creative process – Just the Tarot

The Six of Cups — Protecting the Inner Child of Your Art

The Six of Cups reminds us that our creativity flows from the innocence of the inner child. Protecting that child means honoring your art, choosing who sees it, and never letting careless criticism silence your joy.

When Beauty Meets Criticism

Have you ever created something you thought was beautiful — a painting, an essay, even a garden — and when you finally shared it, the first thing someone did was point out the flaws? Instead of seeing what you were trying to express, they zeroed in on what they thought was wrong.

There’s always a tension between creating and sharing. When we make something real — assuming we’re not just hacking away — we’re revealing a piece of our heart, our soul, our lived experience. A careless critique can feel like a personal attack. It can leave us feeling exposed, vulnerable, even ashamed.

The Inner Child at Play

Picasso once said, “All children are born artists; the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.” Creativity flows from the same source as play — from the child who once molded mud into castles or splashed finger paints across paper just for the joy of it.

That inner child still lives inside us, but it’s easily wounded. A thoughtless comment can silence it. A dismissive tone can make it retreat. And when that happens, the creative flow — the very essence of who we are — begins to dry up.

The Birth of the Critic

Mel Brooks joked that with the birth of art came the inevitable afterbirth — the critic. And he wasn’t wrong. If you take your creativity seriously, you’ll eventually encounter people who feel compelled to “fix” your work.

Julia Cameron wrote that before we can become good artists, we must first give ourselves permission to be bad ones. Every artist, writer, gardener, or musician produces clumsy beginnings — and even seasoned creators sometimes turn out a piece that just doesn’t land.

The creative process is messy and human. Yet while you’re admiring what went right, someone else may focus only on what went wrong.

The Wound of the Inner Artist

Cameron also warned that exposing your inner artist to harsh criticism is the emotional equivalent of child abuse. It’s like taking the eager, innocent child who offers you their finger painting and saying, “That’s terrible. You don’t really have any talent, do you?”

If you choose a creative life, criticism is inevitable. Some people simply won’t resonate with your vision, and occasionally you’ll make something that misses the mark. That’s part of the territory. But you can — and must — protect your inner artist with the same fierce loyalty you’d show a child under attack.

Learning by Heart

I became an artist late in life and am entirely self-taught. I picked up a mallet and chisel and learned to carve wood through trial, error, and stubborn joy. I learned to paint the same way.

Looking back, I can see how rough those early pieces were — primitive, awkward, untrained — and yet they were full of life. I still remember the pride I felt each time I saw progress take shape beneath my hands.

Claiming the title artist took courage. The first time I walked into a gallery and asked, “Would you show my work?” was absolutely terrifying.

A Pact of Protection

One simple, unbreakable pact guides me still: when someone criticizes my art, that’s the last time they see my art.

Showing your work is an act of intimacy — an unveiling of something deeply personal. The art flows from the child within you, and that child deserves protection.

The Eight of Pentacles and the Death of Creativity

The Eight of Pentacles looks like a pretty happy card. A craftsman sits at his bench carving away at one pentacle after another and seems to have several of them displayed, as if they were for sale. My original definition of the card in my book, “Just the Tarot,” pretty much agrees with that:

Profiting from your skills. Learning new skills that will advance your career. Possible promotions or awards at work.

And, yet, as an artist and a writer, I have to say, “Ugh.”

And, “Yuck.”

In some ways the Eight of Pentacles is sort of the anti-creativity card. Real creativity involves an interesting balance between competence and incompetence.

If you’ve ever gone through the pains of starting a new job or you’ve supervised someone who was new at their job, you know that there’s a definite learning curve. For about the first six months you can count on a pretty high level of screwing up. The new employee has to learn new skills or – in some cases – unlearn what he thought he knew. At about six months to a year, she’ll start to develop the abilities to perform the job and, after a year, it should be easy peasy.

We see a lot the same thing with artists. Having a creative vision isn’t enough. The painter has to learn how to blend the colors and which brushes to use. The wood carver has to know which chisels do what and what types of wood have smooth, tight grains that will take the details of the carving.

