Make the Art

On creativity as connective tissue. The fourth and final installment of a weekly series of essays and writing prompts for finding connection and creativity during the month of February.

Hi friends! Just a couple of business things before we get started. If you need art on your walls, I have some new prints in my shop this week. And there are still some spots left for my virtual Papercut Lettering workshop this Thursday February 29, 5-7pm PT (workshop will be recorded too). Sign up here.

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Papercut, Anna Brones, 2024

This is the fourth and final installment in a series of winter prompts to inspire creativity in the cold (or even not-so-cold). If you’re just finding us, here is the first installment, second installment, and third installment. Thank you so much to paid subscribers for helping to support this work.

I have a sticker made by

Mirk Work

at my desk that says, “It’s a good idea to be an artist.”

I have a commitment problem with stickers, so I actually have it taped on an empty glass jar with a piece of washi tape. It’s front and center though, just to the right of where I place my laptop—positioned so that it’s always in my peripheral vision. On bad days I read it aloud to myself while glaring and respond, “really??” But on better days, the days when I am more open and receptive, when I feel inklings of hope and a sense of potential, then I read it and respond emphatically, “well, yes, of course it is, absolutely!”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the physical act of making art. Partially because of writing guest pieces for the first week of

#The100DayProject Newsletter

, which were meant to encourage getting people into a habit of the act of making. Also because of our series of winter prompts right here all month. We’ve gone out into. the cold, we’ve talked about listening, connection, and friendship, and we’ve had coffee outside. This final week was intended to be a call for creativity, and the words that initially came to my mind were, “make the art.”

Make the art.

It’s a nice prompt. Simple, direct. But it’s such an imperative isn’t it? What if you don’t want to make the art today? Or tomorrow for that matter?

I like coming up with prompts. They’re fun, and I know that they’re often helpful, especially when we need a little bit of a creative push. But the thing about prompts is that they can also come off as demanding calls to action.

When it comes to creativity, I don’t know what you need. Just like you don’t really know what I need. And while a prompt can be a catalyst for getting us to start in a certain direction, these imperatives aren’t always helpful. It’s why I tend to prefer questions over statements. A statement gives a conclusion, but a question offers an opening.

Make the art?

I ask myself that question and then look over at the “it’s a good idea to be an artist” sticker. “Is it?” I ask myself in a very sarcastic tone that causes my head to tilt a a bit and my eyebrows to raise. Then I sit with it for a minute, trying to come up with an answer. I go to my notebook and write the following:

It's a good idea to be an artist because it’s a good idea to work at something that expands our capacity for curious receptivity. It’s a good idea to be an artist because it’s a good idea to engage in the activities that keep us open to possibility. It’s a good idea to be an artist because, what else is there?

I don’t mean being an artist in the “I make money from selling my art” sense or even in the “I paint paintings” sense. I mean being an artist in the sense of being alive and awake in this world, of taking things in and translating them into something new, of being open and curious and expansive. I mean it in the sense of reading between the lines, of knowing that beauty and joy have a purpose, of understanding that wisdom doesn’t come in the form of certitudes but is instead planted in the form of questions.

Art is a matter of asking questions. Even in the most direct forms— with slogans and graphic visuals—what we’re really asking is, “what if things were different?” The capacity to create is a reminder of the capacity to change. And if change is possible, then nothing is inevitable. Everything is in flux, everything is impermanent. That space holds the unknown, but it also holds possibility.

The cold can feel like that too. To go outside on a cold day, to be in the cold, is a sensory experience of the unknown, but also the possible. There’s the bite of cold on your skin, the way the wind sounds in the trees. There’s the stillness that cold offers, but also the sense of movement. How snow and rain fall, how bare branches scrape together, how birds flit across the ground and up into the sky. There is a physicality to this, a way of encouraging a connection, a way of presenting the constant change that nature is always involved in.

Creativity has a physicality as well, both in how we conjure it and how we react to it. A good walk will almost always help forward the thought process behind a new idea—movement carves a path for creativity. We have physical reactions when we engage with creative work too. Did you know that it’s essentially impossible to stand still when listening to music? Research shows that even if we’re not actively moving to it, our body is engaged in all kinds of “micromotions.”

There’s the mind/body connection as well. When we look at art, our brain’s pleasure centers light up, and there is strong link between how we emotionally feel about a piece of art, and how our body physically responds to it. Reading fiction can cause us to feel more empathy, and can even cause our brains to respond as if we we’re engaged in the activity that we’re reading about. We can have physiological reactions to movies, scary ones will spike our heart rate. Art is sensorial.

This all makes me think of fascia, the connective tissue that essentially holds everything in our bodies in place. When it’s healthy, it’s supple, flexible. When it’s unhealthy, it’s tight, restricted. We can’t see it, but it holds us together, essential for our movement and wellbeing, connecting every single part of our physical body. That’s what creativity feels like to me sometimes, this energetic thing full of spark and life, but that lies underneath the surface. Difficult to see and feel, but essential all the same—the thread that ties everything together. When we’re creatively healthy we too are flexible, more open, more curious. When we haven’t taken as much time to invest in it, we’re more closed off, restricted in our ideas and our connections.  

