Balancing Acts

Artists and staff at Cedars fine art studio. Ross, California, USA

A thread that runs through much of my writing is the idea that knowledge is something lived, not arrived at. These reflections look at what that means within a creative practice: how learning unfolds through experience and the act of doing. They also consider how facilitators can use that understanding to shape environments that enhance creative experience, noticing how familiarity builds confidence, how uncertainty can be productive, and how control is best held loosely - something that guides, not governs, the process.

A skilled facilitator learns not only what someone is working on but how they work, the pace, the rhythm, and the way progress feels to them. For some, confidence comes from returning to a process, adjusting and trying again, building a sense of control over skills recently gained before moving forward. That need for steadiness is as valid as the impulse to explore something entirely new.

Facilitation, in this sense, is a sensitivity practice. It asks us to tune into where someone is in their cycle of engagement, whether they are experimenting, exploring, discovering, or ready to make a statement. Within the arts, creativity moves constantly between discovery and statement: moments when something new is found and moments when that newness is articulated or shared. Both are necessary, and both are forms of knowing.

Control, in this light, isn’t the destination of creative practice. It’s a momentary feeling that emerges through engagement. It arrives when familiarity meets curiosity, when the hand and the material are in dialogue. The goal isn’t to hold on to control, but to recognize when it’s present, when it slips, and how that shifting balance reveals new understanding.

In a studio, we sometimes mistake control for mastery, but mastery seeks to close a loop, to perfect a process. Control, by contrast, is a living awareness of the relationship between self and material, between facilitator and artist. It’s responsive rather than rigid. The facilitator’s task is not to enforce control but to help others notice it, to understand how it feels to have it, to lose it, and to regain it in new forms. That awareness becomes a foundation for confidence, growth, and experimentation.

To live knowledge is to move within this balance between control and openness, between what is known and what is still becoming. A creative practice depends on both: the steadiness that allows one to act with intention, and the looseness that leaves room for surprise. Control without openness can lead to working from habit; openness without control can scatter attention. The facilitator’s role is to sense that balance in others and to model it themselves, guiding without closing, introducing structure without narrowing possibility.

When approached this way, both artist and facilitator engage in the same learning process. Each gains fluency in reading the space between doing and knowing, discovery and statement, confidence and risk. Through continued engagement - through returning, adjusting, and trying again - the studio becomes less a site of instruction and more a shared field of awareness, one where knowledge is continually lived, exchanged, and re-formed through the rhythm of practice itself.