The Connection
When the brush disappears.
[My Sunday posts are usually for paid subscribers, but this one’s free! If you haven’t already, I invite you to become a paid subscriber!]
I recently took up learning to play the electric bass guitar. As part of my ongoing learning, I attend weekly online group practice sessions steered by a master of the instrument. This past week, he said that a bassist needs to develop a connection to his guitar—rather than playing while thinking of pentatonic scales and fretting hand mechanics, to practice enough so all that thinking dives below the surface.
I’m certainly not there yet. Often, my fretting hand takes off on its own and invents something unexpected and awful. My picking hand, taking its cue from its partner, then decides to randomize rhythm. The effect is something like a spider suddenly slapped off a wall by a rolled-up newspaper and falling in a spasm of flailing legs.
This practice as a beginner reminds me of the days when I was first learning to paint. Oh, I struggled! Painting—and we’re not talking plein air painting here, which adds a whole other layer of complexity to the craft, but just studio work—required me to master the brush. How to hold it, how to pick up color, how to make a variety of marks. It was frustrating for a long time.
But then one day, I was busy painting a landscape—and it suddenly occured to me that I wasn’t thinking, not at all. Using a brush became as comfortably unconscious as eating with a knife and fork. Mixing color by adding a bit here and there, adjusting an edge, I painted as if my fingers were the brush.
The connection, of course, came through practice. But it also came through not thinking. The less I thought about how to hold the brush and manipulate it, the more natural the brush felt in my fingers. Just doing—not thinking—was the secret. Sure, you need to know the basics, but ultimately, quieting the mind is all it takes.
One of the best ways to quiet the mind, I’ve found, is to work on a small format on a cheap surface with a very short time limit. Say, a 9x12 on gessoed heavy paper for 30 minutes. And you want to cover the entire surface in that time and bring the painting as near as you can to completion. Then intersperse these exercises with a little study—did the effort accomplish the goal? Why or why not? Asking yourself this question will help train the mind for the next session, even if you don’t have time in that 30 minute window to think about what needs doing.
Make many of these, and you’ll find that things will become more automatic. freeing you up to make Art with a capital “A.”
Now if I can just apply all this to the guitar!