Do you ever feel like you’re only creative when you have a paintbrush, a camera, or a lump of clay in your hands? It’s time to rethink what it actually means to be a creative person.
In this episode of the Art Crush podcast, hosts Fi Marks and Paula Telizyn are stepping outside the studio to explore a beautiful truth: creativity is absolutely everywhere. From the way you problem-solve at a day job or navigate a conversation, creative energy flows through everything we do.
We are breaking down the myth that art only happens when you are actively making art and discussing how recognizing everyday creativity can deeply fuel your official studio practice.
If you love exploring the broader creative life and are looking for an uplifting podcast about art that speaks to the human experience behind the easel, tune in to this conversation!
00:00:00 Speaker 2: Welcome to Art Crush, the podcast where artists Fi Marks and Paula Telizyn talk about art, the art world, colonialism and art. art institutions and more.
00:00:24 Speaker 2: welcome fee as we talk about another amazing art topic.
00:00:29 Speaker 1: Thank you Paula. It’s such good fun. Our podcast. I look forward to it every time. We just get so excited about what we do.
00:00:36 Speaker 2: Half the time we’re talking. I think, gosh, we should put that in the podcast.
00:00:43 Speaker 1: Exactly. But that’s what podcast should be about, about people being passionate about their subject area.
00:00:50 Speaker 2: Well, I also think about, there are certain sort of structures for podcasts that we have kind of thrown out the window. our listeners are getting a podcast that perhaps I’ve edited out all the ums that I like to put in, but we’re not.
00:01:04 Speaker 1: You know, apparently that’s what I say.
00:01:07 Speaker 2: Yeah, but but we are not actually editing out the conversation. We’re not polishing it up so that when you meet us or if you have have a chance to meet us glorious artists in person, it’s not going to feel like a totally different experience. You are getting us close to unedited but edited for your own sanity. Yeah.
00:01:29 Speaker 1: one hundred percent.
00:01:30 Speaker 2: So we were talking about creativity, in general and artists specifically before we started this podcast. So about the difference between being a creative person and actually being an artist and how that reflects in your life. So you were speaking about being a teacher and how you looked to produce curriculum and the lessons that your students would be engaged with versus just running through a list of things you had to cover.
00:02:00 Speaker 1: as Paula knows, and some of you might. My background initially was in theater and drama, and so I was very much into using drama and art and music, all the arts, as a tool for learning. When I was working in education, and I would be looking all the time for creative ways to engage young people and, get them to through enjoyment, learn more and to also then facilitate their own learning. And so I what I was saying before we started recording was I have always thought that I am a creative. yes, I’m an artist as well. But at heart I am a creative. And we’ve been talking a lot on the podcast about being creative with our businesses, with our art business. Whereas I think people I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, Paula, but I think still the view of people to what an artist is, is somebody who creates images that look like something else is still very much. That’s why so many kids get turned off art in school, because when they paint or draw, even though when they’re three or four, they do amazing, uninhibited paintings. When they get to about six and seven, they suddenly say, oh, I can’t draw anymore. I can’t do that because they get this thing in their head and it never gets erased. It’s not like something they grow out of that. This is what art is. it looks like the landscape. It looks like this animal. It looks like this portrait of this person. education has got a lot to blame for actually trying to work out. And a lot of adults, if you ask them what creativity is and when do you need creativity? Because you need it in every aspect of life, they probably would struggle. I don’t know if I’m saying if that’s unfair. What do you think, Paula?
00:04:10 Speaker 2: one of the things I came across because I spent the first part of my career actually doing computer programming and and a whole bunch of other things in the internet world is people would be like, how can you be an artist and a programmer because they didn’t see the overlap, whereas an artist is a problem solver. How to communicate a certain idea or concept through visual means. And a programmer is the same thing. How to get a computer to do a certain task or certain thing so that people are engaged with it and interact with it appropriately. It’s the same thing that just the details are different. And so I think a lot of people overlook that creativity is in every aspect of of life. I have a amazing family doctor. Absolutely love her. She’s been, my family’s doctor since my youngest was three. So sixteen years? actually, no. Maybe even longer. But she’s been she’s been in the, you know, our our family physician for a long time. And I remember sitting down talking with her several years ago about because she was apologizing that she’s not very creative. She’s just a doctor. You know, she’s in awe of my books and my art and whatever. That’s great. That’s wonderful. But I said to her like, stop. You take somebody who comes in and you look at their pallor, you take their pulse, you listen to what they’re saying, and then you search for a solution creatively to what’s going on with them. With all that knowledge that you have as a physician, how could you exist without being creative? Because you’re immediately running through a list of things and going, this fits, but this angle doesn’t work. Or if this happened, then that would be the result. Like she’s she’s doing it creatively. Diagnosing is just as creative as creating art. I think that we need to understand that that creativity expresses itself differently in different occupations.
