by Creating art is not just a hobby, it is a way of life. But how can you nurture a more artistic existence? Artists share their tips on how to be more creative.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to draw
Helen Cammock was one of the 2019 Turner Prize winners and says she had no artistic tendencies as a child, despite being the daughter of an art teacher. “Just because you can’t draw something in a representative way doesn’t mean you’re not creative,” she says. Cammock, who lives in North Wales, works in “film, photography, print, performance, writing and text”. She is hopeful that art lessons at school have changed and focus less on representational drawing and painting.
It’s never too late to create
Cammock was 35 when she began studying art, after a 10-year career as a social worker. She says it’s important to keep challenging ourselves by trying new things. “The older we get as adults, the less comfortable we are with taking risks. If you think about the kinds of things we did as kids and tried as teenagers, they somehow escape you and risk-taking is not a space you can inhabit. There is something about allowing yourself to try things and not have expectations about what you will produce.” Cammock is now taking trumpet lessons: “I will never be a wonderful trumpet player, but it is important for me to open myself to new things throughout my life.” Anne Ryan, an Irish artist who works in painting, ceramics and sculpture, took up tap dancing for a similar reason. “I suck at it, but I come out glowing and feeling like I’ve spread some love,” she says. That energy fuels her art.
Find your space
Or your “container,” as Cammock calls it. “A container for me is walking. It is a way of being in a particular space, emotionally, psychologically and intellectually. And that could be in the mountains or walking through London to get to a meeting instead of taking the tube. I drive long distances in silence, and those are some of the most fruitful moments, this container in the car, where no one else can see me, no one else is with me. It could be a desk you have in a busy house, or it could be a window, or it could be in the bathroom. I think people do it in their gardens, if they have them, or on their balconies. “It’s about giving yourself time and space where you are somehow in your own head.”
Move
Another walker is East London-based Babak Ganjei, who travels on foot as much as he can in search of inspiration for his text-based paintings. “All thinking happens as we move,” he says. “In fact, I find it very difficult to sit still. When I sit down and try to think about things, I get stuck trying to figure out if I’m really thinking.” Ryan says he moves constantly in the studio: “I’m very physical when I make; “It’s like the music goes through my body.” Alberta Whittle, a Barbadian-Scottish artist, says that when she lacks inspiration she dances: “Sometimes, I really need to move my body and shake things up, so hosting a solo dance party can be a big help.”
Understand the importance of looking
“The only thing you really learn in art school is to look,” says Ganjei, who studied at Central Saint Martins in London. “Being creative is about looking at the world and taking in information in a different way,” Ryan says. “Whether you are a poet, painter or writer, to make it work you have to get outside of yourself.” Portrait painter Stuart Pearson Wright, who lives in Suffolk, says: “It’s really about taking the time to stop and look at things. And whether it’s observing things in a visual world, hearing things, or spending time in nature, it’s about finding sources of inspiration.”
Keep an idea notebook or sketchbook.
Cammock has an idea book on the go all the time and when he doesn’t have access to it, like at night, he uses his phone to take notes. Whittle also writes things down after going to bed: “I wake up with ideas or fragments of dreams related to whatever I’m working on and I need to get them out of my head and onto the page. I have a terrible memory, so I find my notebooks or scrap paper useful for writing things down at night or in my dreams.” Pearson Wright says: “I feel more comfortable taking a sketchbook to the pub. Then, if I don’t know what to talk about, I can just draw people.” Mental notes are also valid. “I don’t take as many notes as I should,” Ganjei says. “It’s almost like I trust the ones that stay… My brain is what eliminates them.”
Don’t put pressure on yourself to produce
Ryan teaches basic and undergraduate art and is about to start a new sculpture course. One of the fundamentals that he tells his students is: “It’s not about going into the studio to make a painting, because then you never do it. But it’s going in to read a book or play with things. Don’t try to do something or it just won’t happen.” Cammock says, “What I’ve learned is that the best thing for me is to take the pressure off and do something else, and trust that it will happen; it always does.”
Be inspired by others, but know when to look the other way
“It’s always wonderful to talk to artists, go to galleries and be part of that community,” says Ryan, “but when I’m making, there’s a point where you look really hard and there’s a point where you have to stop and look at yourself. ”.
Learn about the history of art.
