Crossing My Personal Creative Rubicon
From reading about, and listening to, a lot of creatives - for many, there appears to be a pivotal moment when something ‘clicks’ into place. A personal ‘aha’ moment that takes you from the path you’ve been travelling, and moves you towards a new creative journey. For me, I had two of these moments over two concurrent months - one creative and one personal.
Creative Breakthrough
Late 2022 I started a great six month course designed to help you to find your own creative voice. Until this point, my artwork had felt directionless and I wanted to get my arms around what I wanted to create and why. I wanted to move away from looking at other artists’ work, trying to deconstruct their techniques and re-create them until I thought they were ‘good enough’. All this did was generate a lot of self-defeating frustration and of course, the end results still weren’t ‘my creative voice’ - I was just borrowing someone elses.
Within the first couple of months of my course, I reconnected with two core aspects of what being an artist meant for me.
how much the creative side of my life means to me - right down to my core. This wasn’t a mild token thought process, it was a moment that almost moved me to tears when I imagined my life without it.
remembering to have fun and taking the pressure off myself to create something that could be of commercial value to someone else, instead of focussing on creating artwork that was of creative value to me. This ‘aha’ moment resulted in me looking less to others to inspire my creative endeavours, and looking more to myself as my own source of inspiration.
Personal Breakthrough
The month following my creative breakthrough, a personal one came knocking on the door in the form of a health scare. The timing couldn’t have been more synchronistic if it had been planned. Having re-discovered my new creative flow, for a couple of weeks I was faced with the possibility that I may not have the time to see it come to fruition. There’s nothing quite like staring into the abyss of a potential ‘used by date’ to focus your thoughts. I was extremely fortunate to hear that my results were negative, but the clarity I gained during those two weeks never left me. It still hasn’t. It felt like I had been given a second chance and I wanted to make the most of it. I took a massive leap of faith and decided to go part time for a few months and throw everything, including myself, into trying to create a business out of something I loved.
In Conclusion
So why am I sharing this personal story? A couple of reasons. Firstly, hopefully it helps you to get to know me a little bit better as an artist and what drives me creatively, and secondly, in the hope that it may help other new/emerging artists to realise that it’s OK to course correct sometimes - if it feels like the right thing to do with every cell in your body.
In life, what we value rarely changes, but what motivates us can change as our life unfolds. Everyone’s creative journey will be different, and we’ll all have our own personal ‘aha’ moments that have taken us down the path we’re now travelling. It’s never ‘too late’ and there’s no right or wrong time to take a leap of faith. You’re exactly where you’re meant to be at this point in time.
So, fellow emerging artists, is this path we’ve chosen going to be hard work? Yes. Will there be times when you think “What am I doing, I’ve left this all too late”? Possibly. Will there be times when you doubt yourself and your ability to succeed? Definitely. Will there be times when you think about giving up? Absolutely. For me, whether I succeed or not, I’d rather take that leap of faith and see what happens, than look back in 5 years and wonder ‘what if….?’. What about you?
Good luck, and keep the faith fellow emerging artists!