What’s the primary device that unlocks your creativity — the camera, a pen, or the paintbrush?
These tools are our passport to freedom. So photographers speak through photos, writers communicate in text, cartoonists draw, etc.
“We become what we behold,” Marshall McLuhan said, “We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”
Our vocation shapes our perspective and predetermines our output.
But we gather scraps of ideas everywhere; through unintended eavesdropping, mishearing things, and misread headlines. Artists are scavengers.
We combine divergent widgets in our toolshed to strengthen the entire arsenal. The writer makes draws; the architect paints with light; the musician scribes poems.
Using a variety of widgets helps work out different artistic muscles. As we draw analogies across subjects, we improve our core craft.
Said the Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
All the hedgehog knows how to do is protect itself with its spines. But the fox is more elastic — it can adapt to different conditions that enhance its chances to survive.
We permit our perspectives to shapeshift by opening the mind up to ubiquitous inspiration. Our imagination expands in so far as we stretch our palette.
First, we collect and understand. Then we deduce. Only then can we return to mastering our core competency.