2025
Creative Writing

The artist is tired and the curious are heavy.

Perhaps I’ve begun my descent into madness. Bear with me.

Recently I’ve come to realise that I feel at times like an oracle without an audience – helpless and tormented by visions. I might not be fully interested in productive creation in all its forms, but the act of creation in the form of ideation and visions holds my mind under siege 80% of the time. Be it writing, be it designs, be it object ideas, be it concepts – lately my mind continues to come up with anything possible under the great white moon, and oh does it make me feel alive again. Just as I felt right before a series of burnouts took me out in the past years. And this renewed feeling is akin to flooding, something that feels potent and even a little too powerful for my current energy resources to handle. So much so that this has become an anecdote amongst people closest to me.

‘Listen, yesterday I had…’

‘Don’t tell me it was another “idea”…’

‘No no, just a thought, I promise.’

[But yes, the list of “try this, do this, make this” grows longer with each day.]

I always despised specialisation. I never even wanted to be a graphic designer in particular; I wanted to simply create, and design became a ‘practical’ compromise for me and the left side of my brain. ‘Find your niche’ always turned my stomach as soon as the damned phrase would reach my ears, and for years I felt like a jack of all trades and a master of absolutely none at the same time. All the while ignoring the fact that my trade – of which I actually was a master – was ideas, visions, thoughts. And this is a trade that then trickles down into other ‘trades’ of which I might be just a simple, humble ‘jack’ and be perfectly chuffed about it.

This was also what always made me so envious of the renaissance masters. People like Leonardo, as the most pop example that I could bring, or Athanasius Kircher for a more amusing, nerdier touch; who never decided to dedicate all of their focus and energy on specialising in that one thing, but instead allowed themselves to explore the world around as well as that within them.

It all comes down to the damned curiosity that I love and preach; same curiosity that also torments me just like the eagles flying hungry for liver around the peaks of mount Caucasus would – daily and annoyingly.

It is unfortunate however that curiosity is dead in our society today and all we do is – lazily continue to debate the list of suspects over its decomposing flesh. It was quite clearly an assault of an organised syndicate – but productivity nailed the coffin shut. Curiosity requires exploration, one that doesn’t always lead to an outcome. Free floating – is how thought develops and civilisations progress. Do we have the space for it now? I don’t think so. And I am positively laden with envy for Leo and Athanasius.

In my own experience, in a world so focused on the outcome, every time a thought would pass through my mind I would constantly stop myself with questions: ‘Is it worth it? What would I do with it? What will it bring? What impact will it have?’. And it has stalled me a lot in the past years. Creation is a state of mind; it is worth it when it has even the slightest meaning (now, what that meaning is – is debatable, we admit and leave it as is for now). Take writing as an example. I want to believe that when I write – I create some meaning, despite my neurotically mad style of it. Or at least, in writing something completely opposed to common sense, I create space for anybody around me to create that same meaning by opposing me.

Do I have a conclusion to this stream of consciousness? No.

Do I care? Also no.

So I guess I’ll just leave it as is, as a little… peep hole into my existential crisis as an artist. One that I think I’ve finally learnt to overcome. And even if my thoughts won’t reach more than a room of people and later on someone will describe my work as ‘fantasies of a fertile imagination’ – that’s fine and I’ll be more than delighted about it.