“The thing about artists is that they absorb other artists,” Ryan says. “So if you look back at, say, Cézanne and El Greco, you become part of that timeline and it’s part of your history. I tell students to look back and create a family, whether it’s something from the 18th century or any other era. Shrink your world in a good way. You start to see cultures and ideas throughout the ages very differently, because you start to place yourself there.” His style may be reminiscent of what preceded him. For a time, Ganjei worked on the text “Not David Shrigley.” “It’s pretty hard to know when something has influenced you or when it’s your original idea,” says Ganjei, “because if you’ve found something that simple, it almost always existed.”
Consume another culture too
Ganjei loves listening to comedy podcasts while hitting the sidewalks; At the moment, Conan O’Brien is one of the favorites. He also watches a lot of stand-up. Ryan goes to concerts, from female punk bands like Panic Shack to folk reminiscent of the music he grew up with. Whittle appreciates when “family and friends send me links to articles and posts, it can really change how I feel about myself and my work. I love a good meme!
Use mistakes to your advantage
“Trust yourself,” says Whittle. “A lot of time is wasted worrying about making something that is perfect. Perfection is overrated and mistakes are usually much more interesting.” Ganjei shudders as he remembers his disastrous A-level art painting exam that took him from an A to a C. “But I’m realizing that as I get older, I can use that paint on something else; It’s a funny story. The paint is horrible but there is something else elsewhere. Your mistakes could be positive in another way.”
Learn to love your own company
“One of the essential things about creating is that you like being alone because we spend a lot of time alone,” Ryan says.
Calculate what time of day you enter the area
“I’m a morning person,” Whittle says, “but I’m a bit obsessive, so it can be very difficult to get away from whatever I’m working on and I can end up working into the wee hours of the morning.” Ryan says he can be in the studio all day, but it’s not until the evening when he really gets going: “There’s a preparation to get to that point in the zone. For me, between 5 and 5:30 p.m. is the turning point.”
Create close to home
Pearson Wright usually works until midnight. “I feel creative all the time,” he says. It helps that his studio is next to his house. His children are at his study desk when they come home from school, making their own art, so they can spend time together while he works.
Work work work
Artists don’t really switch off. Pearson Wright describes a period last year when he realized that he had worked six months straight without a single day off. “It’s like a flow I can’t turn off,” she says. “My problem is that I have so many projects and schemes in my brain. And I think that’s why I’m such a workaholic because if I sat down now and started working on the ideas in my head without new ones coming up, I could work until the day I die and not complete half of they. I want to build a half-scale copper Routemaster bus and fill it with figures; that would probably take two or three years; I want to make a copperhead 25 meters high and place it in Lowestoft, overlooking the North Sea; I want to make a series of paintings about the M25 set in the 1980s on five meter long canvases that come together and surround a huge gallery space. I come up with new ideas all the time and each idea can take six months or two years, so I will never be able to catch up.”
Do something creative every day.
Even if you’re a little less prolific, it can be helpful to commit to one creative act every day. But how can you achieve this? “Putting the phone aside is a good start,” says Pearson Wright. “Keeping a sketchbook can be a good thing. I taught myself to draw by drawing people on trains and buses, which can be a bit of a dangerous occupation. But certainly try to draw every day. Within the visual arts, that is a very good discipline.”
Talk to strangers
“Have a conversation with a stranger,” says Whittle. “Your world and your knowledge will open up as you hear a different worldview, even if you don’t agree with them.”
Don’t force creativity
If you’re struggling, Whittle recommends taking a break to restore your creative flow. “Getting out of the house or studio, watching the world go by, or calling a loved one can release a lot of tension until you’re ready to do it again. Near my studio there is a community organization with a choir, and if I do well I can go out and hear them sing, which really changes my energy.”
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If all else fails, do nothing
Ryan explains: “Once you let everything into your life, it’s not like, ‘Oh, I’m going to draw now, I’m going to paint.’ I mean, obviously you do that. But it’s more about looking, or sitting with your mouth open looking outwards, letting go and giving yourself a break. Sometimes you don’t have to do anything to do it… and suddenly something happens, whether you’re tearing up two pieces of paper, like I just did, and gluing them together differently. Give yourself a break and don’t allow yourself to do anything to make something happen.”
Be creative without realizing it
Cammock believes that even non-artists live creatively. “Everyone works creatively to survive life,” she says. “The families I worked with as a social worker were working creatively to survive. So we all have it; It’s not something special that only certain people have. It’s part of the human experience.”
