It’s all very well creating, making – doing – but what happened once the creative process has concluded? Put it another way – ‘what’s the point?’. This is a question that many people- not just creatives – have to wrestle with on a regular basis – a quest for purpose and meaning to justify their activities. Poor mental health and conditions associated with unhappiness can almost certainly be correlated with lifestyles and routines that lack purpose, satisfaction or meaningful output. For the creative, the sense of ‘why are you doing this’ is as fundamental as ‘how are you doing this’ (essentially the unique skills that you have spent your life sharpening that have allowed you to lead a creative career).
At this stage, all I am willing to do is lift the corner of the first page of that giant volume – the question of ‘why’ – by sharing a small exercise in composition. Having spent the last few years exploring analogue photography with my humble 35mm Russian point and shoot, I have amassed a small library of photos for which no immediate purpose seems to exist. Taken under the umbrella of a variety of different projects, but mostly a wider scheme known as ‘The Parables of Nick the Baptist’, they seem to lack coherent subject or theme. As such, they are fairly purposeless, but in that there is a magical potential that allows them to ‘speak freely’ in a variety of semiotic contexts.
And sometimes, you just have to loosen the shackles of serious intention, turn your back on deliberate conscious creativity and fuck about a bit. Just have a go. See what happens. This is a useful strategy if you are willing to be un-precious about the result. This isn’t supposed to be great. It is not supposed to address anything grand or thought-provoking. In fact it doesn’t really address anything at all. What it does do, in my opinion, is raise a smile. It has a sort of humour that I tend to seek out in others’ work, and that I seldom achieve in my own. It is a small exercise – a sketch – and nothing more.
Enjoy!
