Get Curious!
Let Other Creatives Fuel You
We tend to have these immediate visceral responses to other creatives: I love her and her work! I hate what he draws. I could care less about this story. Is it because they take a lot of risks? Not enough? Are they vulnerable? Do their chosen topics appeal to you? Repel you? Dig deeply for your answers: I could write better than she can. I wish I could write as well as he does. No one could possibly be interested in that type of vapidity. She makes these emotional leaps in her paintings I adore.
Once you have some opinions, ask yourself some more questions: Why can’t you write the way he/she writes/paints/photographs/weaves? What is stopping you from achieving that level or depth of art if that is what you are drawn to? Why is that subject/topic vapid; how would you approach it? What would make the style or subject more interesting to you as an audience?
Let other creatives guide you into areas you won’t necessarily have gone yourself. Even if you usually have regular projects you work on, what could you learn about yourself and your artistic capacities if you tried something new? How could these discoveries feed your regular projects? What if, when you are between projects, you study a new illustrator, graphic designer, poet, memoirist, weaver, land artist to understand the ways your sensibilities and experiences bump up against theirs?
What are you willing to learn about yourself through engaging with other creatives who you love or hate, and their work? What are you able to create that you had never thought of before?
Look at what you have done in the past and could do going forward with your art: try new styles, forms, genres. Never painted before? Start small: buy yellow, blue and red in whatever media suits you (watercolor, acrylic, gouache, etc.) and experiment with mixing colors to get orange, green and purple. Never written fiction? Try constructing a character you’d find interesting and want to know more about. What about macramé?
I’m going to list a few creatives I’ve studied over the last couple of years—please expand on this list in the comments section so we can begin building a pool to sift through, and thank you in advance for your contributions! (Note: If experiencing different writers/artists is your interest, anthologies and literary magazines are good places to look.)
Wellsley-Smith; fiber artist
Strand; essayist, fiction writer, poet, memoirist
Fryar; essayist
Rothman; nonfiction, illustrator
Maricle; artist
Bashaar; poet
Soldier; poet
Orozco; poet
Choose one creative from the pool we create or one creative you’ve always wanted to know more about: study 2 or 3 pieces of their work. Ask yourself what their philosophy or insight seems to be toward their genre. What is one thing you can attempt to emulate? How could you go beyond them? For example, write in their style, paint with their color palette, try their form, stitch or weave with materials they like.
Once your small experiment is over, take some time to ponder—what did you learn about them? About their genre/medium? About yourself? Did you find it a worthwhile foray? Would you be willing to do it again with a different creative?
Stay curious and take care, Loralee
Speaking for myself, as a formalist - - a poet who focuses on CRAFT - - the poetry books that delight me the most are the ones in which poets have used formal verse in inventive ways and have mastered rhetoric and metaphor. When I see flat-footed prose masquerading as "poetry," I will close the book.