July: Illustrating the Possible

Next week I am leaving for a 6-week trip to Norway and Sweden. I haven’t been on an airplane since before Covid, and the travel muscles feel like they have lost quite a bit of strength. Making an itinerary feels very out of practice, and for better or for worse, I’m going into it with what feels like a fairly loose plan and trusting that things will fall in place as we adventure. Now that I think of it, this is the “creative process” version of traveling: acknowledge the unknown, allow yourself to wind along the path, get yourself into the flow of things, see where you end up. Just be sure the passport and wallet are packed. Maybe a rain jacket and a sketchbook too. You know, essentials.

Part of that trip is taking part in a creative residency on an island above the Arctic Circle (thank you Hannah!). I’ve been trying to wrap up loose ends so that I can mostly focus on being while I am on that trip, which means that the last few weeks have been more about getting through to-do lists than making art. I am not entirely joking when I say that in the last month, aside from a couple of commissions, my main hands-on art activity was painting stripes on pieces of paper that I turn into bookmarks (used for adding to shop orders). 

I can feel that I’ve been missing a regular art practice, and the promise of time to sit and think, write, draw, and create feels like an absolute luxury. I’ve been thinking about what art supplies to pack—enough to feel like I can experiment, but not too many so I can keep the luggage light—but I’ve also been trying to remove the pressure of making any one “thing.” I’m still mulling over whether I take my cutting mat and blade or not. I feel like I need a little break from paper, that I need a little creative cross-training instead. Mostly I feel that what I am really needing is a perspective shift, a chance to think about how to do things differently. 



When it comes to creative pursuits, it’s easy to get stuck in the things we do well, or what we know how to do. After all, there’s great comfort in experience. We can also easily get stuck only doing things that facilitate and fuel a profession or a business. We pitch what we think people will want to read, we design what a customer wants for a commission, we post a piece of work we hope fuels the algorithm and brings some more traffic to our online shop. Knowing your market and what works is often necessary for running a business, but from a creative inspiration perspective, it can get exhausting very quickly. It doesn’t feel liberating, or magical, or wild, or any of those other big emotions that can come with the creative process. 

I guess mostly what I am craving with this upcoming residency is to bring some of that back, to open things up a little bit to something bigger, something where all kinds of things are possible. Because that type of thinking is essential to creativity. It is essential for creating beauty and it’s essential for asking questions. It’s essential for envisioning a different path forward, a different way of doing things. And that’s why we need creativity in the first place. 

As James Baldwin wrote in his 1962 essay "The Creative Process," "The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”

I recently watched an episode of the series “Home,” which featured the work of Theaster Gates in creating community on Chicago’s South Side (as a sidenote, check out his design of this year’s Serpentine Pavilion). An interdisciplinary artist, the episode really exemplified Gates’ ability to think big, to problem solve, to meet a need in a creative way and built something robust in the process. As he told The Guardian in an article about the community buildings that he has reimagined in Chicago, “It is not just about this community. I am invested in illustrating the possible. So that other people might think: ‘OK, that works.’ People with more means, other artists in other places.” 

That is to say: making art can is often a process of hope, of illuminating not what is but what is possible.

And that’s what we really need art for, particularly in dark times. There’s a lot to be mad about right now, a lot to be overwhelmed by, a lot to be incredibly sad about. But we don’t always have the energy to meet that head on. We’re not always able to be in the streets, not always able to show up in the ways we would like to. But as Katherine May wrote recently in her newsletter, “if nothing else, keep making the world beautiful. Keep singing and dancing, drawing and planting gardens. This is no insignificant thing in the face of a movement that wants to make everything plain and ugly, cruel and sour. There is radicalism in refusing to judge. There is radicalism in listening. There is radicalism in saying, gently, ‘That’s not how I see it.’”



When it comes to art, while the medium you choose may show your mastery and your ability, it’s not always the how that matters. It’s the why. It’s the seeing part that all three of these people are talking about. It’s the larger context that we build through creativity, it’s the collective experience of art and culture. It’s the stories that we share, and the stories that those inspire. It’s the seeds that we plant, unsure of exactly how they will grow. It’s the questions that we ask, and the answers that try to find. It’s envisioning something different that challenges us to get out of our usual path.

Make art, create beauty. If only to envision something different. Let us open ourselves up to something larger, something unknown, something hopeful. In the words of Mariame Kaba, “hope is a discipline.” And if we practice at that, perhaps we can all work at illustrating what is possible. 

-Anna

p.s. My Big Cartel column this month is about why we all need summer breaks

p.s.s. I'm putting my shop on a summer break on Monday! That means that you have through midnight on Sunday to put in any orders. Here is an extra special discount for Creative Fuel readers: use the code "lasthurrah" for 30% off all orders though the weekend. Good until 11:59pm PT on Sunday July 10, 2022.