VISION / VALUES
Where I’m coming from

CIVIC DUTY & THE POLITICS OF CREATIVITY

The creativity we’re each born with is undermined by our cultural norms in a number of increasingly insidious ways — starting in childhood, then worsening and calcifying through adulthood. I see it as a political act — a form of psychic and spiritual violence — to interfere with children’s access to this facet of consciousness that is such a deep resource and a defining characteristic of our humanity. The discouragement of creativity starts pretty young, usually at school and/or at home. It’s often folded into gendered socialization and conditioning involving the repression of the authentic self.

Having a population largely estranged from its own creativity is something I see as a goal of patriarchy, straight white supremacist colonialism, consumerist capitalism, and now technofeudalism. It disconnects us from our authentic power, our true nature, our deeper intelligence, and from Nature itself – with serious and dangerous consequences that can be observed all around.

Therefore, I consider my own acts of creation (however small) and/or my support of other people’s creativity (however directly or indirectly) to be political acts as well; countermeasures against the myriad abusive, destructive, and anti-creativity forces affecting my own life, other people’s lives, and our planet as a whole.

Creativity is, among other things, an inner mechanism/capacity for curiosity, connection, imagination, vision, healing, nonconformity, and noncompliance!

That’s why I believe it’s a civic duty — if we are able — to remove obstructions (psychological, cultural, practical, political) blocking the flow of our own and each other’s creativity and its expression via the arts and other outlets.

BEING SCRAPPY / FIRST HAND PRACTICE & EXPERTISE

I don’t have an art degree.

I took whatever classes I had access to in high school and college, and then mainly relied on independent, DIY, therapeutic, and community-based resources to solidify my artistic development (and help cure my depression) after that. And that’s why I’m passionate about the fact that you don’t need a studio, a degree, endless free time, or a trust fund in order to cultivate or reclaim your creativity. I’ve been facing blank pages and filling them up — thousands and thousands of them — with my own art and writing for over 25 years — while working random low-paying day jobs and facing a variety of hardships.

For me, Expressive Art, creative practices, healing the effects of Complex Trauma through writing and the arts, etc = My actual life, since the late 1990s. By which I mean that, for me, it’s not a concept, modality, degree program, or something that I learned “about” from academic gatekeepers. It’s who I am and how I live. I know it from the inside.

CYCLE-BREAKING
*I get more into my early activist orientation in my “about” narrative.

Choosing to be in recovery from Complex Trauma [resulting from narcissistic family abuse, a microcosm of our narcissistic abusive culture] and centering creativity & the arts in that recovery process is a commitment to cycle-breaking that has made my adult life and timeline very different from that of most of my peers. My journey started in my 20s, in the margins, long before the mass adoption of social media, smartphones, and AI – a generation before “therapy speak” and trauma-informed resources and public-facing therapeutic education about things like healthy relationships, sexual abuse, emotional neglect, normalized narcissism (individual, family, systemic), family estrangement issues, etc. These things weren’t named, unpacked, or in the zeitgeist when I was first doing the work. “Going no-contact” was not even a term that existed when I did it, and I knew very few people who had experience with such things.

The Artist’s Way course book, plus trauma therapy [independent of the mental health industrial complex], plus disengaging from my family of origin were the primary three processes that really got things moving for me, creatively speaking, back then. None of those individual elements would have been as effective, successful, or transformative without the other two!

IMPROVISATION

My visual art practices — whichever medium or techniques I’m using — are typically rooted in improvisation. I investigate the dance between choice and chance, seeing what imagery wants to reveal itself once I make contact with the materials and we begin a back-and-forth. My work is never consciously “about” anything while I’m making it, which helps me maintain a playful, curious approach.

I believe that practicing and developing improvisation skills in some form is critical for anyone who wants to stay engaged with and responsive to a world that’s changing faster (and weirder) than perhaps we had anticipated.

WHY?
I make art, and I fill journals (160+ and counting), and I fill sketchbooks to: be present, to metabolize life, to have fun, to take a regular inventory of my inner life, to see and feel time passing, to practice improvisation, to discover new things, to prevent myself from being a huge asshole, to connect with the larger forces of Nature/Creation/Mystery, to exercise my capacity to MAKE / DO / FINISH things of my own accord, to keep myself company, to soothe loneliness, to access regular inner fulfillment, to counteract consumerism, to reclaim my attention, to rebuild and expand my sense of self… So many reasons!