When Do We Give Up Our Art?

Ciao Cosmic Soul,

This is a podcast on when do we give up our art? – When do we make a decision to no longer be creative? When do we put down our paintbrushes and crayons? When do we decide that we’ll buy whatever we need and never handmake anything again – or do we perpetually procrastinate over getting back to it one day…?

It is an exciting week as I actually sit down at my easel, following a dense few months away from it. Even after almost 40 years of steady creative practise, there’s a point where – e.g., now having to take my car off the road – even if the Universe is calling me to make Art, the constructed world around me is certainly withholding the reward for doing so! And this in turn, alongside heavy censorship for supposedly making ‘offensive’ posts that ‘go against community values’ – but which are of course, if you know me and my work, actually deeply meaningful, sentient paintings all about vulnerability and consciousness, healing and expansion….

We all make choices to hold back with our creative power; it’s inevitable, in a ‘reality’ where, if we’re not questioning everything all the time, then we are not recognising how our energy is being pulled from us consistently, in multifarious directions. If we do consistently question everything, then slowly-slowly we can begin to feel into how every small choice to accept what is being offered, accumulates into bigger and bigger negative effects of our spirit, power, vitality and wholeness being Eventually, we shut down; we feel numb or apathetic or uninspired to action.

It is a fricking amazing-exciting-beautiful journey getting out of that! As I discuss in this podcast, feeling fully into knowing what it is to be numb, neurotic and un-creative is the optimum stimulus to get us back into our Art – feeling the lack of any one thing (especially something so powerful and natural like our need to fully express ourselves!) is excellent motivation for reclaiming it.

I’ve hugely appreciated time away from my easel – time delving deep into what it would feel like to not create, and to give up all that I’ve made in my life – to just let it gather dust and mould and never share it again, and then consequently to quietly peter out myself…. This was a good exercise: I can now re-enter more fully the entire space that I was made to fill up here!

If you love this podcast, please consider supporting my work via Patreon and the Hive.blog – or sending a supportive tip/ gift via my Gifting page: every centessimo that I earn goes into subsisting co-creatively and gifting all that I make, and especially a steady ‘wage’ via Patreon allows me to pay bills and feed myself!

Love to you my friend – keep in touch!