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A Strange Kind of Meeting

"Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go." — C.S. Lewis

Every artist knows the return. You come back to a finished work, years later. The work has not changed. You have. The feeling that surrounded its making is gone. You stand in front of your own work like a stranger.

It is a strange kind of meeting. The work knows things about you that you have forgotten. It holds a decision you no longer remember making. It carries a conviction you can no longer summon. You made it, and yet you cannot quite find yourself in it.

This unsettles people. We are taught that feeling is the heart of art. That the work is the feeling, preserved. So when the feeling leaves, it can seem like something has been lost. Like the work has been left behind by its own reason for existing.
Lewis suggests otherwise. Feelings come and go. That is not a flaw in feelings. That is what feelings are. They visit. They were never going to stay. To grieve their leaving is to misunderstand what they came to do.

What stays is the work. And what made the work was never the tool. Not the brush, not the camera, not the pen. Tools do not make work better. The person behind the tool does. What that person brings is not a feeling, which will not hold still, but the slower things. Knowledge. Principles. Habits. Knowing when a thing is finished. Refusing the easy solution. Showing up.

These do not announce themselves. No one stands before a work and points to the discipline in it. But it is there, in every choice that could have been made carelessly and was not. Feeling may have started the work. It did not make a single decision. The decisions were made by everything the artist had become before the feeling ever arrived.

We have the ranking backwards. We treat feeling as the noble part of making and habit as the mechanical part. But feeling is the visitor. Habit is the resident. The visitor is charming. The visitor gets the credit. The resident keeps the house. The artist who waits for the feeling makes work occasionally. The artist with habits makes work anyway.

And sometimes the return brings a surprise. The work is stronger than you remembered. It was always this strong. You could not see it then, past the intention, the effort, the memory of the making. The feeling had to leave before the work could be seen. Even by you.

Studio Portrait Nate McMullen | 2024

by: Gene Sasse

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