Dog days (Patreon)

Sorry that the posts have slowed down a bit over the last few weeks. The hot weather has made sketching very difficult, there has been a hill of difficult personal matters to get over recently, and I am mostly writing at the moment, which leaves me with very little visual stuff to showcase here. 

In addition, I've been away from home for a protracted period, so I can't do a sketchbook trawl. Even if my arms grew by the 200 miles necessary to access my sketchbooks, I would struggle to direct them past the obstacles in the way, through my front door, and up the stairs to my office. And if I could do that, I would not be able to see the pages in order to scan the correct ones. Margaret Atwood invented the "long pen" but she has yet to finish up her designs for the "long arm" and your Patreon experience is somewhat the poorer for it. I will be home and able to dig in next week.

I was reminded this morning, though, of one of my useful thoughts that I try to pass on when people ask me for advice. If you have ever spent time with a bright young child, you will have no doubt been delighted/infuriated by their almost relentless torrent of great ideas and concepts. My own nephew, who is now nine, and on the cusp of the sort of self-awareness that begins to narrow this flow of genius, will fire, as a bare minimum, one brilliant series title or quantum leap of juxtaposition per visit. I write them down, but I never use or reveal them, as no doubt he will need them one day.

But what is adult creativity but an all-too rare preservation of this channel of ideas? As teenagers, it narrows, as we realise that our juvenile efforts do not measure up to the professional work we admire, directing all our increasingly limited time and energy towards attempting to master the skill set that will turn us into those professionals - or at least a recognisable facsimile thereof. We begin to duplicate these templates, rather than listening to the mad infant voice inside us. 

But the older I get, with skills that are enough to get by if seldom to dazzle, the more I realise that the primal creativity of early youth, powered by curiosity, flexibility, and the willingness to accept vast tranches of new thought without resistance, is the only way to stay interested, and vital, into middle age and beyond. "Correctness" has commercial value but it is creatively worthless past a certain point. 

You need to keep the red nuclear phone line to the child within at all costs. Not by slavishly sticking to the things you liked when you were eight, but by searching for the feeling of being blown away by something new that made you like those things in the first place.