Creative Flow

The ease in which you can create without too much conscious thought around the process sometimes surprises me. I set up a vintage typewriter within my studio something discovered in Brick Lane market, not the food or clothes section further down but the junk bit at the top. Old stained sofas, filthy dolls heads and other broken or gruesome artefacts sit on tattered sheets, the street characters shuffling around and about. Anyway, the typewriter was found in a sorry state, a film of grime with keys sticking and a loose ribbon but a steal at £30. Through the power of google I found a restorer in Greenwich who brought it back to beauty and it now resides in my studio slowly collecting dirt and dust (occasionally paint) and returning to its previous state. The analogy of an aged starlet’s face comes to mind, propped up by filler, facelifts and Botox, ultimately it will sag and puff and be what it always should have been, anyway I digress.

The Typewriter sits there and each time I visit I type a line, anything that comes into my head when I sit at the keys. The process resulted in around 18 lines of prose full of corrected mistakes, incorrect grammar and typed at random levels on the page. The wonderful thing about the typewriter is that every mark and mistake cannot be corrected without leaving a trail, a visible sign of the error and its subsequent correction. We are a sum of our errors and corrections don’t you think? They mark us and leave indelible signs on our beings.

Some may say of course there was conscious thought around creating the work, so my opening statement is false and I would have to agree to some degree I told a fib, each line came from the previous but there was no preparation or pre-planning it was spontaneous and a conversation with the page and typewriter keys. The resulting ‘Poem’ and I loosely call it that is quite enjoyable to read. I’ll leave it up to the viewer to judge whether they like it or not. 

Creativity can be spontaneous, it can be unfettered and free flowing and to be fair giving myself time to just write, much like writing this mini essay now, allowed me to create something without the imposter feeling or filters I allow my creativity to be diluted through. The difference with this essay is I’m writing it on a laptop, I can delete and reorder to make myself sound more intelligent or talented than I am, the typewriter knows my mistakes!!

Let me know what you think of my ‘poem’.