00:05:55 Speaker 1: And and this is what makes humans so special is they have this creative muscle. And, you know, we’ve talked a lot about AI and how it’s taking over the arts. It can’t take over the arts completely. Only if people think that’s all art is, something that looks like something else, or is the same as everything else. Generic art AI is not creative. It is taking information and regurgitating it. And there’s far too much of that being taught in schools because that that doesn’t last. People are not going to look at an AI image, and it’s going to be with them for the rest of their lives, because it won’t have that power because there hasn’t been that creative muscle behind it.
00:06:46 Speaker 2: I agree. I came across an interesting article actually this morning on Reddit. Uh, or linked from Reddit. Anyway, where a bunch of Americans were polled about how they would feel if they found out that a, a painting that they loved was AI. And most of them wouldn’t care. It doesn’t it doesn’t change their your opinion of the painting. But then again, those aren’t the people who are necessarily buying art anyway, the audience who was polled and their attitudes towards art, I think are important in the results of the poll.
00:07:16 Speaker 1: Hundred percent.
00:07:17 Speaker 2: But it’s it’s that struggle we get as artists, educating our audiences to understand what’s underneath the painting. Some people get it instinctively. Like if you paint this beautiful landscape and the light’s hitting just so across the trees, people stop and they go, their heart skips a beat. They can feel that power and that passion in the moment. But a lot of people, don’t go beyond that. They don’t understand what’s going on behind that immediate emotion. It’s up to us as artists to to educate our audiences, to take that second and third look to understand what we’re saying. And as you said, an AI can’t do that. you tell an AI to create an image of a woman, looking a little bit serious, and the AI will just gather up whatever the most common thing is. So I went through myself to play games with, trying to get some angles of, portraits of women. Not that I would paint from AI or use AI in that way, but just out of curiosity and playfulness. I’d end up with garbage because the AI was looking for commonality. So I said middle aged woman immediately. She had jowls and gray hair. I’m a middle aged woman. My hair is pink, right? Maybe I have jowls, maybe I don’t. I don’t think I do at this point, but, you know, like fuck off with immediately making an older woman, into an old woman, which there’s nothing wrong with being an old woman. But like that, that commonality, that assumption humans don’t make that when I paint my portraits of women and men and all that, I’m not going, gosh, you’re forty seven, so I better give you extra eye bags because that’s what people expect. like the AI isn’t isn’t painting their heart and their soul and their their whatever. It’s missing that their essence.
00:08:52 Speaker 1: It’s about the essence, isn’t it?
00:08:54 Speaker 2: Yeah. But we, we sort of wandered off the path of, of creativity showing up in every aspect that people need to embrace, that their jobs are creative. But in artists that creativity is honed and it’s visible and it’s exercised intentionally because you can’t be an artist and not and not have a level of knowing that you’re creative. People tell you all the time, oh, you’re so creative. Everybody’s so creative. Uh, kind of attitude. Whereas, doctors and teachers and all that may not necessarily apply that word to their jobs.
00:09:31 Speaker 1: I know, and if everybody knew. Yes, I am using that creative muscle. it would be seen it’s about the difference between having the skill you have. You can learn a skill. Everybody could attend the same lessons and the same skills, but their actual output, what’s going in and what comes out is very, very different because the output is the creative side of it. it’s a bit like is photo realistic art creative? I’ve had that debate with a lot of people highly skilled, highly skilled. But are they being creative as well or are they just copying what they see? What do you think, Paul?
