It’s late morning and here I sit, staring out the corner windows of my office, collecting myself. Eventually shutting the music down and seemingly the world with it.
My view is fields on lake on fields of deep snow. It’s six degrees. The only thing in motion is the stinkbug crawling the perimeter of my open laptop. The windows feel obligatory and a little strange. I feel as hushed and reverent as the landscape in front of me.
I’m not entirely sure yet how to say this, so I’m just going for it. I need something from you. From all of you.
I need you to make art.
Many of you reading this are creatives of some ilk or discipline. There are writers among you, photographers, graphic artists, musicians, painters and poets. There are also, perhaps just as many of you, who would never claim themselves to ‘be’ any of these things, yet nonetheless utilize similar tools to capture and translate your experience.
Whether you choose to call yourself an artist or not, I know without a flaxseed of proof that you’re making art, and you’re doing it every day.
Making anything, paragraphs, tapestries, a loaf of bread, involves choices. Those choices are informed by your experience, your curiosity and your desire to make physical something that begins from nothing.
It is an act of creation, of being creative.
Yes. We choose plenty of things out of obligation, necessity and sometimes survival. And/also, every time we seek to capture our kids’ expressions just right in a photo, or add more oregano to the sauce, if we do it with love and with intention, we’re making art. AND, we’re making art in the only way it has ever or will ever be made.
Okay, so delicious sauce. Cute pic. Whatever. We do this shit every day. It’s not like it’s serious art we’re making, it’s just…
It’s just what? A hobby? An involuntary reflex? Garbage??
If it’s a hobby, you’re doing it for pleasure, aka love. Awesome. Carry on.
An involuntary reflex? Nope. That was a decoy.
Garbage? Grade A self-criticism, based on learned experiences over time, and likely having zero to do with the actual quality of whatever you’ve made. (Anyway… garbage is art.)
Every time we make something, ie. create something, we’re completing an act of translation. Translation of our unique experience into the common experience.
This translation is in itself an act of careful explanation, of communication—of converting something from one form to another with the intent of successfully sharing or conveying the essence of that thing.
At the risk of suffocating my own metaphors…
Let’s say you make that pasta sauce. You make it to nourish but also to be delicious. You make a series of specific choices about how to do so. The effect of those choices, shared with someone or many someones, translates as both energy and sensory responses in their body. Both then become sources of translation for each individual fed your delicious sauce. It may show up in their own sauce, or as a detail committed to long-term recognition and memory.
Likely imperceptible in real time, what may seem like a fleeting and inconsequential effect actually changes that individual. In one moment and forever. And that’s what creators do. They make change by making intentional choices.
“Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn’t matter. The intent does”.
– Seth Godin
So I suppose I’m not only asking you to make art, I’m also asking you to recognize you’re making art, with care and intention, and then… to share your art with others.
What you share ceases to be yours and becomes ours. And in this time, this era of disorientation, confusion, real fear and all the other emotions that arrive uninvited by the hour, it’s never been more crucial to contribute—to connect to our collective imagination through our individual creativity.
Making art is a contributive, generous and deeply selfless act. It involves a shedding of one’s ownership of their own experience in favor of the common one.
When we birth something from our own interior, it feels sacred to us, even if it doesn’t meet our expectations.
So when we share what feels sacred, our art, it’s a gesture of love and respect, for ourselves as well as for those we share it with. Just as when a child runs to you with a drawing, nervy and proud, needing to share not just the drawing itself, but to connect your experience with theirs.
Art is fishing, conversation, dancing in your living room. It’s arranging your furniture, making a campfire and planting a rose bush.
Each one of these things, if pursued and then shared with the love you have for them, will create change in all of us.
Imagine for a moment if five people in your immediate circle spent fifteen additional minutes each day creating something from their hearts, and then shared it with you. How about fifty people in your neighborhood? Five hundred in your county or state?
What would our world look like if every living human exchanged just five minutes of distraction for five minutes of creation?
Making art is not only the way to reclaim our attention and intention, it’s the way to to truly reclaim our connection. To our history, present, future and, to each other.
Start with five minutes. Make art and share it. Do it again.
Bree Stilwell 