Eastside Culture Crawl

Last night I had the great pleasure to meet a bunch of artists involved in the Eastside Culture Crawl to talk social media and how they might use these tools for promotion.

WendyD and the promotions/advertising board are already doing a good job maintaining a website and using twitter to connect the community to artists and the Crawl. Some of the artists are onboard with social media and self-promotion too, and are maintaining blogs and personal websites.

I had a good time and wanted to give a shout-out to the cool people I met last night. Obviously a group who work hard on creative pursuits, they brought great questions and an insight into what matters for artists.

The Rut Discontinued

I rambled on a bit a little while ago about how I’d found myself in a creative rut when it comes to my extraemployular activities.

I managed to break through the wall on Saturday night without even meaning to. That’s led me to a revelation of sorts:

Muses are found where one least expects them, and can affect one in ways that are counterintuitive to say the least.

Duh... right?

Let me explain.

For a long while I’ve considered my then-girlfriend-now-fiancé to be my muse. And in a way she is, just not in the way I expected.

For her I do not want to create great art and music, I want to become a better me. She’s a huge part of the reason I work hard at being a good person in general. In a sense I do all things, small and large, for her. She inspires me to hold down a job, avoid alienating my friends and family, and plan for the future – I have failed miserably at all of these things at one point or another.

What I discovered on Saturday is that I am most inspired to create by a group of my friends. I had a great visit with one of them, a guy nearing forty who despite looking like a goateed thug is one of the biggest softies you’ll ever meet. I love this guy like my brother; we’ve saved each others’ lives more than once.

We drank a little too much and talked our asses off while passing the guitar back and forth, noodling with comfortable old riffs and melodies. After a few hours I found myself playing music that was interesting again, rather than recycling the same old boring lines. I’ve been pouring out ideas since then and it’s the most wonderful feeling.

I found inspiration on Saturday night while drinking with my friend the metalhead. It isn't that he's my muse - that'd be wrong - it's the connection to the creative process that we share.

The deal is, we used to play music together all the time and we’ve developed a kind of synergy where our creative outputs kind of reinforce each other. We had, informally at least, a greater vision of what we created. It’s the most bizarre thing to see because we don’t fit together in many ways, we argue like mad over our preferences for anything from food (marmite, seriously, what the fuck?!?) to music (black metal is not, I repeat NOT good music to wake up to) yet we gel in a way I haven’t found with anyone else.

So maybe that’s it. That touch of symbiosis set off my creative switch. Realizing that someone “gets it”, on a level way beyond simply understanding the concepts, foundations, melodies, structures etc... of what I do, and that I “get” their work, it feels good.

So here’s to you Jimmy-ray! He hates it when you call him that.

Next time I’ll have some scotch on hand – that’s one of the few things we have absolutely no trouble agreeing upon. Yay for punker-trash-turned-metalhead/rootsy-recalcitrant-artists. (that’s art-eeeeeeeeeeeee-sts)

Drought

I look at the guitar but I don't pick it up.
My new strings are still sitting next to my violin.
It's been two weeks since I worked on my last painting.

I am seriously in a creative rut outside of my work. I'm hoping it's just because I'm constantly using that muscle at work. I musiced and arted a lot more when I was fixing computers or working in construction.

It's definitely great having a job that involves so many of my interests, but sometimes I wonder why I've looked for jobs that involve my interests instead of jobs that support my interests in other ways.

I wasn't making amazing money carpentering, drywalling, or painting, but it was enough to get by and my brain was always free to scheme and plan and compose. Now I'm making more but my brain is preoccupied with work.

Is that a trade off I need to accept? I don't think so. I think I just need some new challenges to throw myself into.