00:10:18 Speaker 2: that’s a really tough one because my answer, regardless, we are going to is going to alienate people. But when you do hyper realistic work, you have to make choices about colors. And those are informed choices. But those are technically technical unless you are changing your source material in some way. I don’t think photorealism is creative at all. I think that it’s a skill and it’s an incredible skill. It’s one that I used to aspire to when I was a teenager and in my early twenties, going to art school. I desperately wanted to do photorealistic art, but it just wasn’t something that I was able to make my hands produce. It just it was it was my aspiration. But yeah, I don’t think it’s creative. I really don’t. So if you’re doing photorealistic art, um, I actually live in a whole other country than Canada. You can’t find me here. Don’t bomb my house. But. No, I’m kidding, but it’s. It’s as with everything. Everything is an opinion. But there is no real creativity if you don’t differentiate in some way from your source material. Artists are interpreters. And I think phones and being everywhere with cameras, everybody having a camera in their back pocket has freed us up from needing to document in the way that we used to have to document before cameras were around. So one hundred and forty some odd years ago, or even a little bit longer. I can’t remember when the cameras came out. We we had no way of documenting anything other than through creating art to document, to, um, have portraits of people to document stories or events that have happened. We are now freed from that as artists. So hyper realism, while it’s admirable and certainly the average person who’s not an artist, loves it and goes, oh my God, this is amazing. How is this whatever unless you are doing something to to differentiate it, it’s not creative, but there are exceptions.
00:12:19 Speaker 1: That’s the key. That’s the key. The creativity is the differentiation and the, spin that the artist puts on it.
00:12:29 Speaker 2: The exception would be I saw a in event of quilt making, and one quilt artist did hyper realistic landscapes using fabric. And that requires a level of creativity that the paint and the drawing of hyper realism does not, because that’s a wildly different medium. Who would have thought in quilting to do hyper realism?
00:12:54 Speaker 1: Exactly. That is that that is like genius, because they’ve used their creativity and their skills in order to come up with. It’s a bit like people who use collage, like magazines or whatever. I’ve seen some amazing work using magazines, colored magazines to create very realistic pictures, but they’re not copying. They’re using that skill in a creative way. A it. It is really, really interesting. And, I do think there is a difference because you can be a creative or you can be very skilled in one thing. For example, with music, you know, the creativity, the big creativity in music is the person who is playing the instrument or is singing. It’s their interpretation. It’s what they are trying to say through the music that has been created by somebody else. The big creation is the person who’s composed the music or composed the event, but then you’ve got the creativity of the performer at the same in acting, putting their spin. This is what I want to say as this character, as somebody else, through my instrument, through my voice.
00:14:19 Speaker 2: How we embrace that, I think, affects how our art feels to our audience. How it’s how it’s received. So if we go back to saying, okay, a teacher is creative and how they, they disseminate the information to their students and how engaged and passionate they are and how they present it, their students will receive it differently. In art, it’s the same thing how deeply we feel our topics, our wise about what we’re trying to say with our work will affect the viewers in that case. So we were talking off recording about your current, signature collection that you’re working on in the stories that you’re creating for, about women, unmasking themselves and embracing who they are and the passion that you feel for that subject, but the fact that you have to feel that deeply while you’re creating affects your creativity in in producing the art and in the connection people feel to it.
00:15:17 Speaker 1: Yeah. when we were recording the episode about how you come up with the ideas for a signature collection, I was saying just off camera, off camera, off recording that, I had to feel we were coming up with ideas and there were some that my my brain was immediately like, yeah, I get that. But I’m rejecting that until you hear it’s a bit like meeting your perfect partner in a way, or you’re, you know, you have that connection with people. You go, yeah, this pulls up this memory, this feeling. This is what I want to paint. And it’s so clear. It’s so clear. when we talked about having, you know, artist block, I often think that it’s because artists haven’t thought what they want to say and how they want to engage with that. It’s something you it’s got to be important to you. You have got to resonate with it. And in the same way, when you buy a piece of art, the viewer or the collector is resonating with what is being communicated.
