What's Your Creative Truth- Staying true to Your Artistry!
The most common question that I get all the time, is if I was to choose which art form that I loved the most what would it be? I usually answer is that I don’t really hold one over the other. Ever since I could remember as a kid, I have always been involved in writing, painting and performing. In high school I was in the Creative Writing Club, the Cinema Club, I was in the theatre plays, and took art classes all four years of high school. Carry on to college and I started off as a double major in Theatre, and Studio Arts. I have always done all three. Now of course I have my dry months of creative blocks, as artists we all do. However if I wasn’t doing it, I was surrounded by it. I’d see a play, go to a new gallery opening, and read more books in the same subject matter that I wrote. I guess in a subconscious way I was sticking to my very own creative truth.
It’s so common amongst society to be labeled into a particular category. A+B = C, therefore D cannot be an option. What is always hilarious to me is that most artists usually are capable of doing more than one art form, but are only really acknowledged for one.
I have seen many of my fellow artists’ friends, sacrifice one form of their artistry for the other. Just to make it. I guess for me, I refuse to settle. Plus as I grew older and learned about becoming an entrepreneur, I was taught about branding. So I decided that I would brand myself the way I would like others to see me. So I am LE BohemianMuse: The Artists with Multiple Personalities. I gave my creative truth a quirky spin, so it would be easier to swallow the fact that you’re going to see me as all that I am. Honestly I am only choosing (3) to share, if I reveled the others, people might have a panic attack.
Hence, if I were to pass a message to any other artists out there, that feels that they need to remix their creative truth to fit in. Don’t. Fitting in takes your creative power away from you, many of the great artists in the past that we acknowledge today aren’t known for fitting in. They are known for sticking out. Think of visual artists, like a Van Gough, Picasso, Jackson Pollack, Cy Twombly, Georgia o’ Keefe, or musicians like Prince, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Nirvana. Writers like Shakespeare, Sylvia Path, Helen Keller, Langston Hughes, Dr. Seuss, Maya Angelou, and so much more! Here is my impromptu idea for the week: Write down what you regard as your Creative Truth- Sometimes this can be translated as a mission statement or personal statement. Then choose (3) artists/inventors/scientist/creative people, that you look up to, and seek out their story, see how they were able to stick to their creative truth.
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson