As I glance to see if THIS blog has a spell check (you may thank the universe - Blogger does provide means to escape my inability to type things correctly), I am trying to be confident about what this blog will be for.
It will by no means be a way of me showing you my old art or talking about my past creative projects or dealing with material that is not new - unless I am fully revisiting it from a completely new direction.
This may not seem significant at first, but let me explain: places where you post your art or your music or your stories or your other creative endeavours tend to get bogged down in the past. You can't escape the inevitable "and this is what I was thinking at the time", which makes you mentally go back to that time. The trouble with dwelling on the past and your life's story (unless you're writing an autobiography) is that your creative endeavours never seem to want to leave the past. You stop being creative. You start being contemplative.
It's okay to meditate on the past, it is place where you store up information to pull things from - but it's not okay to rely on the past for your creative drive - the past does NOT move forward. Creation can only happen in the moment.
I'm not talking about "well I had an idea for an art project last week...I guess I shouldn't think about that any more, because I never moved on it!". By all means, visit an idea you've never moved on before - but you shouldn't go "I had an idea about an art project last week, but the last time I did anything good was when I was at my old house or when I lived with so-and-so, or when I was being motivated by some force. I obviously need to recapture that, in order to bring this new project to life!" - THAT is my protest.
Recapturing the past is a trap that I feel many artists can fall into. They stop moving forward because they begin to assume that the magic can only occur because of something (a place or an emotion or a person), instead of realizing they don't need that token "whatever" to keep creating new work.
Creativity happens in the moment, and cannot be brought about by trying to recreate the past, or even halting the present. Artists who move into "the perfect place" and then never change anything end up with repetitive, derivitive works. Perhaps they can be satisfied with that, but I refuse to be that way any longer.
I'm going to let my creativity guide me!
Oh - and if you're curious about the things I dabble in - here's a short list: Fine Art, Novel Writing, Cartoons, Comics, Homebrew DnD and a plethora of other things.
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