Washington, DC, October 1, 2011—Artists make trouble. First, they make trouble for their parents.
Once they get away, and get away they must, they make trouble for their viewers, their readers, their listeners.
One thing’s for sure: Creativity stirs the pot when the cooks "in-charge" don’t think it needs a stir.
Bob Dylan has spent a lifetime making trouble. Jackson Pollack made trouble with paint drips and wrecked havoc with his family. Picasso’s abstract art made trouble. Mark Twain, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Vladimir Nabokov made so much trouble, they got banned.
Alexander McQueen made trouble with design in clothes — and so does Ray Harris.
The artist’s choice to make trouble isn’t easy. Why? is the question. You have the answer though you may not know that yet.
The problem for creative souls starts often at home.
Your family doesn’t think you should go into the arts.
Ray Harris, London dress designer, is no exception. His family wanted him to choose sensible work.
Art is rarely viewed as sensible when parents think of career choices for their children.
Ray Harris wanted to sew and make clothes. He found his calling at his grandmother’s knee when he was five years old. She was the court dressmaker for Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth’s grandmother.
“She was so happy to teach me,” Ray said. “None of her grandchildren wanted to learn. The girls weren’t interested. She would have taught anyone, but I was a boy. My father didn’t really get it. I wasn’t supposed to do this stuff.”
Ray calls the meetings with his grandmother “clandestine.” He was close to her and most people thought he was just visiting. Some guessed what he was doing, but, as Ray puts it, “chose not to look,” to say it out loud. But he knew: He was in design school.
With the sound of ‘scandal’ in his voice, he speaks of his family’s and his social circle’s view that boys did not sew.
His father pushed him to go to university, to do what Ray called, “academic stuff.” Ray has a degree in English Literature that he doesn’t regret because his art got a deeper foundation from poetry and novels. He still reads deeply and widely.
But his father’s choice would have led to “general management in an office.” It would have led to sensible work. “That was killing me,” he says. “So I walked away after the degree, went to fashion school. I began designing at 25.”
His family was worried. “Scared for me really, but my Dad is really proud of me now.”
Here’s why the artist in you must choose even when your family does not approve, when they want you to do sensible work:
There is nothing more dangerous for you than your own family, your own room, your own past. ... You must leave them, the writer Milan Kundera asserts. Ibsen, Strindberg, Joyce … knew this. They spent a large part of their lives abroad, away from the family’s power.
Let imagination free and you will be free. To do that, you must choose from within. If your art innovates, you will make trouble.
You’ll have to choose again. You’ll have to ignore the critics, the audience, who don’t “get” you.
We wouldn’t have Bob Dylan’s poetry in lyrics, melody in rock if he’d listened to the voices from without, horrified when he left folk and let loose on the electric guitar.
We wouldn’t have Picasso, whose work appeared in chronological order at the Paris Musée Picasso, closed now for renovation until 2013. The exhibit I saw revealed how he began with realism and moved again and again to striking innovative choices. His works vary so much they’re named in periods: The Blue Period, for example, from 1901 to 1904.
You may say, I’m not Dylan, Picasso or Ray Harris.
The call you hear to do the work you love may feel like pain. That call may come to you the way it came to the poet and innovator Baudelaire: as a frenzied addiction.
You may be scared to leap.
“The blank page is the hardest thing,” Ray Harris said. “You have to have the courage, take your clothes off, jump in the water.”
I ask you, What are you waiting for?
Stir the pot. Let the cooks in charge be damned. Make trouble.
Hear the question that calls from within.
Love will answer.
I interviewed Ray Harris in Washington, DC, where you can find his clothes at Upstairs on 7th. Ray Harris’s store is in Notting Hill, London. See his imagination, and his signature fabric crinkle in the photos below.
Mary L. Tabor is the author of the memoir: (Re)Making Love: a sex after sixty story and The Woman Who Never Cooked. She says, “I ferret out the detail, love the footnote, am never bored and believe it all leads to story. Best advice I ever got? ‘Only connect …’ E.M. Forster” Find out more at http://maryltabor.com
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