Don't be creative, just give way
Accepting not knowing what you're making, until you're making it
Hi friend, thanks for checking in with me here today. As an artist, we’re constantly tapping into new inspiration. But when we get to a certain point in our practice, we tend to question our ideas with a critical eye that asks: ‘Is this worth pursuing?’ Today I want to talk about how to get past this hurdle and back to creativity.
I didn’t go to art school, but I did learn creative project management during my studies of Communication & Multimedia Design. Maybe you’ve heard of the different types of project management styles, which can all be very helpful in execution, but not in providing a framework for true creativity, I’ve found.
You see, most projects live on a timeline. They serve certain specific goals and maybe even other people’s interests. Creativity thrives where we are not subjected to time and space or, God forbid, other people’s opinions. If we want to create freely, we have to free ourselves from these mostly self-imposed shackles.
In stead of asking these questions:
Is this worth my time?
Will this propel my career forward?
What can I do to develop a strong concept for this?
Will this make me grow as an artist?
Do I have enough/the right resources to execute my ideas?
How can I make this a portfolio piece?
Will this get me any recognition in my field?
Start asking yourself more of these:
What am I curious about right now?
What excites me?
What is something I haven’t tried before?
What is occupying my mind lately?
What do I really NOT feel like doing?
What challenges me in what I think I can do?
When you have taken up a form of art as your career, it’s easy to fall into the trap of needing everything you do to support your business. And of course, at the start, you probably need to be doing a whole lot of those things. But it doesn’t mean your artistic development, your true creative expression, should have to suffer or become completely sidetracked because of it. Not everything you make has to contribute to more clients, more sales, more audience reach. If you ask me, it actually works the other way around completely: the more you create from an authentic and restful place, the more you will attract into your business.
So, what’s the crux? If there is no answers coming to you at all, even when you ask questions from the second category that I mentioned above, my short answer is: just make something. Anything. Put on your Nike tights and Just Do It. If you really really can’t get past the resistance and the buts and the maybe’s: go out with intent to make something really awful. Purposefully go out and make something you know is going to be bad. Chances are, it will end up not being half as bad as you thought it would be, and at the very least you now finally made something. Hurrah! You have momentum, which is all that matters. Keep going.
A while ago I was trying to (key word here: trying) get going on a new personal project. I wanted to create a larger scale personal project on the topic of masculinity. I was inspired by a couple of portraits I had made during my travels, and wanted to expand on what I had started, to explore this topic further. I did all kinds of research, looked at projects and exhibitions on the subject, had my intern do some more research on it, and… I got stuck. It was now a project, with a certain goal that had grown over my head, too many things I was already comparing it to before I even really started. I tried to fit the shoots I wanted to do in this small box that I created for this project, which left me utterly uninspired.
I decided to let it all go. I was no longer labeling my projects, I just went out to photograph people and things that I felt like photographing, trusting that eventually a common theme would present itself to me. Or not. I had to be ok with it not ‘becoming’ anything than just photos I wanted to make. Because in the end that is what I wanted to encourage in myself: to make more photos. I can conceptualise all I want, I can even be very good at it, doing that and not going out to make photos is not what’s going to become the body of work that I want to give way to.
I felt that having a concept for my creative personal work beforehand really limited what it could be. What I could be. I was taught that before you make something, you should have solid concept. For client work this is of course still very true, although even in that container I try to wiggle in some leeway to experiment and leave things up to chance. I know now that a lot of the time, for me at least, it isn’t true that I need a complete concept before I can start. I just wanna make stuff. And that works perfectly fine.
If you’re curious how you can tune into this creativity more as a portrait photographer, I’m hosting a full day workshop called Creative Portraiture on March 16th. I’ll teach you everything I’ve learned over the past 15 years of taking portraits and you get to put it into practice with our model in the beautiful daylight studio.