Artists and creatives

Creativity begins with the freedom to be yourself

You finish the record, the collection, the show. The reviews come in, or they don't. Within a week you're asking what's next, as if the last thing never happened. Or what people now expect of you has made you careful, and the work has stopped feeling like yours.

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I spent fifteen years as and among those who make things, in London and Los Angeles: in advertising agencies, at a music festival, and running my own fashion label. I know the excitement of a possibility before it has a form, the pleasure of craft, and how much can hang on whether an idea lives up to what you imagined. I also know how a creative identity can take over a life.

The person behind the work

Your work may be admired, shared and discussed while the person who made it feels strangely unknown. You may have become very good at knowing how your work will land, and less able to tell what you want when there's no audience. It might be a block. It might be successful work that no longer moves you. It might be a relationship, sex, grief, money, envy, or a feeling of being lost.

You can be bored, childish, dependent, angry, frightened or delighted here. You can resent the audience you worked so hard to find.

Making and Focusing

There's a moment in making things that fascinates me. You sense that something is possible and can't yet say what. You try a word, an image, a movement, a shape. Not quite. Then something fits.

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Focusing works with the same kind of attention, turned toward your life: a feeling, a wish or a direction that isn't ready for language yet. We give it the time it needs, without asking it to prove itself by what it produces.

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I want to know what matters to you when nobody is asking whether it's interesting, original or good. The question that matters in making, and in here, is whether it feels right to you, before anyone else weighs in.