I often hear the question, “The songs you write: where do you get all these ideas?” The long answer can take pages – behaviours (“Copycats”); incidents (“Brother Jonesie”); machismo (“Wong Ping”); patriotism (“Blade O’ Grass); expressions (“Cricket in the Jungle”); contradictions (“Civilization”).The short answer is I’m a “noticer.”
Significant creative work rests on four essentials. Three of them – talent, dedication, and originality – are mentioned frequently in arts discussions in the media, but the fourth – observation – is almost always completely overlooked.
Consistently creative individuals, in whatever field you find them, while particularly good at generating arts expression – songs; poems; paintings; dance routines; prose; comedy – are also more particularly good at noticing some point, some behaviour, some state, some happening, in the world around them, and then extrapolating that into an artistic expression. Artists are always people who have generated, within themselves, this enormous private storehouse of seemingly random life material, and it is from that repository that their artistic interpretations emerge.
Painting is the most obvious example, because the artist is often conveying something concretely seen (a waterfall; a sunrise) or producing a work triggered by something noticed or felt (love; rage; confusion) that then emerges as a piece of art in which the painter is saying, “Look at what I noticed or experienced.”
Picasso’s paintings, for example, are his attempts to show us the complexities of mankind – the absurdities; the contradictions – as they seemed to him; as he noticed them. Yes, his unique imagination is in play, but those depictions are the result of the artist’s long, careful, intense examination of the appearances and behaviours and manifestations of man. Wherever he was, like all artists, Picasso was always noticing life. In one instance, dining in a sidewalk cafe, he picked up a piece of celery, dipped it in ketchup and drew, on the tablecloth, a shape of a bird he saw nearby. Whether real or not, the so-called “African influences” is his work could simply have derived from observation.
It may not be so obvious in the other disciplines, but that disposition to notice is always at the core of creative work. Ernest Hemingway’s writings about war, for example, rest on his having not only having lived in that condition but more on his having been totally engrossed in observing. He was able to convey the horror and grandeur of the time, by taking in the details of what went on – the nuances, the sounds, the odours, the ambience, the words spoken, the looks – and then replaying that, in his distinctive style, to show us what he had seen. What makes him a great writer is partly that he can use language with a tight kind of clarity, but also largely that he is a noticer.
It’s there in music. Sparrow’s songs, for example, manifestly humorous, when you get inside them lyrically, are often clear depictions of the Trinidadian culture from someone (whether Sparrow himself or someone writing for him) staring hard at the Trinidad landscape and commenting on the machismo (“Elaine”), the morality (“Benwood Dick”), the education system (“Dan is the Man”), the economy (“Police Pay Raise”), and so on.
The evolved writer in Bob Marley, with his anguished shouts about his homeland, is an obvious example of someone very given to noticing what was going on around him. Certainly not all of it is first hand, some of it comes from other observers, but in each case the creative person is drawing on something observed when he/she makes us laugh, or cry, or remember, or reconsider. Quite apart from its central psychological message, the song “No Woman No Cry”, describes a ghetto nighttime scene with lines that an artist could then use to create a painting. Marley the song-writer had drawn on that memory stored in his head probably from many nights of watching it and taking it in.
Bob Dylan, often presented as leading his generation in America, was actually relating in those songs what he, as a young man of 21, was noticing about his country and then raising alarms (“Hard Rain”; “Blowing in the Wind”) based on his observations.
When Ian McDonald writes a poem about the Essequibo River, it is a culmination of many hours, largely in solitude, in almost a mental staring, watching the river, as a cat watches a mouse, sensitive to the changes in the wind and the water, and how the clouds move, and what happens when storms threaten, and how the ambience differs after rain. He is noticing detail and absorbing it, without even being conscious of the process.
Sometimes, of course, the artist is noticing, or coming to terms with something internal. Michael Jackson’s “The Man in the Mirror”, comes from the observation that when you talk about changing the world the first person you have to fix is yourself.
The other interesting thing about this process is that it is automatic. Ian McDonald isn’t intentionally soaking in the Essequibo; it’s akin to an instinct operating; he’s doing it without a conscious intent. The songwriter Marley is drawing on the raw material ingested by the observer Marley. These creative people are like cultural or emotional sponges whose nature it is to notice. It is not a planned exercise. Essentially, it’s who they are; they are instinctive observers. To use the Trini expression, “they come so”.
So why am I bringing this up? Because, in the course of listening to various people here, and outside, talking about a successful career in the arts, one rarely hears this critical point: that to be a consistently productive creative person you have to be, by nature, an observer, a recorder, a noticer. And I included “consistently” because many people will be able to come up with one or two observations in a brief burst. The person who is consistently producing good work – that’s the one about I’m dealing with here – that person is fundamentally a noticer. He/she is picking up on things, instinctively, as naturally as breathing, which are then regurgitated, sometimes years later, in some creative output.
Someone powerfully drawn to being an artist – in whatever category – will need the three essentials of talent, dedication, and originality to produce significant work, but the fourth essential, that latent God-given disposition to notice, must be there, too. Probe any significant artist deeply enough, and you will find it.
