Review

Culture

18 July 2023

5 min read

The Creative Act by Rick Rubin – no prisoners taken

A biography lacking in personal anecdotes, makes up for it with a profound understanding of the creative process. Imogen Stokes recommends an essential read on art’s transformative power.

Imogen Stokes

Imogen Stokes is a musician and member of Voka Gentle. She is also part of P.S. a missional community of multidisciplinary artists supporting and encouraging each other to cultivate a biblical culture of worship and fellowship in the heart of industry.

Rick Rubin | The Creative Act: A Way of Being

From Johnny Cash to Kanye West, Rick Rubin has worked with some of the biggest names in music. Notably titled ‘the most important producer of the last 20 years’ by MTV, the famously bearded founder of Def Jam records has nine Grammy awards under his belt and is one of the most sought-after producers working today.

Written over the course of four years, a period that saw Rubin work with bands such as The Strokes and The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, The Creative Act: A Way of Being might promise a memoir yet assumes the form of something more like a self-help guide. Rubin distils what he has learned throughout his illustrious 40-year career into a series of short chapters that read somewhat like meditations, contemplating the meaning of art in general; how to make it well and why it matters to keep trying. While its dearth of personal anecdotes may be disappointing to fans hoping to gain insight into some of the producer’s many exploits, this book requires little to no contextual knowledge of Rubin’s life and work to enjoy.

“There was a version of the book three years ago,” Rubin told The Bookseller magazine last October. “The content was similar but the feeling of it... it did not feel like a call to action. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t inspirational.” If inspiring artists to create meaningful art is Rubin’s primary aim, suffice to say The Creative Act: A Way of Being largely succeeds.

Happily, this book is not just for musicians; for any working artist in search of practical guidance, Rubin offers encouragements and hands-on suggestions for how to cultivate discipline, maintain creative perspective and successfully finish work. His tips are, in many cases, refreshingly rudimentary. Set up a daily schedule of practice and stick to it. Level up your taste in the medium you are working in. Allow yourself to be distracted sometimes. Such instructions immediately reminded me of Oblique Strategies, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s tarot-like deck of pithy creative prompts, conceived in 1975 as a work of art and designed to stimulate creativity. And the advice is sage. As an artist myself, I had barely gotten halfway through when my highlighter began to run out of ink.

Rubin’s thesis on art-making is full of self-aware contradiction. It is a serious matter, he says, but it’s also reliant on play. One should employ a rigorous schedule yet embrace rest and spontaneity. Practise your craft but be aware of the value in naivety;

‘often the most innovative ideas come from those who master the rules to such a degree that they can see past them or from those who never learned them at all’,

and remember that both years of artistic toil and a five-minute flash of inspiration can both produce a valuable result.

[It] does an excellent job of meeting the creative in their tiredness while celebrating their bravery.

It is this ability to understand and speak to the tensions faced by an overwhelming majority of artists that is a real strength of this book and a testament to Rubin’s experience as a producer. The creative process is rarely straightforward; success can be difficult to define and inspiration elusive. However, he admits, in the pursuit of great art ‘there are no shortcuts.’ The Creative Act: A Way of Being does an excellent job of meeting the creative in their tiredness while celebrating their bravery. It exists, at the end of the day, to remind them why it’s important to make art at all. I can corroborate this with my own experience: as a reader I brought all the baggage of any working artist. I felt understood and reassured, both by Rubin’s reverence for art-making and by his admission that art is rarely straightforward, and that artists can be hard to understand. This, for Rubin, is by no means an indictment. It’s part of the journey, and an important one at that.

Rubin’s reverence for the power of art and the significance of the artist is without question. This can sometimes, though, verge on the eulogising of unhealthy behaviour— an issue, I can’t help but feel, is endemic to the music industry at large.

'The great artists in history… are protective of their art in a way that is not always co-operative. Their needs as a creator come first. Often at the expense of their personal lives and relationships',

writes Rubin, excusing selfishness as a ‘childlike spirit’ to be aspired to. Surely, while singular focus is key, this doesn’t need to override a generosity of spirit, does it? Van Gogh certainly didn’t think so, famously writing:

‘there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.’