Creativity is our human connective tissue. To create is a way of asking, “what is in our human capacity?”

Another visual that sits near my desk is a papercut that I made of Jane Goodall a few years ago, on the heels of my Women’s Wisdom Project.

“The greatest danger to our future is apathy.” - Jane Goodall

“Can we overcome apathy?” asks Goodall. “Yes, but only if we have hope.” Art is a form of hope, and creativity sustains it. We need the ability to think beyond what we know, to make connections that go backwards and forwards in time, to say to ourselves, “I don’t know what the outcome will be, but I will try anyway.” We need the capacity to step into someone else’s world—through words, through song, through dance, through sound—and in the process, feel our own empathy muscles grow, strengthen. We need access to all kinds of creative works, so that we can read something that inspires us to dig deeper, look at something that that helps us feel less alone, listen to something that resonates all the way down into our cells. Art is an antidote to apathy because art requires us to care, to learn, to engage, to feel.

I’m using a wide definition of “art” here, much like how I read

Antonia Malchik

this week defining walking and engaging with nature in a more expansive way. “When A Walking Life was being published, I told the marketing people that I’d wanted to write a book for the ‘everywalker,’” writes Malchik. “I was tired of reading about philosophers and writers wandering through pristine woods and up remote mountain peaks. This is our world, I’ve said. We have the right to walk it, in all its glory and grit.”

This is our world. We have a right to make the art. The words, the songs, the drawings, the scribbles: all of it. The everyartist.

As someone whose job is dependent on “The Art,” in many ways, it is easier for me to do the marketing part of my job (ie selling the work) when I tune out from what is happening in the world. But the artist part of my job (ie making the work) only really happens if I pay attention, if I allow myself to feel, if I listen. The artist part is the human part. I acknowledge that yes, it does feel like the broader world is falling apart, there is so much pain, so much that is broken. Art arises from that place, from being in the world, not avoiding it. Or sometimes, being in that world, and wanting to craft something different in response to it. To create a space of joy and beauty.

I’ve been reading Letters from Tove this month, a collection of Tove Jansson’s letters to a variety of friends and family, and thinking a lot about how much World War II impacted her as an artist. In October of 1944 she writes to her friend Eva Konikoff:

“…more powerful than the longing to be ‘great,’ to be famous, is the longing for joy, for happiness. For a whole year, Eva, I haven’t been able to paint. The war nearly did for my desire to, in the end. It took me time to understand that it has to be a road, not a destination. What I want now is for my painting to be something that springs naturally from myself, preferably from my joy.”

The war took a toll on Jansson, emotionally and creatively, particularly as her city of Helsinki was repeatedly bombed. In a letter several years later, she references the moment when she started to write the first Moomin story:

“…when I was feeling depressed and scared of the bombing and wanted to get away from my gloomy thoughts to something else entirely. (A sort of escapism, to the time when Ham used to tell me stories). I crept into an unbelievable world where everything was natural and benign—and possible.”

Jansson dreamt of something different, and her entire universe of Moomin was in part spawned by that desire. It allowed her to create a world that felt hopeful for herself, of course, but just think about how many people have been drawn into that world, how many people found joy in it.

I think that’s the lesson from winter for me: creating, while often an individual, and sometimes even inward-focused act, is always part of something larger.

Even on the loneliest, coldest days, it has the potential to make you feel connected. To all the artists who came before, to those today, and to the ones who will come after. To the humans who came before, to those today, and to the ones who will come after. The connective tissue that binds us.

Make the art?

Make the art.

-Anna

Thank you so much for being here this month. And hi to so many new readers! If you enjoy reading Creative Fuel and exploring some of the themes here, the best way to support this work is to become a paid subscriber. I’m planning a few fun things for paid subscribers next month (you just might be seeing more of Tove Jansson for example), and I’d love to have you be a part of that community.

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CREATIVE PROMPT

Every week this month we’ve explored a writing prompt in conjunction with Freeflow Institute, all dedicated to connecting to the the cold. This is the final prompt for this series, if you want to support Freeflow and the work that they do, you can do so here. They’re putting on an amazing Grand Canyon trip next year with Rebecca Solnit and other incredible creatives.

Just like experiencing the cold can heighten our awareness and our attention to the world around us, so can our creative practice. Because art offers us something: it is a way to keep us grounded in our humanity. To be in our senses, to be in our bodies, to be connected to each other.

Creative thinking and problem-solving are of course things that we do in our brains, but creativity also lives in the body. It is engaged through movement, through taste and touch. It is a sensory experience. As you’ve challenged yourself to take your bodies into the cold these past few weeks, consider how that sensorial connection impacts what you create.

• How do your senses inform your art?

• How do you stay curiously receptive?

• How is your creativity sensorial?

• How does your art keep you engaged in the world around you?

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS

February 29, 2024: Papercut Lettering, 5-7pm PT [VIRTUAL]

Register here.

March 9, 2024: Exploring Positive and Negative Space, 11am-12:30pm PT [VIRTUAL]

Register here.

March 19, 2024: Spring Papercutting, 5-7pm PT [VIRTUAL]

Register here.

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