Creating in conversation
Slow Studio Sunday
Most artists I know tend to be multi-passionate and wear many hats in both life and business. Whether I’ve been supporting myself with my own business or working full time, it often takes intention to keep myself rooted in my own creative practice.
It’s so easy to give to others, sometimes harder to give back to ourselves. It can feel like our creative sensibilities have gone stale or dormant.
For me, the antidote has been creating in conversation. Like a friend you can go a long stretch without talking to but pick up right where you left off, these conversations help spark my creativity and wake me back up, especially in seasons where the time I can devote to my creative practice is a little more sporadic or hard to come by.
Ways to find conversation within your practice
Creating alongside: Influence feels like a dirty word since it so often paired with the oversaturation of Instagram or Pinterest, images without context, illuminated by screen light, flowing and echoing. But artists have long created amidst larger movements and happenings, and acknowledging that can be powerful. Intentional awareness shapes our influence, rather than cheap imitation when we are not mindful or aware.
I enjoy putting on a virtual drawing class or still life session, less following steps and more drawing with company. September’s Slow Creation Session: The Power of Play is offered in this spirit—an invitation for you to set a space for yourself to create alongside; I’m in conversation with you and the page as I find flow and intention.
Welcome to Slow Sessions
You can join our Seasonal Slow Sessions during the first month of each season! I’ll post the date and time in advance so you can save the spot on your calendar.
Soon, members of Slow Flow Studio will gather for real-time conversation and exploration too. We’ll have the chance to share the threads we’re gathering and following, the questions and curiosities that become more tangible when voiced in companionship.
You’re invited to learn more and join us below:
Your Invitation to Slow Flow Studio
This Routine to Ritual newsletter began simply as a way to document my process so that I might better honor it, and has evolved as a place where I can create in conversation with fellow artists, to share possibilities for creative practice, and document ways to nurture creative practices to ground, nurture, and inspire us.
In conversation with books, museums, other artists: I keep company with letter archives from artists and writers, and a museum dedicated to just one person’s work can be so telling. I display case with an artist’s sketchbooks feels like a peek into how their trains of thought that often spark my own.
Anything can be a part of the conversation as you go about your everyday life, open to the ideas and through lines that might appear.
We have to sometimes tune out the imagined voices of critics, or loud opinions that might dampen our own instincts when the work feels new or tender. But we can also seek intentional community and foster actual conversations that will buoy us even in our quiet solo work.
Engaging your past self and work: When we create anew, we are also in conversation with what’s come before; we can step into iteration, treading down the familiar path and veering just slightly. I like to open old sketchbooks and surround myself with the bits I want to carry forward even as I try something new.
At some point, the voices do quiet and we enter into a space beyond conversation—but the initial chatter can provide the pathway to enter amiably with enough to guide us forward.