There’s an evident undercurrent of divine inspiration woven throughout the book, too. Rubin acknowledges and explores the cosmic thread that runs through all things, the energy of which the artist both observes and channels through their work. The artist without this spiritual viewpoint, he posits, is at a crucial disadvantage. For Rubin, the spiritual world provides a crucial sense of wonder and a degree of open-mindedness rarely found within the confines of science. A dedication towards a deeper connection with and understanding of the ‘Source’ (the creative force of the universe) will inevitably merit a greater artistic encounter. Rubin therefore encourages artists to be disciplined in their spiritual practice in order to ‘build up the musculature of the psyche to more acutely tune in and receive from the divine’.

Rick Rubin with Neil Diamond, 2006. Photo by MusicLoverDiamond.

As a believer, of course I perceived Rubin’s ‘Source’ to be a metonym for the God of the Bible, and while occasionally Rubin’s universalism strays into abstraction— perhaps even cliché— there is genuine substance here; many of his spiritual encouragements overlap significantly with Christian teachings, for instance his appeal to artists to be ‘in’ currents of culture, not ‘of’ them, and the assertion that ‘it is better to follow the universe than those around you’. He admires the biblical attitudes of patience, discipline and child-likeness, and even quotes directly from the Bible’s book of Ecclesiastes, ‘for everything there is a season... ’, when illustrating the rhythms of nature.

Although it might be viewed as a simple guide to creative rules and rhythms, at the heart of this book the challenge is set.

You are either living as an artist, or you’re not. You are either adopting this way of being, or you aren’t.

Rubin takes no prisoners. The Creative Act: A Way of Being is an essential read for anyone looking to explore the importance of art or to remind themselves why they shouldn’t give up. For Rubin, a facilitator and a collaborator, the transformational powers of art are undeniable and artists themselves are almost magical creatures who need understanding and care. This book is both about, and for them.

Review

Art

Culture

26 July 2024

5 min read

Paradise cottage: Milton reimagin’d

Artist Richard Kenton Webb converses with the blind poet in his former home.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A black and white illustration shows a man holding a walk stick standing among tomb-like structures.

The blind poet. Charcoal and white chalk on paper, 2022.

Richard Kenton Webb.

‘Waiting to Speak to Milton’ shows the artist Richard Kenton Webb on a rain-swept night waiting in a valley for a car whose headlights can just be seen at the crest of the hill. For this image he has imagined himself waiting for a lift from John Milton to discuss the poems Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes. As the opening image to Webb’s exhibition at Milton’s Cottage in Chalfont St Giles it is appropriately positioned in the porch by which visitors enter the cottage.

This image of light appearing in the dark night of the soul symbolises the beginning of Webb’s journey with Milton and his late poems Paradise Lost, Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes. This has been a 10-year journey that Webb began following a conversation with his son in front of John Martin’s mezzotints for Paradise Lost at the Tate. Following on from his son’s encouragement to begin work, over that period, Webb says Milton has been a companion like Virgil to Dante guiding him through the narrative of his own life including the dark nights of redundancy and lockdown. The result has been 128 drawings, 40 paintings and 12 relief prints forming A Conversation with Milton’s Paradise Lost, a commission of 12 drawings in response to Milton’s pastoral elegy, Lycidas, for the Milton Society of America, and the 13 drawings forming this exhibition, A Conversation with Paradise Regain’d & Samson Agonistes.

Milton proved an effective companion because he, too, had passed through his own dark night of the soul. He arrived in Chalfont St Giles to escape the Great Plague of 1665 after the Republican cause to which he had dedicated more than a decade of his life - being Oliver Cromwell’s unofficial spin doctor - had collapsed around him with the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660. He had been lucky to escape with his life following imprisonment and the banning of his books. In addition, he had lost his sight, his beloved second wife, much of his money and all of his influence.

