The Groove 147 - How to Find The Marvelous in What You Do
HOW TO FIND THE MARVELOUS IN WHAT YOU DO
You may recall that one of the tenets of Surrealism is the juxtaposition of two distantly related images that when brought together create a marvelous spark.
Everything in Leonora Carrington’s life was marvelous, from the paintings she made to the life she had, not to mention her artistic legacy.
She looked at her life with decadence, had a fascination with animals and human bodies, and possessed a high-spirited, baroque sense of humor that helped her paint, write, sculpt, and combine the artificial to the natural.
Carrington had a knack for finding staggering material out of everywhere: paintings depicting extraordinary vignettes where ordinary humans coexisted with animals and fantastical creatures in impossible situations; novels where the heroine is a nonagenarian woman; short stories where a debutante attends a ball with a hyena.
Born in Lancashire, England in 1917, Carrington is credited with feminizing surrealism. Her work brought a woman's perspective to what had otherwise been a largely male-dominated artistic movement and with that she changed history.
Leverage Adversities for Creativity
Leonora Carrington in 1942 in New York.
Some people face hellish trials in life and come out on the other side bruised but triumphant and with stories to tell and things to do.
Carrington met Max Ernst in 1937 and the two fell for each other even though he was married at the time. He separated from his wife and Carrington moved in with him, first in Paris and then to the South of France.
But with the outbreak of World War II, Ernst was imprisoned, and Carrington fled to Spain, where she had a breakdown and ended up in a sanatorium in Santander. There, she suffered countless abuses and was forcibly treated with Cardiazol, a spasm-inducing hallucinogen. Her father sent a business contact to get her out of the hospital, wishing to confine her to another institution in South Africa. They went to Lisbon first. While in the Portuguese capital, she escaped from her handler and, recalling the Mexican diplomat Renato Leduc, who had been a friend in Paris, she ran to the Mexican embassy. Leduc helped her run away, marrying her and then moving with her to Mexico.
Leonora Carrington, The Meal of Lord Candlestick, 1938, oil on canvas.
She later recounted the experience in her book Down Below. Thanks to her writing, Carrington was able to exorcize the demons that tormented her during her detention and open up the path for a new and vibrant artistic practice that turned her into an internationally renowned artist.
Marie Forgeard, an American psychologist, conducted the first empirical study proving that there are increased levels of creativity in people who have faced crises and adversity. Forgeard calls these spikes in creativity resulting from severe challenges "post-traumatic growth."
You do not have to suffer to become creative, but if you find yourself in the middle of a crisis, know that it can be a catalyst for progress and originality.
Invest In Your Own Creative Synthesis
Leonora Carrington, The Temple of Peace, 1954, oil and gold leaf on canvas.
The most creative work is always the most personal, the one that is born out of the amalgamation of your own experiences.
Mexico gave Carrington the space and opportunity to sculpt and to paint, and to merge her interests about Celtic legends that she learned from her nanny and the surrealists of Paris in the 1930s with Aztec and Mayan history and its cult of the dead. There were new artists to share ideas with, like Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Remedios Varo, who became her best friend.
After her marriage of convenience with Leduc unraveled, she met and married the Hungarian photographer Chiki Weisz, had two children, and became more immersed in her own way of doing things. Her interest in animal imagery, myth, and occult symbolism deepened. Together with Varo, she studied alchemy, the kabbalah, and the mytho-historical writings of the Popol Vuh, combining all of this into her now recognizable and irresistible work.
She found herself and her vocation – the pursuit of logic and mysterious inner meaning in an otherwise banal reality – and she thrived in everything she did. "You had to understand the chemistry of everything you used, including the paper and the pencils."
Through your own diverse experiences, you can venture into the depths of your creative being, unlocking the extraordinary power to forge your synthesis, where the harmonious convergence of memories, perspectives, and emotions ignites something new and uniquely yours.
Create the Space That Works for You
Leonora Carrington, Self-Portrait, ca. 1937-38, oil on canvas.
With all the new work arrangements, plus all the post-pandemic controversies about people working from home, not coming back to the office, hybrid schedules and myriad other things including lack of productivity and less creativity, psychologists have agreed that it’s ultimately how each person manages their schedule and understands their responsibilities that makes these versions work or not. But Carrington had it all figured out 70 years ago.
Just like Virginia Woolf encouraged us to have a room of one’s own, Carrington created the space in her life where she was not just on her own but truly dedicated to her husband, two children, work and friends, without having to negotiate the quality of her relationships or her artistic output. Her family dynamics were designed so that the boundaries between the daily work of art and the daily work of care were almost nonexistent. And it worked for her.
Her studio was a combined kitchen, nursery, bedroom, kennel, and junk-store. When her patron Edward James visited her, he became so impressed by the magic she could wring out of domesticity that he commissioned her to paint frescos for his "surrealist" house in Xilitla, Mexico, and arranged an exhibition at Pierre Matisse's gallery in New York in 1948.
With maturity and experience comes the responsibility to know what works for you and what’s the most fertile environment to produce your best work. Once you know this and are able to enforce it, protect it at all costs.
Carrington left an extraordinary creative accomplishment: countless paintings, dozens of prints and sculptures, several novels, and short stories, plays, costumes for plays, a huge bronze fountain in the form of a fantasy crocodile boat and more.
The artist didn’t love to give interviews, but in 2008 at age 91, she told her interviewer that there are no real answers to the profound questions in life. “They're too unknowable. There are things unsayable and that's why we have art.” Knowing this, yet seeking it all the same, is how you find the marvelous in what you do.
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