00:16:25 Speaker 2: Mhm. That makes a lot of sense. As somebody who, who has been struggling or has in the past struggled with artist block and, and lots of excuses about art making and everything else, which we’ve talked about in the previous season of Art crush. what happens when you fall out of love with your art and things like that? That the ideas creativity requires processing a lot of information, a lot of, flexing of a muscle, which we have to acknowledge because when we swing back to AI, a lot of people are now doing their brainstorming on AI and getting slot back, as we know we’ve we’ve done that work as well where we’ve tried to name something and AI has given us garbage. and then they lean more and more on it and lose that ability to brainstorm, to process a bunch of ideas and reject them. Creativity does take calories. It does take energy for our brains to do, but it’s well worthwhile energy to spend, especially as artists. But I think in any job, it’s.
00:17:31 Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s vital. I mean, you know, when I trained as a teacher, we had to spend a lot of time reflecting whether that still goes on now. I don’t know, but it’s such a good skill that when you have completed something that you reflect on it, that you think about it not in a critical. It’s not about being critical in a way that oh, that was terrible. Oh my gosh, I did that so badly. Oh that you’re not learning from that. But you are looking and you’re going, okay, I really I really this is a bit I really enjoyed. I want to take that further in my next piece. I really like this. I don’t want it to be the same. And, and I think we talked about when we talked about a signature collection, it’s you are evolving as an artist and you don’t want to go back. You can use some of the ideas from the past, but you’re going to do it in a different way. And being a creative is about this evolving, looking at your work. So people are like, ah, yes, that’s an early or that’s a, you know, a later one. People talk about artworks as like that doesn’t it’s not the same. Somebody doesn’t have a style and stick and that sticks throughout. but you can tell often if it is a style that comes from the artist’s heart, that it’s evolved. You can see that connection.
00:18:59 Speaker 2: Yeah, and the messaging, I think, also becomes more clear as artists become more clear as to what their work is saying. I mean, some artists can go through their entire career and just be like, I like painting trees. And that’s it, right? They’re not going any deeper. But a lot of artists, their work becomes more clear, the messaging in it, because the creative muscle also becomes very well exercised, and they question themselves and are not afraid to reject their own ideas. You know, not every idea we come up with is worthy of putting a crown on it. some of them just belong, to be fed out back to the pigs kind of thing, you know? Like, it just it is what it is. And I think that’s important to acknowledge when I think about your earliest pieces. Fee. although you, you covered a lot of the same subject matter. In a way, they weren’t speaking the same way that your current pieces do now, where you’re you’re pulling from stories that women experience and, and stages that a lot of women go through who are changing their lives for the better or trying to remove. I’m stuck on the current piece you’re working on, which, it will be done by the time this podcast episode airs. But the the unmasking is such a.
00:20:14 Speaker 1: And the selection of masks. Yes, you it’s also about, in my head as well. these women could be either hanging up their masks or they could be taking the masks off the wall and going, this is the person that I need to be at this minute, So it’s like that evolvement of, you know, that it’s a choice sometimes that we make for ourselves might be through pressures of external people saying things. But sometimes we make a choice of the mask that we want to put on, but sometimes they are masks that are given to us and we feel like we have to use it. We can’t we can’t reject that mask.
00:20:57 Speaker 2: So I think at the end of the day, we want our listeners to maybe be a bit more aware of where they use creativity. I mean, most of our listeners are probably artists at this point, but even if you’re not, there is an aspect of creativity and problem solving and understanding and coming up with ideas and and connecting with who you’re working with or who you’re interacting with in a way that is engaging, that we need to embrace now more than ever. When there’s technology that’s trying to step in and say, actually save that brainpower and just let computers do it for you, or, oh, you’re, for example, an accountant that’s not a creative job at all, which is a load of crap, because I worked with an accountant who’s lived breathed in eight numbers like it was, you know.
00:21:48 Speaker 1: And they’re often very creative with their numbers.
00:21:51 Speaker 2: Well, I maybe she was, I don’t know, but she, she was so passionate about it, it actually changed my view of accounting as a profession because it was very clearly her calling. And, to get her to talk about it.
00:22:04 Speaker 1: She was passionate about it, and she chosen something that she was passionate and loved, and it wasn’t something that somebody said to her, oh, well, if you’re accountant, you’ll you’ll make a bit of money, you know, so you might as well do that. You’re quite good at maths. Yeah. That’s not a reason to be an accountant. But yeah, it can be the reasoning that a lot of young people choose professions?
