creative currents

a thank you to creative community

I find myself thinking a lot lately about creative community—what it is, how we foster it and function within it.

I’ve been lucky enough to develop friendships with some prolific abstract artists in my community. Influenced, both consciously and unconsciously, by the dream-like power of Britt Bayley’s profoundly moving canvas work as well as the enchanting, dreamy tendrils flowing throughout Nik Black’s art, I found myself wanting to write something that felt like it had been painted onto the page. When I sat down to write my own sea-salted dreamscape in “Salt Lung,” I was under the influence of the deeply moving art and artists in my community. I was a part of a creative current, one ripple in the giant ocean that is our collective consciousness.

Writing “Salt Lung” felt like falling into the depths of one of Britt’s striking paintings; like sliding around the loops of Nik’s ink drawings. I couldn’t have ever predicted what would come next, what kind of collaborative power acting on these inspired ideas floating around the collective consciousness would have: electric currents of creativity, community excitement, and bold idea generation. No artistic movement occurs within a vacuum. We experience, we create, we witness, we’re inspired, we create more.

We’re so powerful when we take up space, speak our truths, and share our art.

Recently, artist and writer Nic Adrian shared their poem “Oh, Muse!” on Instagram stories, expressing what it feels like to chase inspiration, touch it, lose it, and want it back. Their lyrical images stuck in my subconscious and mixed there with concepts of desire, the Wild Woman archetype, and the deep psychic intuition that I’ve been reading about in Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s monumental book, Women Who Run With the Wolves. A few weeks (or was it days?) later, I found myself writing about desire, about a muse, something I seek so desperately to grasp but can’t quite touch. It was a small yet impactful moment when I was able to look at my work and recognize where my inspiration came from that day.

A brief interruption: my rendition of chasing the muse

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Desire: A Psychodrama

In sleep, I chase a shifting spectre: at once wild-woman laughing, black hair billowing in the foggy midnight breeze 
& snarling wolf-mother biting fingertips in leafy forest eaves

Haunted, I hunt. Silently stalking the ghost: Arrows solid and sharp in hand—breathe deep, plant feet, steady and—release! 
Aimed shots burst into dream-matter dust, dissipating (disappointing)

My quarry runs & I am revealed 
Exposed 
Naked & waiting 
Come back 
Alone

Eyes leer—glowering, greedily gobbling; cackles crackle in the dark: We see you now! 
Panic pulses as laughter grows louder and louder and louder until a crescendo of 
Alarms blare and I wake up safe in bed under quilted blankets stitched with stars and leaves

Fuck.

I roll over, swing legs, stand up, get dressed, wash face, brush teeth—
in twenty minutes, I’ll open my computer to chase someone else’s dream

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Thank you for indulging this brief interruption.

We’re inspired by so much in our lives: family, friends, conversations, art, books, whatever comes across our social media feeds, movies—and it’s such a beautiful thing. As our world changes, we have access to more ideas than ever before. But it’s a double-edged sword—with infinite access comes infinite comparison, competition, and the question of originality.

Conceptually, Originality is one of the greatest western colonial lies ever told, intended to incite us and pit us against one another. Culturally, the colonial west champions ownership, and the myth of originality allows one person to take ownership of an idea—as if it couldn’t be happening concurrently in another community, in another soul, at the very same time; as if it hadn’t happened before in someone quieter, with a smaller circle. As if an idea could ever belong to just one person. In reality, there’s so much room for ideas to move and take shape in myriad ways among each of us, flowing through us as a collective creative current.

But it’s a battle to get that insidious critic’s voice out of our heads: “It’s been done before, and they did it better; you really don’t know what you’re talking about; this isn’t any better than what came before, so why are you even trying?” Through educational systems, corporate hierarchy, and celebrity worship culture, the capitalist-industrial machine spends a lot of time beating the myths of individualism and exceptionalism into our heads. It’s no wonder we get caught up in the melee and let it infiltrate our hearts & minds, criticizing and ostracizing ourselves and one another instead of learning and expanding together. These systems keep us scared and they keep us small.

But the older I get and the more I explore, the more I see and hear resistance to these systems; the more I see a breakdown of gatekeeping structures. Artists are out there creating powerful movements from within a community: experiencing, sharing, learning, unlearning, witnessing, doing, being—and they’re doing it with and for one another. It’s an exciting form of resistance to witness. A loud and resounding fuck you to western colonial individualist values.

So, I just wanted to say thank you to all the artists and writers out here vulnerably sharing work with friends, with strangers, in coffee shops, in classrooms, online—you have more power than you know. Keep going.

Check out the artists I talk about in today’s letter:

Britt Bayley: @brittbayley | brittbayley.com

Nik Black: @theopaldoor | theopaldoor.com

Nic Adrian: @_nicadrianart

Creative conversations I’m loving:

• Comparison as Symptom by

  ayandastood

• Sounds Like a Skill Issue? (Part 1) by

  Favour Nwagu

Let’s chat!

• Where and when do you notice creative influence from your friends, colleagues, and even strangers on the internet? Do you ever step back and take the time to recognize and name it?

• How has gatekeeping and the societal pressure to be exceptional affected your art?

• Do you strive for “originality”?

• What kind of creative conversations are you drawn to? Where do you find them?

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