In high school, a young man named Phil discovered an art form called pointillism. He plotted thousands of dots in a pattern so that when viewed from afar, the dots looked like an identifiable image, like a person’s face.
But years later, when Phil attended art school, a shake began to develop in his hand. He was shocked that 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 pain he experienced around his muscles and joints. He saw it as the “destruction of my dream of becoming an artist.” Devastated, Hansen quit school to leave the craft behind.
Phil became an X-ray technician. However, his desire to return to art gnawed on. A few years later, he saw a neurologist, who diagnosed him with permanent nerve damage in his forearm. The doctor looked at Phil’s squiggly line and asked, “Why don’t you embrace the shake?”
That day, Phil went home, grabbed a pencil, and let his hand shake as he drew. “It felt great.” he later recalled. “Once I embraced the shake, I realized I could still make art.” He realized that he had been stuck on assuming pointillism as his only technique when it was possible to explore his work in many other ways. “This was the first time I’d encountered this idea that embracing a limitation could actually drive creativity.”
Phil used this new lens to approach his projects. Once, he was at a Starbucks asking for an extra cup. The limit he applied to his project was to use only a dollar’s worth of supply, so he thought, what if he asked barristers for 50 free cups? “Surprisingly, they just handed them right over,” he said. “And then with some pencils I already had, I made this project for only 80 cents. It really became a moment of clarification for me that we need to first be limited in order to become limitless.”
This shift in perspective marked a new beginning for Phil to experiment with new working methods that wouldn’t hurt his arms. Phil expanded the types of materials he used: he created a 2-D version of Michaelangelo’s David with chocolate chips, made a canvas of Virgin Mary with over 200 peanut butter jelly sandwiches, and put an image on a banana by poking it with a push pin and letting it oxidize. He made images by X-raying sand, a portrait of Mother Theresa out of dandelions, and a portrait of the Ku Klux Klan with printed biblical verses.
He also began to use his entire body, painting Michael Jackson by dancing with paint on his feet and a portrait of Bruce Lee by doing karate chops on an art board.
In 2013, Phil had another problem: His art pieces were too big, and he was running out of space. “If you’ve ever seen the TV show Hoarders, it was like the artist edition,” he described his studio. The physical clutter had become mental clutter, so Phil decided to work on a year-long project called “Goodbye Art”: he would make 23 art pieces and then immediately destroy them.
The mental barrier to destroying his own work was initially high. “I felt myself getting all nervous and anxious because I just spent all this time working on it, 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, that I wouldn’t be able to destroy any of the other projects.”
When he put his work through the shredder and dumped it in the trash, he felt horrible at first, but after a while, he felt a sense of relief and excitement. “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.
Sources:
1,000 Leaps 
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