I used to, very briefly, write and record a little series called Creative Practice, where I’d exercise my creative eye to produce something, even if awful, every day. I’ve been biding my time to bring it back, until the eye was open again. Seems like the time is now. I don’t want to write posts just to fill empty space — though, I seem a little too comfortable with perpetual “pending spaces”, too. I prefer to wait until the words spill out, so they always feel sincere to me (and you, reader).
Recently, perhaps from a spot of maladaptive daydreaming, I’ve found myself transported to infinite lives in infinite spaces through Pinterest. I haven’t been making in a while, and felt daunted by the emptiness in my usually-overflowing repository of ideas. Sometimes, the algorithm reads you and knows what you need.
I came across this uncredited photo from which I couldn’t pry my eyes away, and I don’t know why exactly: the individual elements don’t interest me, but paired with that beam of warm sunlight and the peek of block apartments not too distant from my own childhood memory makes me feel like I could blink and land softly inside. I wanted, no, needed to see this apartment more fully. To live within it through a futile extension of pixels.
I felt compelled to create. Out of nowhere, in an instant.
Sometimes, when ideas don’t seem to reach you, it helps to find support in tertiary, or tangential, mediums.
In this case, I felt an uncontainable emotional depth that wasn’t able to be released through a single photograph that I didn’t even take, so I expanded on it — quite literally — with my own hands. This let me still scratch that itch of creating something new, but not from nothing. No pressure. And, it helped me live in the glow of Pinterest dopamine for a moment longer.
If you’re an old design school professor looking at this, I don’t want to hear it. Perspective and linework was (and still is) my living hell. The whole point of this study is to fill an existing space with a signature of interpretation — in this case, the story I told myself as I sought solace in a new space. Precision is not the point, rather, to find an easier entry back to the state of flow that helps create something new; something your own.
There’s something interesting about how this image would be recreated by a hundred people. How would they inhabit the same space? Interpret the same colors and shapes? Contribute new forms? And how far would they extend it? A change in pen texture, technique, or even time of day can inform and infuse the parent photo with novelty that can lead to its own evolution of originality.
I think that’s where the magic lies: taking your admiration for an existing thing, and granting yourself the freedom to contribute.
What would it feel like to extend a photograph while trying to maintain the original artist’s integrity of style, color, or overall craft? A microdose of stepping into someone else’s shoes might just be the thing to dislodge your own identity as a creative. Or, what would it feel like to disrupt it, to improve or destroy it? What can your reaction to a chosen image tell you about your sense of art?
Taking shape in the shadow of a finished object might remind you how to step into the light.