The Same Instinct

I've noticed over the years that I seem to collect creative people. Not intentionally, and not because we all make the same things, but because there seems to be a familiar rhythm that draws us towards one another. Very few of my closest friends are painters. They make theatre, photographs, pottery, music, food, gardens, and conversations. They all work with different materials, yet somewhere beneath the surface, I have a feeling they're searching for the same thing.

I'm writing this whilst my partner is sitting opposite me, a guitar resting across his lap. His eyes have been closed for the last fifteen minutes. Every so often, the harmonica finds its way into the conversation, almost absent-mindedly, before he returns to the guitar as though he'd never left it. The longer he plays, the less it feels like he's making music and the more it feels like he's remembering something. The songs become stories, not because they're telling me where they've been, but because they're slowly revealing where they want to go. His hands seem to know the route long before his mind catches up.

Watching him, I realised how familiar that feeling is.

Not the guitar, of course, but that surrender.

That quiet agreement between yourself and whatever it is you're making, where you stop asking every mark to justify itself and begin trusting that your body has been paying attention all along. I don't paint from certainty any more than he plays from certainty. I paint from the memory of a particular wind across a headland, from the rhythm of walking, from a colour that insists on staying with me for days. I paint from the feeling of a place rather than the appearance of it.

Before I paint, I stand on a chair and dance.

It's become a small ritual that I almost never speak about. Not because I think it makes me a better painter, but because it reminds me that making begins somewhere beyond thought. If I can stop trying to control the painting before I've even touched the brush, then sometimes the painting tells me what it wants instead.

Perhaps that's the thing I've recognised in all the creative people I've been lucky enough to know.

Not talent. Not discipline. But trust.

A willingness to follow something that cannot yet be explained, and to believe that understanding often arrives after the making, not before it.

I think that's why we find each other.

Not because we recognise the work.

But because we recognise the same impulse.

The quiet confidence of following something you can't quite name.

The willingness to close your eyes for a moment and trust that your hands already know the way.

Holly,

Somewhere near the Atlantic.