Updated 2024-09-21
Watched David Choe’s youtube video on making art out of curiosity, not fear.
Play has become one of my guiding values in the decisions I make in my personal and work life. I’ve spent most of my life working hard to sustain myself and being hard on myself to be perfect. I was my worst critic and had a hard time letting myself be free of my own judgement to create something for myself at my own pace. My art style is a direct reflection of the box I live in: digital illustrations to keep from the flaws of raw material, intentional detail, black lines thick enough to keep colors within limiting shapes. Even in more fluid and analog mediums do I find myself obsessed with being as close to real as it can be — nothing more to show anything abstract.
Where did I go?
My journey with play — letting loose, exploring, acknowledging and denying rules, accepting flaws — is more recent. I don’t remember being a fun kid, I played by the rules and mostly judged the rest of the kids for not doing that. The sports I play were strictly competitive. Open world video games bored me if there was no goal to achieve.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/12XCsx2h29CMSNpeJ0GatR?si=c907396d8e2949b7
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7:17 — trying to reframe free play as “R&D” to feel less guilty about doing it
Play in my creative process is essential. I think it takes the pressure away and allows me to create the way I want to, to just be and put myself into something that doesn’t necessarily need an end goal, which I think ties into some of my thoughts On Creativity.
This episode of The Honest Designer had me audibly saying yes as they talked about reframing creativity. At 54:39 they had mentioned that play still has a structure to it, it’s not really free from rules. Think hide and seek, manhunt, the floor is lava: there are rules that give game constraint, that make it fun. Play, then, isn’t necessarily free from rules, it’s free from outcome. There is no ultimate goal or money to be made (unless it’s Squid Games). It’s just having fun.
What, then, is the constraints of my creativity, my play?
Time and money is always the easy axes to play on, but maybe we can look at mediums, people, environments.
More to think about.