anxiety

On Anxiety and Practice.

Link | | Paul Greer

This article, shared recently by an internet friend, outlines three methods of coping with anxiety that closely align with my procedures for increasing artistic practice.

They are:

1. Do it badly

““Doing it badly”, without worrying about how it’s going to turn out, will not only make it much easier to begin, but you’ll also find that you’re completing tasks much more quickly than before. “

 

2. Wait to worry

“If something went wrong and you feel compelled to worry (because you think you screwed up), don’t do this immediately. Instead, postpone your worry – set aside 10 minutes each day during which you can worry about anything. If you do this, you’ll find that you won’t perceive the situation which triggered the initial anxiety to be as bothersome or worrisome when you come back to it later. And our thoughts actually decay very quickly if we don’t feed them with energy.”

 

3. Find a purpose in life by helping others.

“Being connected to people has regularly been shown to be one of the most potent buffers against poor mental health. The neurologist Viktor Frankl wrote: ‘For people who think there’s nothing to live for, nothing more to expect from life … the question is getting these people to realise that life is still expecting something from them.’”

“L’Inquietude” by Man Ray (1890-1976)

Image | | Paul Greer


“One of Man Ray’s guiding principles was “to do the things that one is not supposed to do,” and here it seems he has used the camera to make a picture of something intangible, an emotion. Man Ray explored photography’s potential in the realm of abstraction, photographing a cloud of smoke gathering around a found-object sculpture in his New York studio. By manipulating his camera, he blurred the subject beyond recognition and created a sense of velocity and disequilibrium. The enigmatic title denies the existence of a recognizable subject in the photograph. Unknown to the viewer is the fact that Anxiety (L’Inquietude) is the name of the sculpture in the photograph, making this a craftily anti-documentary document of the three-dimensional piece.”