Welcome to our first take five post! One of the things we are
most passionate about on this blog is learning how to live a creative life.
While we could post up research studies and articles and write fancy
posts about it, we figured it would just be easier to ask people and
see what they have to say. So we put together a list of our top 8
questions about living a creative life. Each week we will send the list
off to a fresh new amazing creative person, have them pick their five favorite
questions and answer them… get it… take five… yes we know we are
so clever… First up this week we have our very own Kadie Pangburn up to
bat, so sit back, grab a cup of cocoa and enjoy.
Name:
Kadie Pangburn
Creative Specialties: Photography, Music, Swing Dancing, Fiber Arts and Creative
Studies
Current Location:
Huntsville Alabama
Mini Bio:Kadie
graduated with her BA in Expressive Arts and a minor in Photography. She has a
diverse background in the creative arts ranging from running a commercial
photography company, to songwriting, to fiber arts, to swing dancing. Recently
she has spent the last several years passionately studying creativity itself
and how artists can lead long happy lives free from depression, addiction and
mental illness. She spends most of her time as a creativity
coach, teaching workshops on creativity and
writing extensively on the subject. Her book "How To
Be An Artist And Not Go Crazy" is due out later this year.
Website: http://pangburnphotography.com
1) What is one thing you've
learned as an artist that you wish you'd known when you first started
out?
Oh god, everything. There are so many things I did or thought
about in the wrong way when I was first starting out, but I think the biggest
mistake I made was putting to much emphasis on other people’s opinions.
I am a people pleaser, it’s just who I am by nature. I want
everybody around me to be happy 100% of the time, all the time, and if they’re
not I somehow convince myself that it is my fault. My husband could stub
his toe on a door three rooms away from me and I could somehow convince myself
that it was my fault it happened, my fault he was unhappy. I have learned
that this is as ridiculous as it sounds, however, this same behavior used to
creep into my creative work as well and be almost undetectable (like one of
those infamous untraceable poisons CSI seems to love so much).
When I would make work, instead of asking, “what would make me happy?”
I always found myself asking, “what would make my
client/patron/gallery/public/teacher/pocket book happy?” This didn’t
seemed to be that flawed to me at first, I mean, I was getting paid to do a
job (or hoping to get paid in some cases) so it only seemed logical to
care what my client would think and try to make something that they would be
pleased with… or would make them happy. While this may be logical and
might work out well for Spock, it doesn’t work out so well for a creative
person.
As the years went by I became burnt out and couldn’t shake the feeling
that something was missing in my life. I realized that all this time I
had been falling into my old people pleasing ways and that if I wanted to be
truly be creative, truly make things that brought me joy and fulfilled my
passions, I couldn’t work for other people, I had to work only for myself.
This then made me unbelievably nervous that I would live a poor
destitute life with no money. I mean, if I wasn’t trying to make work
that made people happy, why would they want to pay me money?
What I discovered was the exact opposite. The more I worked from
a place of pleasing myself, instead of pleasing others, the more creative my work
became, the more desirable it became. When I was working from the
viewpoint of trying to please other people I was left shackled to a set of
their preconceived ideas about what they wanted, what it would look like, taste
like, feel like. In essence I was simply only able to regurgitate other
peoples work and call it my own because what people *think* will make them
happy is always something familiar, something they are already comfortable with,
something sort of like something they have already seen before. When you
let go of those preconceptions an entire world of possibilities opens up to you
and your thoughts and dreams are able to see connections and outcomes you had
never before been able to imagine. Your work then becomes something unique,
because it was birthed solely out of you and from you, it is an extension of
your unique voice as a human being, your unique viewpoint.
In the end, that is really what people want, they just couldn’t
imagine it themselves to say so.
2) What is the greatest challenge you have faced as a creative
person?
I think I’m still facing it right now quite honestly. About two
years ago I sat down with my husband and told him that I wanted to jump ship on
a lucrative photography career and business I had built myself from the ground
up and spent years and thousands of dollars training for. What for?
Research. Something I had no clue of how it could possibly pay me a
dime, yet it was the only thing I could think about or wanted to do.
I had been inspired by an art teacher one semester to start digging
into creativity itself and I found myself becoming more and more passionate
about what makes artists and creative people tick. I wanted to understand
the whys and hows behind their work but more so I wanted to understand how to
take care of them. I’d been around the art scene long enough to see my
share of creative casualties; from alcohol and drug addicts trying to find
inspiration; to the burnt out, used up, and spent artists who just didn’t know
how to carry on anymore. I wanted to understand these people, I wanted to
be able to help them – hence the research.
It’s been two years now and I can’t even tell you how many books I’ve
read, articles I’ve examined, papers I’ve written, psychology classes I’ve
taken, interviews I’ve conducted and I’m still just as passionate. From all of
that I’ve written my first book (Its so close to being published I can hardly
wait!), started going into highschools and teaching workshops on creativity and
launched this blog with the help of the wonderful and amazing Mrs. Kate.
