I find perspectives on the creative process to be so meta when it comes to life. We are a creative process and everything we do is subject to the same rules. Creation is non-linear. It’s messy. It moves forward and backward. And also gets stuck. Oftentimes we do not realize the purpose of a singular creative process until years later. Creativity likes to surprise us.
“The studio is in my head.” Fred Wilson
Today is Office Hours!!
Join me every Tuesday at 12 pm pst over on
Substack Live for an hour of creativity chit-chat.
Bring your questions about creativity, the creative process, tapping into flow and I’ll share my thoughts!
Link in bio.
See you there!
Can’t make it? Paid Muse subscribers receive Office Hours recordings right to their inbox.
One of the more useful distinctions I have come to draw in my work with creatives is the distinction between craft and perfectionism. From the outside, the two can look identical. The hours spent on a piece. The unwillingness to release it. The repeated returns to the same paragraph or the same passage. From the inside, they are not the same at all.
Craft is the reckoning a professional creative has with the gap between what they see in their head and what their hands have so far been able to make. It is laborious, but there is a clarity to it. The artist knows what they are reaching for and whether they are getting closer.
Perfectionism is something else. It is a behavior layered on top of that legitimate reckoning, whose function is not to refine the work but to manage a feeling. It tends to persist past the point where any further effort is actually changing the piece. That is often the clearest tell.
I wrote a longer essay on what the feeling underneath tends to be, and why insight alone is rarely sufficient to change the pattern.
Substack Link in bio.
Study Hall came directly from my private mentorship clients asking for more time like this.
More space to drop in together, regulate, and actually work.
So I built it.
A live, structured container where we meditate, enter the work, and stay with it.
Brainstorming, drafting, making, playing, thinking, finishing.
Prompts for when you are stuck (and they are soooooo good).
A DJ curated playlist from our resident DJ @finacuerpo to set the vibes (the vibes are sooooo good too).
It’s also the only place outside of private mentorship where I teach my method of
approaching creativity as energy, and learning how to work with it instead of against it.
The container is Study Hall.
The benefits are rad.
Three times a week.
12 times a month.
$150/month.
7 day Free Trial.
Link in bio to join us. Enrollment is open and ongoing.
PS: these are legit 90’s yearbook photos from my Dude’s and my yearbooks 😜
Perfectionism, as it presents in creative people, is one of the more misdiagnosed patterns I encounter in my practice. It is most often described as the obstacle to the work. In my experience it is not the obstacle. It is the protection.
Layered on top of the legitimate reckoning every professional creative has with their own work, the gap between what they see in their head and what their hands can produce, there is sometimes a second behavior. It looks identical from the outside. But its function is not to refine the work. Its function is to manage a feeling.
A new essay, on which feeling, and why insight alone tends not to be sufficient to change it.
Substack link in bio.
Join me every Tuesday at 12 pm pst over on
Substack Live for an hour of creativity chit-chat.
Bring your questions about creativity, the creative process, tapping into flow and I’ll share my thoughts!
Link in bio.
See you there!
Can’t make it? Paid Muse subscribers receive Office Hours recordings right to their inbox.
Most creatives will tell you they struggle with self-doubt, or imposter syndrome, or fear of failure. These are real, but they are usually the surface of something deeper and harder to illuminate.
What I have come to see, after years of working with creatives, is that the fear underneath the fear is almost always the fear of being unseen or dismissed for what one made. To put work into the world is to externalize an internal perception. To have that perception missed or misread is not a small sting. It is a particular kind of exposure that the body registers as something closer to threat than disappointment.
This is part of why perfectionism is so difficult to shift through insight alone. The behaviors are not the problem. They are the strategy. And until the feeling underneath becomes survivable, the strategy will keep doing its job.
New essay on the Substack. Link in bio.
In all my years of working with creatives, I have not yet met one who wasn’t, in some form, a perfectionist.
And I’ve come to believe the work is not to eliminate the perfectionism but to develop the capacity to tolerate what it is protecting us from.
A new essay on perfectionism, invalidation, and the difference between craft and fear.
Link in bio.
Study Hall is a vibe.
Study Hall came directly from my private mentorship clients asking for more time like this.
More space to drop in together, regulate, and actually work.
So I built it.
A live, structured container where we meditate, enter the work, and stay with it.
Brainstorming, drafting, making, playing, thinking, finishing.
Prompts for when you are stuck (and they are soooooo good).
A DJ curated playlist from our resident DJ @finacuerpo to set the vibes (the vibes are sooooo good too).
It’s also the only place outside of private mentorship where I teach my method of
approaching creativity as energy, and learning how to work with it instead of against it.
The container is Study Hall.
The benefits are rad.
Three times a week.
12 times a month.
$150/month.
7 day Free Trial.
Link in bio to join us. Enrollment is open and ongoing.
PS: these are legit 90’s yearbook photos from my Dude’s and my yearbooks 😜
Office Hours!!
Join me every Tuesday at 12 pm pst over on
Substack Live for an hour of creativity chit-chat.
Bring your questions about creativity, the creative process, tapping into flow and I’ll share my thoughts!
Link in bio.
See you there!
Can’t make it? Paid Muse subscribers receive Office Hours recordings right to their inbox.
Charlotte and I first connected over Instagram in 2016, shortly after These Three Things was published. I immediately recognized the beauty and warmth in her work. Full of color and rich with layers of detail and pattern, Charlotte has a way of capturing her subjects that invites you in and illuminates their tender humanity.
Originally from England, now rooted in Canada by way of Spain, Charlotte has spent a lifetime devoted to art. Making it, teaching it, and living it. Her portraits of people and animals are created with personality and care, while her landscapes and interiors reveal a practiced sensitivity to composition, light, and detail. She’s that rare artist who can move easily between tradition and experimentation, thanks to her love of mixed media and her adventurous spirit.
Charlotte has also become a beloved teacher, both in-person and online. For the past five years, she’s offered live demos on Instagram and YouTube, generously sharing her process with thousands of aspiring artists. She’s now realizing another longtime goal: teaching while traveling, expanding her inspiration and connection across the globe.
Charlotte was one of the earliest participants in These Three Things when it lived as a daily writing practice on Instagram. During those early, uncertain days of the pandemic, we collaborated on the 100-day project, blending my prompts and photographs with her beautiful paintings, and drawings. It was a reminder in the midst of so much unknown of how creativity can connect us, ground us, and offer solace. I’m excited to say we are brainstorming about another collaboration that I just can’t wait to talk to her more about. Join. us Monday over on Substack at 12 pst for a Live conversation all about the creative process. Link in bio.
