secrets that won’t be in the final draft but make the initial draft easier to compose. This is a difficult phase of writing that would be rendered impossible if the writer expected someone else to read the material as it was written.

The exception that proves the rule of secretive creation is improvisational art. The reason it’s so much fun to witness improv theater, jazz, and street artists is because we’re given a rare opportunity to witness the dawn of a creation. Such creative moments are usually hidden in poets’ notebooks, painters’ studios, and composers’ music rooms.

poster style invitation to a watercolor gallery show opening

Image used with permission from Jean Haines.

The second reason that secrecy surrounds art is that artistic works benefit from being displayed to the world at a particular moment — a work of art needs a birth announcement, a grand reveal, a ribbon cutting. So, even when the art has safely ventured past the phase when secrecy protects process, its existence still needs to be wrapped in veils until the big moment arrives. At that big moment, the artist invites the world to celebrate the revealed book cover, the issued invitation to the gallery show opening reception, or the scheduled first read-through of a debut play (I attended one of these recently and it is a very cool opportunity should you ever get the chance).

Do you keep secrets about your artistic endeavors? Are there other reasons besides the ones I mentioned?

Thanks to Jean Haines for allowing me to use her invitation to an exhibit at The Wey Gallery for illustration. Check out Jean’s blog, Watercolours With Life, for details about her upcoming USA tour, her instructional DVDs and books, and many glorious pictures.

Comments

Secretive Art — October Memoir Challenge — 5 Comments

Jane Ann McLachlan on October 17, 2013 at 10:00 am said:

Very thought-provoking, once again. Another reason I never talk about a work-in-progress is something I learned when I started writing. A writer is someone who has a story he/she HAS to tell. The story is a tension inside you that you have to express. You have to follow it, to see where it’ll go. So you sit down and start writing. But if you tell the story to someone, it’s out. You’ve told it. The need to write it is gone, or at least greatly lessened. Sometimes I can get away with describing it vaguely once to a fellow writer, as a sort of think-tank exercise, but if I went about telling it to a number of people, I just wouldn’t need to write it down any more.

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Tamara on October 17, 2013 at 10:58 am said:

I create two kinds of art; hand knitted items and writing. When the knitting is a gift, it’s always kept secret (sometimes that’s hard when the giftee sits beside you on the couch in the evenings 😉 ). When the writing is a book, there’s often a period of time when your publisher wants things kept quiet; they like to control the flow of information and announcements according to their marketing schedule. Kind of like your suggestion that the timing of release is important.

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Jenn @comebackmomma on October 17, 2013 at 11:09 am said:

Very interesting. I used to work on a women’s magazine in Seattle. When I contributed art, I often preferred it to be anonymous. I considered creating a blog that was also written under a pen name, but I’ve decided to “come out” and just be me.

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Haralee on October 17, 2013 at 2:14 pm said:

Writing secrecy is different than painting or other physical art creation because those media are more quickly observed and often need a thick skin more than secrecy.

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Amanda M Darling on October 27, 2013 at 9:26 am said:

You’re so right about improvisational art; I’d never thought of it that way. I also like what you have to say about protecting the process of creativity.

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