00:22:27 Speaker 2: Exactly. So looking for the creativity and how you can show up as yourself, as what is historically maybe seen as a dry toast profession. So like my Doctor Who, who embraced her power as a creative person doing diagnosing which takes skill to do, not just knowledge but skill, to notice things is important. But as an artist, I think also not just saying, oh, we’re so creative, but actually understanding the power of our creativity, the power that that fee used to come up with her next collection and, figure out what worked for her and what didn’t, and then taking ideas and, and actually, I’m holding my hand up as though anybody can see it because this is audio only, but actually twist it to look at it from a different angle, whether it’s from the back end or from the top or from the bottom or something else. That was really a powerful, podcast episode and a in a powerful session of just talking back and forth as to what you wanted to. What ideas you wanted to convey.
00:23:25 Speaker 1: I would just like to share with you something that, a friend of mine who said, I can’t remember if it was today or yesterday, but, she’s not an artist. I say she’s not an artist. She’s not doing that as a profession, but she’s probably one of the most creative people that I know. And she, was saying about one of the struggles she had she used to teach early years and trying to explain to people that you’re never going to get a high quality piece of artwork or writing from a child who has never, ever experienced the situation that they’re writing in. So if you want them to write about a rainy day, they have to go and splash in puddles. Everything is feeding into that creative muscle and going, They’ll have that creative memory. They will then use that when they are asked about writing about a rainy day or painting a rainy day. They will be like, oh yeah, it felt so amazing. But so often the experience is taken away and we’re just expecting children or people to to come up with something just from and this is where they go for to AI because their life experiences has not been enough to develop their creative muscle.
00:24:48 Speaker 2: That’s such a good point, because the world is so different from when you and I were growing up and not making a sound like we’re one hundred years old, but.
00:24:57 Speaker 1: Which we are, obviously.
00:25:00 Speaker 2: Yeah, well, my, when I was growing up, my parents were very anti-television and anti-media. You read a book or you were outside kind of thing. And and I think that gave a lot of skills to myself and my siblings as we were growing up, because we had to figure out if we wanted to play create a fort, we had to figure out how to make it if we wanted to, play hide and seek. We had to figure out, where to hide and everything else. There was none of this consuming of things. We were constantly producing things. And it’s certainly the way that I raised my kids. They were on the cusp of all the mobile devices, but it was still go the hell outside, ride your bikes, play with their friends, and and run around.
00:25:41 Speaker 1: The fear of letting your child go and play outside and play with other kids and not know where they were. That is what has changed that developmental point for children and young people because parents have been fed a fear, you need to know where your child is all the time. You need to know what they’re doing. You need to you need to be in part of their life. You know, when you talk to. Like when we were growing up, we just went out and it was like, oh, be back by tea time.
00:26:16 Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:26:17 Speaker 1: your parents knew that you were going off and they didn’t really not that they didn’t care or they didn’t want to know. It was about have that freedom and that develops you as, as a creative one hundred percent. Whereas if you have been shut inside, I mean, a lot of parents would say, oh, they’re on their device all the time, but they haven’t had the opportunity to go out and enjoy that. I know that there is a lot of work around forest schools, but it’s not the same. It’s still structured. It’s not unstructured play.
00:26:50 Speaker 2: Yeah, and unstructured play is important. But if you’re already, a grown ass adult like we are, and I know I myself spend a lot of time inside because I’m working on my businesses and making art and whatever. We also can lose that. daily creativity in terms of problem solving and things like that. So I know for a lot of the authors that I’ve enjoyed reading their books, one of the ways that they start by writing is going for long walks. And I know that when I was struggling through the pandemic, that’s what myself and my oldest daughter did is we walked for two hours every night.
00:27:27 Speaker 1: Get yourself a dog, apparently. And then you still walk every day.
00:27:34 Speaker 2: Yeah, well. Well, maybe there is an upside to dogs. I’m a cat person, so. And I, I’m not walking my cats, but it’s like getting outside that that experiencing things, adding to your, real world experience is still important for creatives. And getting outside of your comfort zone too. One of the things I’ve been doing, uh, since August of last year is networking in person, something I haven’t done in over a decade because I was going to art shows and things, so I didn’t need to network in person. I was already in person at things. I didn’t want to see more people. Uh, but it was also just like my businesses were successful.