You study it, you practice it, and you learn it. I used to refer to that as, “getting the knowledge out of my head and into my hands.”

But, the thing is, the second you’ve REALLY learned it, the second you can do it perfectly over and over and over again . . . you’ve stopped creating. You’re just repeating.

That’s what I see when I look at the Eight of Pentacles: a line of perfectly carved pentacles that are all exactly the same. It would have been really cool if some of them were orange and some of them were purple, if there were a few folk art pentacles mixed in with some abstract pentacles.

But there aren’t.

Henry Ford invented the assembly line in 1913. It was a novel concept at the time: a product moving down a line, being assembled by a team of workers. Each worker was highly trained in doing one separate part of the assembly, over and over and over. Doing exactly the same thing day after day after day until they retired or dropped dead from boredom.

It was a brilliant idea for a capitalist and an absolute soul killer for the workers. Real creativity involves trying something new that you don’t actually know how to do perfectly. It’s a meshing of your skill set with unknown territory that results in something unique and different AND increases your skills.

Unfortunately, we don’t see a lot of that in our work places. We see people stuck in jobs where they do one or two things over and over again and are never challenged and never grow. We actually give them awards for that and congratulate them on knowing how to do those one or two things better than anyone else, on accepting the concept that they should be, “good”, but not creative or different.

The Eight of Pentacle is a safe card, a card that shows that nothing bad is happening to that person. But nothing particularly wonderful is happening to that person, either. The real story is in the definition of the Eight of Pentacles Reversed:

Employment problems that may involve a need for retraining or learning new job skills. Possibly the questioners position being eliminated or some sort of a reshuffle of employees that will place him or her in a job requiring different skills.

In other words, THAT person is going to have to GROW. It’s all really a question of choosing emotional safety or choosing growth. Sit in the nest or jump out and learn how to fly.

Life is way too short to choose safety.

The Three of Pentacles and the Creative Process

We know that humans essentially have two different brains in one skull. The left hemisphere of the brain is involved in logical and linear processes such as math, writing, driving a car, and analyzing problems. The right hemisphere is the, “creative brain,” and deals with dreams, symbols, intuition, inspiration, poetry and art.

While the right brain is more involved in the genesis of art, both sides of the brain are necessary to make it materialize. Here’s an example: Janis is an artist and has a dream about a beautiful, glowing landscape. Upon awakening, she’s determined to paint the image she dreamed and share it with the world. That’s right brain working.

She goes to her studio and has to select which paints will work best with the image, what size canvas she wants to paint it on, and which brushes she want to use. That’s left brain working.

As she begins to paint she falls into a sort of a trance and hours go by without her being aware of anything but the painting. Right brain is in charge again.

When she’s finished for the day she sits back and critiques what she’s done. Did she get the lines right? Is the shading perfect? Did she capture the source of light? That’s left brain engaging in the process.

So there’s this interesting back and forth between the two sides of the brain, each side contributing its’ own powers and skills to creating. And that’s what we see in the Three of Pentacles.

The Three of Pentacles is unusual for a Minor Arcana card because it incorporates two figures from the Major Arcana. A stonemason stands on a bench, mallet in hand, pausing between strokes to listen to two people who are conferring over a plan. The two people are obviously The Fool and The Hierophant.

They are represented here, it seems, not so much as the formal individuals they are in the Major Arcana, but as the energies or vibrations associated with those two cards.

The Fool is wild, intuitive, intoxicated with divine energy but with no need to interpret or define what he’s doing. The Hierophant is stodgy, stolid, conventional, not unkind but a stickler for the rules. The Fool is all about Right Brain energy and The Hierophant is all about Left Brain energy.

So we have this almost perfect representation of the creative process: Left Brain and Right Brain working together while the craftsman waits to create their synthesis in the material world.

And one of the fun things about this card is that it’s not about art at all, according to its’ common definitions. It’s about buying real estate and making improvements to your home, being enthusiastic about it but paying careful attention to details. Which is a wonderful reminder that everything – everything – we do in life is a creative process.

Life is a canvas – use bright colors.