Just do it

 

Sol LeWitt letter to Eva Hesse

Way back in the mid 1960s, Eva Hesse wrote a letter to Sol LeWitt about the fact that she was facing an artist's block, She had moved from New York to Germany and things weren't going well and she needed some sort of guidance from LeWitt, an artist she had in the past known and trusted. He wrote her a letter back, a letter that should I feel be read by anyone facing a similar problem. In fact I need to include myself in that list and I have found his reply useful time and time again when I have felt despondent and unable to come up with a new idea or take work into a more surprising or interesting direction. What you need to do is to just immerse yourself in what you are doing, something that applies as much to life as art. As LeWitt put it, "Just do it". 

If you don't want to read LeWitt's letter, it also works very well when someone else reads it out aloud and there is a wonderful video on YouTube of Benedict Cumberbatch doing just that.

Benedict Cumberbatch: Letter from Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse

There are similar things said by other artists and perhaps the most famous is the basic instruction about art making as set out by Jasper Johns. In 1964, Johns wrote himself a note in his sketchbook: “Take an object / Do something to it / Do something else to it". Both Johns and LeWitt stress doing as being essential to what it is to be an artist and LeWitt is at pains in his letter to Hesse to tell her to stop thinking about it. 

Georgia O'Keefe tells us, "Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing." O'Keefe is reminding us that you need to get lost in what you are doing if you are to discover anything. There is a something that emerges out of doing that wasn't there when you started the doing, because it emerges out of the conversation between yourself and all the other things involved in that doing. It might emerge from other people, from the materials you are working with, or from just the way your hands work with the limitations of your body. The important thing is to be on the look out for what it might be and to go with it as you sense its arrival. 

Without being active and doing stuff, nothing will happen and thinking very quickly becomes procrastination. There is a deeper thing here, something about the ethical nature of life itself. Doing led thinking is also about being totally immersed into the world. Actions require responses to the ever changing physical environments encountered. Some of the world rubs off on you as you interact with it, You are also like the moving charcoal that makes a drawing, as the drawing emerges, more and more of yourself is rubbed off into it. Thinking about the world implies a separateness from it; but you will never make a good drawing without engaging totally with the paper. Before making a drawing you might think that you have a good idea, but thinking without doing leads to ideas such as possession, rather than discovery; you think you own an idea, a bad thing, rather than allowing a thing to emerge from interactions between yourself and everything else, which is a good thing. 

If you ever stopped to think about what you are saying as you say it, you would never say anything. 

See also: 

Iterative drawing

Art as experience

How to pay attention (Includes a reminder of who actually wrote John Cage's 10 rules)