Embrace the Shake
Phil Hansen: "I wondered, could you become more creative by looking for limitations?"
In high school, a young man named Phil discovered an art form called pointillism. He plotted thousands of dots in a precise pattern such that when viewed from afar, the dots became an identifiable image, like a person's face.
But years later, a shake developed in his hand when Phil attended art school. He could no longer draw straight lines, and the dots he plotted looked like tadpoles. At first, Phil compensated with willpower and held the pen tighter to gain control of the tremor. The effort, however, made the shake worse: the tighter he held on to the pen, the more his muscles and joints hurt. The condition seemed to have crushed his dream of becoming a pointillist artist. Devastated, he quit the art program.
Phil became an X-ray technician, but his desire to play with art remained. A few years later, he saw a neurologist, who diagnosed him with permanent nerve damage in his forearm. The doctor asked Phil to sketch something on a piece of paper. He examined Phil's squiggly line and asked, "Why don't you embrace the shake?"
That day, Phil returned home, grabbed a pencil, and let his hand shake as it pleased. "It felt great," he recalled. "Once I embraced the shake, I could still make art." He realized he had prematurely abandoned all other options when he focused only on the one thing he couldn't do.
Phil saw limitations with a new lens and even imposed artificial constraints on his projects. Once, his goal was to complete a piece with only a dollar's worth of supply. While asking for an extra cup at Starbucks, an idea came: what if he asked the barristers for 50 free cups? "Surprisingly, they just handed them right over," he said. "I made this project for only 80 cents with some pencils I already had." It became a clarifying moment: accepting his constraints allowed him to see new possibilities.
This shift in perspective marked a new beginning for Phil to experiment with methods that would work for, rather than against, his damaged arm. One obvious step was working on larger canvases with more diverse materials. He made a flat version of Michaelangelo's David with chocolate chips, illustrated the Virgin Mary with over 200 peanut butter jelly sandwiches, and poked a banana with push pins so the holes would oxidize, brown, and form a picture. He x-rayed sand and assembled dandelions to depict Mother Theresa. He painted Michael Jackson by dancing with paint on his feet and Bruce Lee by doing karate chops on an art board.
In 2013, Phil had another problem: He ran out of space with his oversized art pieces. "If you've ever seen the TV show Hoarders, it was like the artist edition," he said. The physical clutter in his studio had become mental clutter. Phil decided to work on a year-long "Goodbye Art" project. He would make an art piece, document the process, and destroy the work immediately. Phil completed 23 pieces of work this way that year.
The mental barrier to destroying his own work was initially high. "I felt nervous and anxious because I had just spent all this time working on it," he said. "And the idea of destroying it just seemed pointless." He thought about making a copy and not telling anyone. "But I knew if I did that, I wouldn't be able to destroy any other projects."
He felt horrible putting his work through the shredder and dumping it into the trash. But once the knee-jerk reaction passed, relief and excitement came. "As each time I created, destruction brought me back to a neutral place where I felt refreshed and ready to start the next project," he said. "As I destroyed each project, I was learning to let go, let go of outcomes, let go of failures, and let go of imperfections."
"This seemed like the ultimate limitation, being an artist without art."
Phil Hansen (1979—) is a self-taught American artist.
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