On Ideal Conditions
A reflection on time, devotion, and beginning before you're ready.
If someone asked me to be honest, and asked me how I felt about being an artist, I’d tell them it’s an extremely slow but ultimately rewarding process. It is also possibly the slowest mode of self expression. If you’re looking for quick fixes, I’d recommend about a hundred other mediums. (Cut to me, circa 2005, krumping alone in my room)
The amount of iteration, skill, technique, and physical dedication required to practice one’s craft is often overlooked by outsiders. For many of us, art feels less like a conscious choice and more like something that chose us. Something you don’t formally decide on, so much as something you’re claimed by. I certainly don’t remember (consciously) making that choice. It was just always present. But alas, I love it. At least in some form, I mostly always have.
All this to say I find myself longing for other mediums. Images are powerful, but they can also quickly become a place to hide behind. A perfected frame can only hold so much, and doesn’t fully reflect the nuance and complexities of an artist as an individual. So this space will be an effort to create differently, and to move and pass along ideas faster than I ever could with a single painting. This will be a place to:
gather + synthesize images, ideas, inspiration, quotes
to discuss art and creative expression
think through mindset and entrepreneurship
Oh, and astrology. I do love astrology.
For those that don’t know me, or maybe barely know me, I’m an artist & designer (and astrologer—but more on that later). I consider my professional career to have started in 2013, when my freelance work as an artist began to overtake my schoolwork. I left Emily Carr University in my third year due to my chronic lack of patience and because I’ve never been great at following rules for rules sake. (I had to take Biology 101, a science course, to complete a Bachelor of Fine Arts… Very sorry to my teachers but that logic never sat right with me.)
One thing I do admire about my younger self, perhaps out of my own naivety, is that I never waited for permission or a degree to begin making the work. I simply started because starting felt compelling. My work began as a self-directed street art project, posting rap lyrics in alleyways, which gained a lot of traction relative to the time. Cringe if you must, but this was the Tumblr era, aka. prime millennial click-bait, Instagram was a new frontier. It sounds simple but once I understood how my work could connect, resonate, and inspire people, I never left my practice.
Over a decade later my career now resembles something I didn’t really set out for or knew existed. The work grew into brand collaborations and large-scale public art installations. A path I didn’t consciously map out, but as Joseph Campbell says “If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's”. I’m grateful to have a practice that continues to evolve, and a career that allows my style to change alongside me.
Recently, I came across a C.S. Lewis quote that stopped me in my tracks. It nudged me toward writing publicly, and reminded me of something my younger self knew implicitly, and my current self had forgotten:
“If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come.”
Favourable Conditions Never Come
We often imagine creative work as some grandiose adventure, that will require all of us and demand our full, undivided attention. If we can control the environment, then we can control the risk of failure. These are well-intentioned, earnest attempts by the mind to protect us but it misses something fundamental. That art, by it’s very nature, does not produce controlled outputs—that a controlled environment does not guarantee a controlled result.
I always say clichés are clichés for a reason, but creative process works more like building a muscle than spontaneously channeling one long sonnet. You start small, with a 10 pound weight, and with repeated effort you slowly increase both your capacity and form.
I was born with Saturn trining my natal Mars. You don’t know what that means, but bear with me. My astrology mentor once called this the mark of a “craftsman”. But I prefer to think of it less as something personal to me, and more as a methodology available to anyone. Saturn represents discipline, slowness, sustainability. Mars represents physical action and life force. Together in a trine (a harmonious relationship) the two work together as slow action, repeated sustainably over time. An application of pure life force, performed deliberately and slowly.
The thing about time is that it will pass either way. It moves on, with or without your participation. Knowing that, the question becomes much simpler: what are you willing to commit to slowly and with intention? What matters enough to you to tend to over months, even years, through the smallest repeatable actions? If not now, then when?
Dedicating oneself wholly to a practice is an act of devotion, and a form of love directed toward time itself. In time, it will love you back. What we tend to register as outward quantum leaps in others, are usually the outcome of hundreds of unseen small steps.
And yet, some seasons are better than others..
As a creative, I believe the time is now. But as an astrologer, I believe time has a quality, and not all time is equal. Some seasons are inherently better than others. But, I’ll save that one for next time…
—M
Love
The time will pass anyway ❤️