00:28:10 Speaker 1: Mainly because let me just explain that Paula’s neurodivergence. It’s not that she’s anti-social.
00:28:18 Speaker 2: There is that. Yes. I am, an introvert in terms of my battery drains and social settings. So a lot of my business has been online. even my my first tech company, I saw my clients in person maybe twice a year, and I never saw my contractors in person. They just worked for me remotely. So so having this ability to go out, was something I need to actually rebuild and start doing that and connecting with people not because they’re other artists, not because they’re potential clients, but because we get creativity from the experiences of engaging with people who are outside of our bubbles. And the algorithms on social media give us a bubble. So I’m in a very socialist bubble because I’m very left wing, and I believe, you know, that we should all have good lives and capitalism isn’t the end and be all and whatever, because we’re not turning this political. But I am in that bubble on social media. My friends generally fall into that bubble in some degree, so I’m not getting different opinions when I go out networking here in London, in London, Ontario. London is a the largest city in southwestern Ontario, but we’re surrounded by farms and by people who breed horses, by people who grow our food, by people who work in in the companies that build the trucks. And, all the things that the rest of the country needs. I’m surrounded by this variety of people, and I get to engage with them in the networking because they’re all running businesses. They come to the business networking, and suddenly my creativity is added to because I wouldn’t engage with them otherwise because our lives end up being so very curated. So creativity is also fed by exposure not only to the outside world and problem solving, but by exposure to other people who might not otherwise be in our lives.
00:30:05 Speaker 1: I’ve got I’ve got another good analogy as well traveling. Okay, so some people have traveled all over the world, but they have not left the complex of the hotel. So they have been in another country, but they haven’t been developed in the same way of understanding other cultures, history, whatever. If you go and you travel independently or go to places that perhaps other people, I’m not saying be or whatever, put yourself at risk, but the experience is like chalk and cheese. It’s completely different. People come away and they have met the people, the indigenous people or the people of that nation. They spoken to them. They have seen a different way of living just by going to a hotel and going lounging by the pool and eating all your meals. There is not going to develop your creative muscle or your cultural muscle or whatever you want to call it. but those people could both people type of people could say, I’ve visited this country, this country and this country, in this country, and it would be true, but they would come away with very different understandings of what that country and that culture is.
00:31:30 Speaker 2: Absolutely. I have been to the UK three times now over the years, and London has not been the central focus of my visits because every time I’ve said I’ve been in London, people, everybody in England goes, there’s more to England than just London. Yes there is. It’s a totally different experience because London is very much catering to, people in business and to the tourists and to a certain type of thing. And the minute you leave that area, you end up seeing more history in a different way of life and hearing different accents and experiencing, you know, there’s such a variety and such a small land mass of people and culture just in England alone. But then you head up into Scotland. It’s a whole other ball game. and I think it’s really important we have to feed our, our creativity by those experiences, by stepping out in Canada, it’s very common for us to do Cuba holidays, especially in the winter, and it’s dirt cheap. It’s like two thousand four hundred dollars Canadian, which is about twelve hundred pounds to including your flights, all your meals, all your alcohol, your entire resort stay. You just pay one fee. Go there. They pick you up at the airport, drive you to the resort, and you’re in Cuba and you never leave. You never leave. And a lot of the implication is that it’s very dangerous to leave. you’re not welcome elsewhere, blah blah blah blah. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I’ve actually never been here.
00:32:54 Speaker 1: Again, I’ll ask my sister. She went. She was. She’s been to Cuba. Yeah.
00:32:59 Speaker 2: But it’s it’s a lot of my friends do the Cuba tour, and I’m not definitely not judging them because in the winter in Canada, sometimes you need some vitamin D.
00:33:06 Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. And we have the same.
00:33:07 Speaker 1: In the UK, with the Canary Islands, you know, winter sun.
