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How “What Does The Artist Say” Came to fruition:
I spent a number of days with uncomfortable thoughts about my creativity. Ideas, concepts, and projects would have bodies with no face. They would phase in and out and become either tremendously big or incredibly vague. They would kind of just float up there in my headspace, and I would sink under the weight of them. I would stay up for days and only eat to remind myself I could. My body was suffering something serious. I was grieving. The reason for my grieving is immaterial to the impact it had on my craft. Understand, I didn't know I was grieving, depressed yes, grief, no. The unsteady emotions had a chokehold on me. The feelings were all I wanted to write about and didn't even want to acknowledge at all.
The modus operandi of most artists is to channel every ounce of those screwed up feelings into glorious works. The skilled ones take those broken, unresolved pieces of themselves, and put them into a gut wrenching song or a chapter book. I would stew in the idea of being able to put purpose to the page. However, there was something in the way. Regardless of what I felt I did not have the words. Or should I say the words didn't make sense. Sentences were heartfelt but not congruent, my poetry was abstract to an unrecognizable fault. It was 9:45 at night, I was laying across the floor of my den, looking at photos of my grandfather, in front of his barbershop in Ft. Lauderdale, circa 1997, and it was then I made the decision to move.
I took out an old journal I hadn't had the motivation to write in for months and started to scrawl down every single thought I had as they came. If another thought came whilst I was writing, I'd stop and start to write down that one. I didn't dissect anything I was writing. I didn't stop until organically it felt necessary to do so. It was heavy, writing those unattractive sentiments and unpleasant recollections. Even the beautiful ones gave me pause. But, at the end of it, I found the words. In the midst of the babel I saw the poems, I saw the premise, I understood the roots.
In the thick of my scribing I reflected on conversations I had, had with others during this time. When I was asked if I was “okay”, to avoid having this philosophical, embarrassing, solemn, borderline morbid conversation, I would reply with a palatable yet touching response, that wouldn’t make the interviewer uncomfortable, and for me, did not expose too much. It didn't serve me. I didn't have to tell them but I did need to hear the words out loud. There was exploration and reflection that needed to be cultivated in this time. Both of which I was denying through being contrary. “What does the artist say” is a call and response method to creatives to speak openly and honestly about words and themes that are common in various mediums of artistry. The Analyzing of the meanings and my personal connections to the words I wrote in my journal, like Revival, Redemption, and Rebirth, propelled my pen, and pushed me to truly get to the raw of all that I felt. I found the words. My thoughts soon had both faces and bodies, and they walked out of my headspace to sit beside and create instead.
