a tangle of feelings
I’m convinced that’s the true plural of “feelings”. Poetry aside, this edition took a little longer than expected, since I don’t have much going on creatively at the moment. Or so I thought…
the creativity of not feeling “creative”
If you’ve ever done any knitting or crocheting, you know how easy it is to find yarn you want to use in tangled mess in the bottom of the storage container where you last left it. You also know that you must unwind that tangle, at least partially, before embarking on your next project. This is how I feel about my feelings around creativity lately.
The Renaissance left an impression on me early on. I distinctly remember first finding out who da Vinci was and about how many subjects he worked in; immediately I responded, “Wow! I want to do that!” As a child I wanted to be a paleontologist and an artist simultaneously. I always answered “both” if someone wanted me to pick one. And my parents were shocked to find out I was bisexual…
Jokes aside, this duality of how I interact with the world is challenging in this day and age where specialization is basically essential for “careers”. It’s also challenging for picking and choosing which projects to tackle, especially as the kind of person who needs large chunks of unstructured time in order to feel mentally ready to dive into a project. There’s only so many ways I can context switch in a given day or week!
As a numbers person, seeing numbers related to my art stuff go down (numbers that are supposed to go up) makes me feel bad. I have been seeing several such numbers go down lately. Is anything I make actually “good” if the numbers look “bad”? If it’s not “good”, should I be making it? It’s easy for me to spiral into these states of mind; I resent how susceptible I am to the way social media warps my perspective of the world. Sometimes the numbers are not helpful, and they certainly do not have the full context of the experience of making.
The answer obviously is to just make stuff for the enjoyment of making it, sharing it, and connecting with people based on it. This short clip of Reggie Watts talking about how anyone can be an artist, how creativity is broader than we often define it, found me at the right time this week!
Given all these knots, I am working to reorient my relationship with creating. It is hard to shift from thinking about metrics to thinking about what sounds the most emotionally fulfilling. An angle that is helping me at the moment is focusing more on making art that facilitates sharing and connecting.
An example: I am increasingly drawn towards making “artifacts” that could be found someday, like zines or small trinket-y items. The image above shows a mini-poster from 1993 that I found in an old book (tbh I enjoyed the poster way more than the book). There is a joy in the serendipity of finding these sorts of things in our environment; I want to make things for enjoyment and whimsy now, but also for a hypothetical accidental archivist living in a different time.
Compounded with my tangle of feelings is the looming sociopolitical climate where true agency is being ripped from many people, as well as the meteoric rise of machine “agency”. How can art help humans build real agency?
I have no idea if this quote will make it into a final cut, so here’s something kicking around in my mind, as spoken by a character in a story I’m working on:
One thing I simply do not understand about humans is your insistence upon domesticating yourselves. From the ants to the whales, they understand the merits of remaining wild. Your tools practically have a life of their own! Ha!
What is all this eFfiCiEnCy and pROduCtiViTY for? How little of your existence you actually enjoy for what it is. Such strange creatures.
This was a rambling one, one that intentionally and unintentionally twisted and turned like yarn bent from entanglement. It’s high time I got offline to make something, but I hope this finds you in a moment where you can ponder what creativity means for you, too.
ongoing projects
I don’t have much substantial to say here aside from quick status updates.
I’ve started experimenting with mini-zine folds aside from the classic middle-slit 8-page zine. I have yet to figure out what to draw in them, but for now I’m getting used to the different morphologies.
I’m working on a short story (!!). Yes, FICTION WRITING. New territory for me. It’s terrifying but very fun. I have no idea how long this will be (or how long it will take me to wrap it up), but I have about ~2300 words so far. I am unsure if I want to share it publicly under my real name…that might depend on where this story goes 😈
I’m trying to muster the courage to revisit some really old half-finished drawings that, in some cases, have been lying around for years…and the comic I started a few months ago.
latest inspo
I’m working my way through exploring the books in the Butches in Books list by C.L. Clark, who famously is a butch who writes books.
A few times a year I re-obsess over the sapphic cover of “Take Me to Church” by Reinaeiry…which has a really poignant Locked Tomb animated music video. Soul-transformingly beautiful.
A couple weeks after reading the essay “The Art of Haunting” I’m still thinking about it. It’s a deep dive into what machine-generated summaries flatten out and fabricate, written by someone who encountered such a summary about a non-existent presentation of his. It’s ethereal, creepy, and extremely thought-provoking.
