What Are Our Rules?
Taking a look at the rules of our creative practice and whether they help or hinder.
Welcome to the weekend’s Creative Fuel prompt! Prompts are focused on helping us tap into our creative process, no matter our medium Paid subscribers have full access to the archive of prompts and I very much appreciate you helping to make this work sustainable.
I usually set Friday aside for “studio time” which really just means that I don’t plan any calls or teaching gigs and try to encourage myself to devote time to experimenting and playing. What it actually means is catching up on the work that I probably should have prioritized earlier on in the week (writing the newsletter, sketching for new papercuts).
Even as a working artist spending time making art, or even sitting down to write, continues to feel a little indulgent to me. Like someone might come over and tell me, “ma’am, you’re not allowed to be doing this as work.” It’s easier for me to get around that by giving myself the rule that there’s a certain time and place that is my studio time.
Rules, restrictions, and guidelines exist for a reason. They can provide structure. They can make us show up when we don’t want to. And of course, they can help to define and clarify our creative ideas when they feel all over the place.
But I think we often exist within the confines of rules and structures that can become limiting, and even debilitating to our creative practice. Rules that no one else put in place, but that we constructed for ourselves—or that morphed into being over time without us ever noticing.
In our Wednesday Creative Fuel session this week, the theme revolved around finding beauty in the mundane. In other words: elevating the most basic, dull, everyday objects and experiences by giving ourselves permission to turn them into art. My friend Roshni made a painting of her hard drive, and Shell painted their box of tissues:
Finding beauty in the mundane requires us to pay attention, to hone in on the things that we might otherwise pass over. But it also requires us to bend or even release our rules about what is or what isn’t interesting, our rules about what is worthy of our creative attention.
Because as it turns out, everything is worthy. Everything has the potential to be the seeds of creative inspiration, and if we let it, art and creativity can slip into all the nooks and crannies of our lives.
Art, after all, is all around us. Maira Kalman’s explorations of her favorite things, Rosa Leff’s papercut street and neighborhood scenes, and JoEllen Wang’s use of tarps come to mind as pieces that elevate what we might otherwise not pay close attention to.
But in order to get there, we have to first get rid of the rule that says that creative inspiration must be powerful, overwhelming, life-changing, or whatever else we’ve identified with the “creative inspiration is all flashy lighting bolts” myth.