Please get in touch if you have any thoughts or
responses to the subjects I write about, or about our
events. I'd love to hear what's been useful or
interesting, or downright annoying...
What’s the worst thing we can do to ourselves as
creatives? Compare our work to others? Compare ourselves
to people we perceive to be more successful, more
talented, more driven?
I’ve been thinking about this for a few reasons
recently. The first was when I was wandering around the
Kandinsky exhibition (at the Tate Modern) last weekend.
One of my most powerful childhood memories is the first
time I saw Kandinsky’s paintings at the Neure Pinacotec
in Munich. I was twelve years old, and completely
mesmerised by art for the first time in my life. It was
as if the colours and shapes and sheer energy of the
images impacted on me physically, and I’ve never
forgotten the experience. His work still influences the
way I paint and more specifically the way I relate to
colour and structure in my work.
Seeing his paintings again at the Tate made me
realise how relevant and inspirational it still is for
me, but I was surprised by a couple of things. Firstly
discovering (not being the kind of person who generally
reads artist biographies, being too busy looking at the
pictures), that Kandinsky was 30 before he even began
painting, and secondly that the inspiration for him
doing so was in part his synesthetic response to a piece
of music. In effect he began to paint in order to
express his visual experience of a beautiful sound.
It made me think about how much time I waste berating
myself about what I have not yet achieved creatively,
comparing myself unfavourably (as a painter in my
thirties) with whatever wunderkind happens to catch the
eye of the critics. I wondered if Kandinsky might have
done something similarly unhelpful. There are probably
faster ways to self- sabotage yourself creatively, but
I’m yet to find them. But, it also made me think that I
have something else in common with Kandinsky, the way
that I connect sound and image, and take inspiration
from one to the other, and that cheered me up.
A conversation with a coaching client this week also
brought the topic of creative comparisons into sharper
focus. We were discussing the way it is sometimes when
in the midst of struggling for a really good metaphor,
what you get instead is someone else’s image, someone
else’s brilliance, and with it, the sense that you will
never be quite as good as that ‘someone else’.
Its hard to avoid the trap of using another’s
inspirational work as a stick to beat yourself with, but
when you take a deep breath, appreciate the brilliance
of what you are experiencing, you allow your own stream
of creativity to flow from the point of contact.
What does it make you think of or feel?
How are you responding to the other person’s ideas?
Are they similar to yours, or contrasting?
What would you have done instead?
What does it make you want to achieve and how are you
going to get there?