Can I say that I’m raking in the cash yet? No. But I’m doing
something that really matters to me and I’ve learned that that is more
important than the paycheck in the end.
3) How do you cope with creative anxiety and societal
expectations?
As for the societal expectations, like I mentioned earlier, I have
learned to work for myself and for what makes me happy instead of for what I
think will please others. I’ve learned that even if my actions don’t line
up with what the world expects of me, it doesn’t mean they aren’t best for me.
I’ve learned to trust that my mind and my body really do know what I need
and what is best for me, I just have to actually listen to them.
As for the creative anxiety, this is something that I really struggle
with. The morning of big projects I always used to literally get sick to
my stomach with worry. My fear of failure would always exponentially
multiply into this insane rabbit trail of thoughts that would eventually lead to
my demise. I would literally tell myself that my entire future hung in
the balance with this one project and with my ability to successfully pull it
off. Not only would this make me so sick I could barley function it would
also give me severe insomnia for weeks leading up to the event. Then I
started studying creativity, I interviewed a few people and one day a man said
something so insightful that it literally changed my life.
We were talking about this very subject and I asked him this very same
question to which he replied. “One day I was taking a ride with some friends on
my motorcycle. After we had been riding for a time I saw a tight turn coming up
and I decided to take it a little faster than usual. I attempted the turn
but ended up crashing the bike and landing in the hospital. As I sat in
the hospital with metal pins in my knee I couldn’t help but find the irony in
the fact that I was willing to take a risk so great that it landed me in the
hospital on a whim while riding my bike yet I was afraid to take even a
fraction of that amount of risk with my art. If you compare the
difference between the risk of taking a bad photograph and crashing a
motorcycle, that’s a very very different thing. You take a bad photograph and
put it out there, what’s the worst that’s going to happen? Somebody’s going to
go “I don’t like your picture. You’re not going to end up in the hospital,
you’re not going to have any broken bone, they’re not going to be putting any
pins in you bones.”
This statement really hit home with me and made me think about risk in
a whole new light. Yes something may be scary, it may be uncomfortable
but in the end what’s the worst that could possibly happen, literally probably
nothing.
4) Do you have a ritual way of preparing to create?
For me this usually involves taking myself seriously in some regard.
I have a hard time just stumbling into my office in my PJs and expecting
myself to be creative. Instead I get dress, particularly in an outfit
that makes me feel good about myself. I eat breakfast, and I drive
somewhere. The driving helps me mentally kick into work mode, for someone
who is self employed it gives me the feeling of actually going somewhere to do
a job. My workspace itself varies depending on the project but its almost
always somewhere away from home where I won’t get distracted by laundry,
chores, or the dog wanting to go outside and use the restroom every 10 minutes.
5) How do you deal with the inevitable uncertainty that
accompanies a creative life?
Journaling has probably helped me more with this particular problem
than anything else. As I mentioned earlier I am very prone to bouts of
insomnia and when the going gets tough, I stay awake. I used to just
literally pace up and down in our living room listening to the clock tick by my
mind swirling out of control with thoughts of failure and all the lovely things
that accompany it. Then I got a journal. Every evening, especially
when the going gets tough I sit down and write. I write out every fear
that I have and try to exercise as many of them as I can out of my mind and
into the paper. I write and write and keep writing until my mind is
finally blank and there is nothing left. At this point I can usually fall
asleep. The next day (when my brain is fully rested and actually thinking
straight again) I read over the entry. It is amazing how silly and
foolish some fears seem in the daylight.
Of course there are always things that are harder to let go of, but
I’ve learned to try and structure my life in a way that lends it as much
inherent stability as possible. For one I stay on a budget, just because
I get a big payday doesn’t mean I can spend that money. If I set up my
life to live on as little as possible the savings I take in every once and a
while balance out the dry spells and my lifestyle isn’t affected as much.
I have also learned to see dry spells as a blessing. Yes it’s hard
to just sit around and watch your bank account dwindle, but think of all the
amazing things you have the time to finally do when you aren’t crazed out of
your mind with client work. I get to finally read that mystery novel I’ve dying to read or watch some movie that everyone keeps talking
about. Learning to see dry spells as moments of preplanned respites for your
creative soul, there to help you refill and refuel for your next project makes
the world of difference.
If you are a passionate creative and want to share your own Take Five on The Art Abyss shoot us an email at theartabyss@gmail.com and let us know!
Name:
Kadie Pangburn
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I’ll let you in on a little
secret, being creative is hard. As creative people, we rarely have
roadmaps to help us on our journeys; there are no guidebooks, no road signs to
let us know that we are headed in the right direction. Instead, we are
simply left to wander around in the darkness alone, our fingers crossed, hoping
that our dreams and passions are leading us where we want to go and not just
simply around in circles.
