A few years ago, I wrote a piece on finding your creative voice. It’s a topic I come back to more often than I’m comfortable admitting—in the reality of life and work and family and health, I sometimes spend more time thinking about art than actually making it. This inevitably leads to a tendency to intellectualise the whole process, rather than what I actually want to be doing, which is living it.
In previous writing I’ve referred specifically to finding your voice, like a creative voice is something that is just sitting there, fully formed, waiting for you to turn over the right stone to uncover it.
A creative voice isn’t found; it’s developed. And the only way to develop it is by doing.
All the time I’ve spent pouring over my work (and the work of others) trying to find the elusive threads that hold it all together, because I thought if I knew what my voice was, I’d have direction and purpose and everything else would fall into place. Procrastination is spending forever in the planning stage and never taking action, but why am I procrastinating on doing something I love?
As children, creativity seems to come innately. It’s born of the curiosity we have, a way of exploring and discovering the world, but it also comes from a lack of expectation. When I was younger, I never thought about what my artistic identity was. I made something, and when I finished, I made something else. As we get older, we are told to grow up, to put imagination away. Only the naturally talented or elite, who might be able to make something of it, are encouraged to continue with art, sport or other recreational activities. Life becomes a serious pursuit, with no room for play.
Every artist I know is an artist because they are compelled to create. It’s a part of their being, as necessary as eating and sleeping and breathing. In her essay “Of Power and Time”, Mary Oliver writes “There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done…. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” And yet it seems that in choosing to spend time making, we must also justify it. The first questions I’m almost always asked when I say I’m a photographer are “where have you exhibited?” and “have you won any awards or been published?” or “do you make money from it?”.
While I have become more comfortable with the idea of pursuing art simply because my sensitive soul requires it, there is a lingering idea that if I am to be a proper artist, I must have something worth saying and a clearly refined way of saying it. A singular creative voice that defines my work.
How incredibly boring and unfulfilling to think that I would only ever be allowed one way to express myself, when I could instead be building and changing and growing as I go.
Everything is a practice in creativity and life. This idea that you tick off a list of goals and then you’ve made it ignores the richness of experience, of making mistakes, of being allowed to change your mind as you learn new things and of being able to hold and encompass all the nuances and contradictions of being human. The work itself, is the point. If you are continually striving for the end product, a finished piece, a cohesive portfolio, a clear voice, you miss the most gorgeous part of the process which is found in the doing. The meditation of awareness, the loss of time in a flow state, even the frustration when nothing seems to work. The finding of yourself, in deeper places you didn’t know existed.
And yes, having a strong creative voice has benefits. Having solid ground to stand on means you are less likely to be swayed or distracted by the next shiny new thing. But maybe exploration is the point. Maybe it is about diving into all the possibilities, including all the rabbit holes and wrong turns, to see what truly speaks to you. We only know what we know unless we open ourselves up to the unknown.
This act of discovery only exists in the making. To think that you will ever be fully formed removes the essence of what art is about: creation, expression, exploration. Being an artist is a somewhat otherworldly experience—the sensitivity to see and notice, the ability to feel deeply, the openness to let something flow through you, and the skill to shape it into a new form. It requires dedication. It requires showing up, over and over.
“Of this there can be no question—creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. A person trudging through the wilderness of creation who does not know this—who does not swallow this—is lost. He who does not crave that roofless place eternity should stay at home. Such a person is perfectly worthy, and useful, and even beautiful, but is not an artist.”
Mary Oliver – Of Power and Time (from Upstream : Selected Essays)
I don’t know why I feel the need to define things. My brain likes order, to know where it stands. I am half analytical, half intuition, and they are at odds all the time, spinning in circles of questions with no answers. I started this essay thinking about creative voice, but what I’m finding is that it doesn’t really matter.
Pick up the camera, even if you don’t know yet what to point it at. Follow every thread of curiosity, every feeling that thinks maybe something is worth your attention. Dump all your thoughts obsessively onto a page with no regard for cohesion or structure. Read books, watch films, go to galleries, and let it all marinate in the creative corners of your mind. Be messy and contradictory and flawed and human. This is the work, attentive, open, and unresolved.