Remembering My Inner Artist
This is the first instalment in a series that I’ll be sharing over the year. It is an explanation, an invitation, and an exploration in itself.
Over the past year, I’ve felt a strong calling to remember my inner artist.
Coming to read this through my music page, a space dedicated to sharing my art, might seem odd. So, let me explain what I mean through two particular elements of artistic expression: creation and sharing. By no means exhaustive or all-encompassing as a definition, these are two elements that I have learned to be very important to my inner artist. When one is out of balance with the other, a myriad of feelings emerge. Illegitimacy, shame, unfulfillment, envy, inadequacy, resentment, inferiority, desire, yearning…
Noticing this imbalance, I made a deal with myself during 2020 lockdown not to post on any social media. A strange thing to do when online content was one of the only ways for artists to engage with community and audiences, I did so because I found that I was no longer creating art, but merely ‘content’. In every chord I played, every note I sang, every lyric that fluttered through my head, every flower I watered, a niggling anxiety in the back of my mind was present. Each moment of potential inspiration was clouded and, ultimately, extinguished by the haze of a potential photo opp, social media post, the next single, the next perfect lyric.
After taking time to reconnect with my creative expression, without the looming threat of witness, a few things happened. No longer limiting myself to being ‘a musician’, I found my lost inner artist in places I didn’t expect: in decorating my birthday cake, cutting herbs for dinner, waking up slowly, turning the garden soil, experiencing my bedsheets, walking with a raised gaze. I let myself sing without the anxious rush to capture a witty one-liner or elaborate an entire radio edit. I felt the gift of transience. I sunk into the treasures left by great songwriters before me and revelled in them without ego.
I spent a lot of time away from my guitar. In the last year, I’ve barely finished a single new song. To admit that is both scary and liberating because, even so, 2020 was one of the most pivotal years of my creative exploration. Taking away the pressure to share reignited my curiosity to create… to play, to explore, to dream, to nurture, in the most innocent and fleeting way possible. Taking away the pressure to perform my artist, I was able to remember my inner artist.
This experience returned my desire to create and to share, not only the products but the processes; in their infancies, in the thoughts that birth them, in their rawness, authenticity, and incompleteness.
I want to talk about the validity of art, the value of art, the need for art, the luxuries and privileges of art, the struggles and challenges of art, the responsibilities, consequences, the danger, and the therapy of art. I want to sing, write, read, learn, sow, grow, sleep, talk, capture, collaborate, self-fulfil and gift.
I want to feed my drive to create, balance it with a genuine desire to share, and, every day, to remember my inner artist.