00:33:12 Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But but they’re missing out on dealing with the local cultures and seeing how other people live and exist and just understanding. When I was in Spain, I was there twice. I didn’t go to Barcelona and everything else. I was in the non-touristy spots where very few people spoke English. So that was a shock to me, because I’d never gone to a country that where English wasn’t, at least, you know, fairly dominant. And the treatment I’d got by the local, um, Spanish people for not understanding very much Spanish was that I was a complete idiot. And that’s fair, because that’s what people get when they come to English speaking countries and can’t speak the language. Oh, you must be a moron. You, you. Because you can’t even say hello or whatever. and so that was an eye opening experience I cherish because I never got a chance to see the other side of things, or even the other side of what my own relatives had when they came to Canada, and not speaking English or not speaking good English. Being treated like a moron was incredible. And actually it informed a lot of my writing following the trips. and I think it made me a better person, a more aware person.
00:34:23 Speaker 1: Exactly one hundred percent. It’s the same I get, when you hear people say, oh, I’m no good at languages. I’m like, how can you not be? It’s all about communicating. You can’t be no good at language. Maybe you haven’t been taught, in a way that helps you learn them. But if you were dropped in another country, where nobody spoke your language, you would pick it up, everybody would pick it up, you know? Yeah.
00:34:50 Speaker 2: Exactly. You’d have no choice. So, Yeah. So then then there we go with with that. That’s an interesting idea, too. So if you dropped another country, you don’t have a language in common, so you can’t teach them English or whatever you speak. And they they need to communicate with you. You need to communicate with them. That’s when you’re stretching your language muscle, your learning muscle and your creative muscle, figuring out how to to get the basic communication. Like, if I touch my nose, am I asking you to tell me what nose is in your language? Am I asking you what’s that smell like? We don’t know until we have that common basis. when you try to create that communication, there has to be a level of creativity as well. But the biggest point is that it’s a muscle that you flex to learn the language the same way. That’s a muscle that you flex for your creativity. So as artists, I think it’s important to have conversations with other artists, other creatives, as well as people outside your your circles. So when fi and I are talking in this podcast, but also the millions of hours we talk outside of the podcast, and bouncing ideas off of each other, that allows us to hold up ideas between us, turn them around and go, yes, no, yes, no, or whatever. It it really works. Our creativity muscle. So at the end of the day, I think the most important thing to take away from this episode, perhaps, is that a creativity is everywhere. Become aware of the creativity that you wield, even if you aren’t creating visual arts and b it requires practice. And maybe it requires community as well. Talking through things, uh, playing with ideas and not being emotionally tied up with our ideas. if I say to fee. Well, that thing you thought of was was a little bit shit. She doesn’t go. My life is over. You’ve made a personal attack, and I’m now going to make a little effigy of you, Paula, and stick pins in it. She’s going to go. Actually, you know what? Maybe it was a little bit shit, but this, this tiny bit of it wasn’t. How can we stretch that?
00:36:54 Speaker 1: Putting the putting that, you know, learning and positive spin. It’s not, personal and then not being afraid to take risks, not being afraid for things to not go exactly as you planned. All of that is where creativity comes from.
00:37:12 Speaker 2: The risk taking is a big one. So let’s wrap up with this. This other thought. I come across artists who are afraid to do things wrong are afraid to show up in case they show up wrong, are afraid to take risks in their art making because it might be wrong. What is this wrong? What is this wrong? Everything we do can. Whether it’s supposedly succeeds or not. Everything we do feeds into our experiences, our skills, and our moving forward. It feeds our creativity. So there is no wrong or right and everything is made up anyway, so who cares? Just do it.
00:37:51 Speaker 1: as we’ve said before, we are reclaiming our own narrative. And there is no thing about this is wrong and this is right.
00:38:01 Speaker 2: And that’s where we are going to leave this episode of Art crush. So thank you, fee, for joining me and having this chat. And thank you to our listeners for listening. We are, you’ll have noticed changing up the art crush release. We’re not going to release episodes in a clump. We’re going to release them weekly as we go so that there’s a constant drip of, art crush available on your Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast apps. And of course, if you are in the UK or near Derby in May, you can come and meet us in person. The fabulous Marques and Paula Tolson, as well as the other members of the fifty one percent at our show, watch social media for, the advertisements, the marketing as we go through this year and, do make an effort to come and join us, because it’ll be fun to join us in person at our inaugural show in Derby. So yes, exciting times.
00:38:58 Speaker 1: And the first of many.
00:38:59 Speaker 2: Exactly. Check out feeds Art on her website at co.uk and my own work on my website at Paula. Com and we will see you in the next episode.
