Creative responsibility

showing up and taming the angst

About a month ago, I decided to finally take my creative practice (and myself as an artist) somewhat seriously. I had been so in and out of it for the last few years, in and out of the identity of it, that I think I had forgotten what I was even doing it for.

I hadn’t been painting. I hadn’t been painting and I didn’t know what I wanted to make and then spontaneously I started to fantasize about the texture of oil paint. This happened for a few days, maybe a week, maybe two, who knows, but soon enough I knew I had to act on whatever stirring was happening in my painterly innards. Otherwise, it would pass.

It started with cleaning my paint tubes. They were all sticky and stuck together in their box in my drawer, and so the first evening was just that: preparation. But it was also just an act in itself, one I might venture to call an act of care - my paint tubes finally felt seen.

I’m not sure what happened next. I found some usable paper, some very old and yellowed canvas sheets, I scrolled my phone for photos I’d taken with good light to work from, I moved my bed to a corner of my room so the rest of it would be free for the making of messes. I hadn’t even realized how long the arrangement of my room and the self-imposed need to work at a desk was keeping me small, stuck and even angry.

It started with one painting that I didn’t like very much. Then another that I liked a little bit. I was trying to get the hang of the medium again. Then one that I just made because I wanted something to do that Sunday, and yes I don’t like that one much either. Then I started to get inspired by places I’d visited and photos I’d taken and I made one of the beach and I was beginning to like what was happening, and I may even have been having fun with it.

Bhit Khorri

I’ve made landscapes before, but they often didn’t contain a subject. It always felt like something was missing. So I started to work with landscapes and people together and on some level I have known for years that this was what I was moving towards. After this I worked on another, and then another, the sequence of which I’m forgetting. I started to leave the house with my painter eye, seeing light and shadows the way I imagined I’d paint them.

Canal Road

Brick Kiln boy

Gizri Boulevard

Empress Market

I could stop this particular project now and that would be okay because not only have I created something close to a body of work, a thing I have not done in so very long and it just feels so good to lay all these paintings out in front of me and know that this came from my hands, but because I’ve learned something very crucial and that has been my duty to myself to do the work. It’s almost like I have to or else I will be guaranteed to be depressed in some existential way. It’s been the intention to have a sort of creative discipline just as a responsibility to myself, rather than something I put down to a season of creation. I allow for that also, I will allow for the rut when it comes, but for now my priority is momentum and connection to the practice. Because connection to the practice means connection to myself. And the practice of staying connected means that it is more easily available when the emotional turbulence starts to make itself felt, which it does and which it will.

Of course, what this has meant is a lot of solitude. Not something I’m unused to, and definitely a state I enjoy in most seasons of my life. For the last month, it’s meant coming back from work in the afternoon, taking a nap, and then bringing my board of paints back in, finding something to listen to, and starting.

The point was always the practice and I knew it, both in theory and from small moments of insight. The mistake I think I was making earlier, when the work was getting me agitated, was zooming in too close to each individual process, rather than the steady commitment and what ends up happening as a whole - it’s my whole life that’s happening. This understanding that life is happening everyday and how I live one day is, in some sense, how I live all of it.

It feels good to know I can have this if I choose, to be happy and calm and to have that inspired energy to work, but also to be shaken and ungrounded sometimes and then to stumble my way back to my little spot, and dab a little paint here and there, and build on it, and allow for some days to be not so good days. And this is why I’ve always done it, because this is how I come home.