Art By Candlelight

I have a strange fascination with combining candles and other forms of light with works of art.  It staggers me that galleries always stick to the conventional method of curating art on white walls in stark light.  I once staged an underground exhibition in the dark lit only by candlelight, it was winter and a few weeks until Christmas, so we served people mulled wine and showed them around in small groups by candlelight. It made for an incredibly intimate and beautiful creative social experience, and the music that permeated the walls of the venue from the club next door only seemed to enhance the exotic surreality of the event.

Cosmosis Creativity Cell

These are the three words words that ended up being placed in the centre of a mind-map during a process of  conscious andunconscious self-exploration during a two week process of life reflection.  It was my first significant creative epiphany , and without a doubt one of the strangest, yet most sublime experiences of my conscious life. 

On the basis of this process/experience and the feelings/thoughts that had begun to emerge into my mind during the weeks preceding it,  I decided I had no choice but to resign from my normal Criminal Justice non-profit job. Ideas and thoughts had begun to impinge upon my everyday thinking when I was supposed to be concentrating on work;  My mind was elsewhere.

It was over the next two weeks that after re-assessing my life, past, present , and potential future that I made this mind map, spending a few minutes each evening after writing upon an old board painted white, whatever random thoughts, ideas, or feelings came into my mind with three marker pens that I had bought from the local newsagents, one red, one green, one black.

In order to explain to you fully what happened would take a while, and to explain what has happened to me over the subsequent ten years, would take a book,  extended performance, or film, which is what my family and friends believe I should be working on or towards at the very least.  I must confess, if I was following the conventional procedures of the creative industries. or the art world I would, but I'm not, I'm exploring a multi-dimensional creative process of my own.

I have however, incorporated numerous conventional creative experiences as I have gone along; I enrolled upon a course in the Creative and Cultural Industries for example and studied the design process for a while which I enjoyed,  I tried art courses but they didn't suit me at all, I turned to creative writing but felt stifled by the script, and somehow I then ended up spending three years of my life living in an Art Squat with dozens of others creative nomads in an organic art community. It was this radical experience that was to provide the basis of my revolutionary theory of creativity.

Ultimately, I realized that the separation and specialization of creativity wasn't what brought me to the subject of creativity in the first place, nor was it the chaos and uncoventionalty of my outsider bohemian life, it was an inner, intuitive feeling that had somehow lain dormant within me, and been jolted into life by an inner growing urge to express myself fully within the ordinary process of everyday life, which had increasingly come to feel like the restrictions of a cage around my mind and myself. This is what an uncreative role, in an uncreative job will do. It will gradually creep up and enclose you without you realising that you are not fulfilling your complete creative potential; and if you are one of the few to realise this you may find yoursself too old or too scared to do anyhting about it, job change, personal change, life change is difficult, scary, challenging. The rewards are great but the risk is high. So the majority of people remained unfulfilled at work, and therefore in life, but the lucky ones don't even relaise this because they have not become "creatively conscious", they remain contained in thier own little world of repetitiveness and routine.

I've seen it happen with many people. a friend of mine had a good education, a good job and career for ten years, but it was never what she really wanted to do or be. Suddenly she came to realise that rather than taking the easy option of staying in her a job for the next ten years she had a choice to make a change, but by then she felt so tied into her mortgage, work colleagues, friends and £40,000 a year salary that she was unable to see any way of changing her life into something she really wanted it to be. Most of her friends were mirror images of her, same tastes, same parties, same clothes.  Most of her relatively high salary went to paying of her credits debts that she had built up by massive comfort shopping for expensive clothes and shoes to feel good about her job, her life, and herself. After the temporary highs of self-indulgence she still felt stuck, and even tried a life-counsellor.  This dragged on for two years eventually resulting in a break-down, when she entered real counselling. She used the counselling process a comfort blanket for another two years trying to re-train her mind-set into the State (system) that all was well and her job was not so bad after all. 

Eventually, when it was clear she had to do something, she moved out of the City to live in a more relaxed place, but she took a similar job. Now she is doing the same thing, the same routine, but in a different, nicer  place, and she will never know what her future may have been if she had taken the risk to use her own creativity to re-imagine and develop her own life towards what she felt she was, and could be.

Creativity is about the whole person, the multi-dimensional complexity of being human, and being able to express and develop that each and everyday. If your job, or your life is not allowing you to do that, then it is upto you to consider the change and creativity.

The Creativity Manifesto