Despite these traumas, Milton was able to express his love for his Creator wonderfully in Paradise Lost, which was completed at the cottage in Chalfont St Giles, and Paradise Regain’d, which was inspired whilst there. In both Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes Milton deploys his rich verses and visions of spirituality and the forces of good and evil to reflect on the Restoration of the Monarchy and the loss of the English republic, doing so by means of Biblical stories concerning Jesus and Samson.

Browse Webb's exhibition

A black and white illustration show a person crouching in the corner and lifting as it was a stage drape.

Modes of Apprehension by Richard Kenton Webb – charcoal and white chalk on paper, 2022.

Inside a history cottage, black and white illustrations hang on the wall.

Webb’s exhibition at Milton’s Cottage in Chalfont St Giles.

A black and white illustration shows a two people close together on a pinnacle.

The Pinnacle by Richard Kenton Webb - charcoal and white chalk on paper, 2022.

Webb’s exhibition at Milton’s Cottage in Chalfont St Giles.

In Webb’s view, “Paradise Regain’d is about overcoming impossible situations” while, in Samson Agonistes, Milton’s Redeemer shows “Samson, the blind and foolish man”, “that we can always find hope in our living God even when society does not”. These poems moved Webb out of despair to discover hope because he knew they were heading towards redemption. As a result, he sees Milton as “a great English poet who gives hope, which in itself is a creative act for these difficult times”.

Although the story of Samson pre-dates that of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness, Webb’s painting series begins with images inspired by Paradise Regain’d, just as Samson Agonistes followed Paradise Regain’d when both were jointly published in 1671, because Jesus’ resistance of temptation ultimately redeems those, like Samson and Adam and Eve, who were unable to resist.

These are images set against a dark background with the exception of the final Paradise Regain’d image with its white sky depicting a paradise within as Jesus has overcome temptation, is in full communion with God and is about to begin his ministry by calling his first disciples. The images move from the trauma and test of temptation – whether involving hunger, greed, lust, threat, pride or ambition – to a calmness of mind that is equipoise and liberation and which also enables the destruction of false temples.

They are images in which movement is arrested in still moments which form theatrical tableaux. These, like medieval and early Tudor morality plays, involve the viewer in an epic struggle between good and evil, involving temptation, fall and redemption. Webb’s use of charcoal and white chalk on paper emphasises the binary nature of this struggle. Being formed of charcoal and chalk, despite his use of contemporary equivalents for the temptations, the look and feel of Webb’s images also accords well with their exhibition setting, in rooms of low ceilings, uneven white walls, dark beams and furniture.

Webb’s works and exhibition also universalise Milton’s own experience of the dark night of the soul by merging that story with Webb’s own.

As Paradise Lost was the first illustrated poem in the English language, Milton’s poetry has, as Kelly O’Reilly, Director of Milton’s Cottage, has noted “inspired many of our greatest artists, from Blake to Turner, Dore to Dali”. Webb, who consciously works in the continuing tradition of Blake’s visionary art, is extending the tradition of illustrating Milton’s poems. It is appropriate, then, that, by exhibiting these drawings in Milton’s Cottage, they are placed alongside examples of illustrated editions of the poems, plus other paintings and prints relating to Milton.

Milton’s works are not only a repository of rich verse, which also gifted over 600 new words to the English language, but are also a conversation with scripture, its stories and their interpretation, plus the social and political ramifications of the Reformation in the British Isles. Webb’s works and exhibition also universalise Milton’s own experience of the dark night of the soul by merging that story with Webb’s own and linking those powerfully to the themes of Milton’s poems.

The key image, in this regard, is the first in the Paradise Regain’d series (‘Modes of Apprehension’), which sees Jesus in the wilderness turning up the corner of the wilderness backdrop, as in a theatre, to reveal another dimension or reality to existence and experience behind it. Hope is discovered in the midst of desolation, resilience found in the face of temptation. In these ways, Webb achieves his own hope for these works, that, “by responding to Milton’s universal themes of creation, destruction, temptation, love and loss”, he “can help new audiences find fresh ways to engage in Milton’s legacy”.

A Conversation with Paradise Regain’d & Samson Agonistes, Milton’s Cottage, 3 July – 8 September 2024.

Visit the exhibition web site.