A Letter from the Editor

Tom Jakob | 6/30/23

Dear reader,

For this first issue of Art Grove, my partner in business, romance, and crime, Artistic Director Betsy Podsiadlo, has asked me to write something about my own personal creative process. I’ve been sitting at my computer for a few hours at a time over the past two weeks hoping desperately that something will come, often to find myself wiping the document clean after typing only a few sentences. Considering the whole motif of Art Grove is to grow a sense of community in the arts by exploring creative processes, perhaps it would be ill-advised for the Managing Editor of Art Grove to admit this in the first issue… but boy howdy am I struggling to put pen to paper and draw out my own creative process.

Creativity is something that comes in ebbs and flows. To believe that any single person at all moments of the day is overflowing with raw creative energy is just not true. It is equally untrue that some of our fellow humans walk the earth every day without a single creative thought in their heads. We, humans, are complicated… the engine that drives us is a complex and wrinkly mass of neurons that even our most brilliant researchers barely understand the fine-tuned workings of. We don’t always know why we fluctuate between extremely high and extremely low in the blink of an eye… we know it has something to do with the balance of chemicals such as cortisol, serotonin, or dopamine being thrown out of proportion as a result of some stimuli. But we don’t usually know why those triggers go off… or at least not immediately.

When I think of what it means to be creative, a lot of ideas come to mind. Creativity is a daunting idea to unpack because it is subjective. We pitter-patter between the belief that creativity is something either highly vague or highly specialized. Some people think creativity is capable of being attenuated while others think that anything can be art. But when I think of what it feels like to experience, process, and dispense creativity, I think of the wind. Sometimes I try to imagine the first human that ever got the idea to put a mast on his or her raft and attach a sail to it. Because much like creative impulses, the wind is always there even when you can’t feel it running down your neck, and it is still capable of pushing your ship along the water. Of course, you ought to learn how to harness it before unfurling your sail, lest you be swept away into uncharted waters that may quickly drag you under. But now we arrive at a “chicken-or-egg” scenario in which we once again ponder on a binary model. Is creativity innate or something that can we develop? I believe that two things can be true at the same time.

A few nights ago, Betsy and I sat down to watch our current TV commitment, the Sopranos. In one of the later episodes, the main character, Tony, finds himself fixated on an aphorism that most people attribute to the Ojibwe tribe, who once laid claim to the lands around the Great Lakes:

“Sometimes I go on in pity about myself. And all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky.”

In the episode, Tony befriends an astrophysicist, who dispenses to Tony the wisdom that forces often believed to be opposing are in reality the same thing spread out. The astrophysicist uses the example of two tornados; while they may be seen by many as two separate storms, in fact, they are both the result of a single unifying storm cell. In other words, all things are connected… “Everything is everything.” 

Of course, being the ultramasculine hardshell Tony Soprano is, he initially rejects the astrophysicist’s premise.

“Get the fuck outta here,” he scoffs.

But if Tony is as insightful of a depiction of American values as I suppose culture has made him out to be then there is perhaps no more realistic response to such a mind-bending proposition. We often like to think that creativity is something that comes from inside and that we project out to the universe. Perhaps that is because it is far more comfortable to think each of us is entirely unique than it is to suppose everything is more or less the same. The First Law of Thermodynamics says that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only redirected. But there is no scientific law that says redirected energy always results in the same identical reaction or outcome.  And if that is the case, then perhaps the energetic winds of creativity are much the same… they can be harnessed only if one looks for them, because creativity is not a law but more of a theory that can be molded and perfected.

“The universe is just a big soup of molecules bumping up against one other. The shapes we see exist only in our own consciousness.”

As a journalist by trade, one of the great privileges I enjoy is getting to tell the stories of people who need their stories told… comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, and so on. But I’ve struggled for years amidst this to adopt what journalists often refer to as a “beat” because it’s difficult to find the common thread between a story about animal foster programs and a story about right-wing extremism. Oftentimes, there are moments—sometimes longstanding, other times short-lived—in which it feels there is no wind to carry me across the boundless skies of human imagination. Other times, it can feel like the winds are so strong that I begin to fear being swept away in the confusion and aimlessness. 

I used to think journalism was not an art form, and thus my beat had to be on some calculated topic… police misconduct, small businesses, extremism in elections, etc. But after enough earnest introspection, hard work, and a dash of battered ego, I’ve come to find that my beat is not a topic, it is simply that of service… what gets my creative juices flowing is not just BLM protests, or a new BBQ joint opening up, or a tense election cycle… it is people, how they do what they do, and how they can have their needs personally attended to.

But even though I’ve come to better understand my values as an artist, there are still times when the curtain gets pulled back and I question my own motivations, or when I lose sight of the fact that I have motivations at all. Any number of things may cause that to happen, and I imagine a handful of them trace back to factors based on highly-complex problems that afflict Western societies, namely mental health. 

Generational wealth may offer some shielding from those creative speed bumps. But that argument falls flat many times; just because someone’s daddy can foot every bill doesn’t mean that person doesn’t also deal with internalized problems that hamper their creativity. It also doesn’t mean that person lacks creativity simply because they come from money; many of history’s most well-known artists were the products of the aristocracy and nepotism. Are we really to believe that each and every one of Mozart’s pieces lack depth, or that Nic Cage has never once given a good performance? And for the same token, are we really to believe an impoverished person either lacks or exceeds in their talents by virtue of nothing more than their socioeconomic status? That is crazy, and also pretty classist!

I believe that everybody, in some way, is creative and unique even if we are all made up of and surrounded by the same stuff. I’ve long believed that a painter is just as “creative” as a rocket scientist who has to do miles of arithmetic to safely land astronauts on the moon. Perhaps in their individual lives, we need not ache for the artists of today that come from money. But we ought to accept they, collectively speaking, exist and make peace with that fact. Admittedly, it would be a lot easier to do that if the nepo-babies simply admitted to their privilege and open the door for earnest discourse. And another part of the problem is that no matter your degree of privilege, it is hard to feel a sense of pride for others when your own winds feel motionless. Yet the more we wallow in what feels like motionlessness or even thrash against rising winds, the more our minds seem to disfavor creativity.

Much of what I have put down in this letter is my own truth and perspective. The creative process is highly subjective and may vary greatly between two people. But no matter your form, art is not easy to make and requires a great deal of hard work and perseverance (unless it depends upon artificial intelligence, which ArtGrove takes a firm stance against). I owe a lot of what I know today about the creative process to New York City. But let me be clear: I never wanted to move there. I practically kicked and screamed my way there and continued to do so for a while after moving there. But if I hadn’t, maybe things would have gone better for me. The less I kicked, the more things presented themselves to me; from learning to acquiesce to the powerlessness I felt in my dead-end job, I uncovered a story about America’s undoing at the hands of the World’s Fair and Robert Moses. Almost two years later, I have finally identified a project which I can confidently say has changed my life’s direction dynamically. A great wind had been blowing against the walls of my cubicle for months, and I had not given myself a chance to notice the wind for those months because my skin was too busy crawling with a sense of disgust in myself and circumstances.

Creative dearth is merely an illusion. We tend to think that dissolving the facade is a task some are destined for and others are not. It is certainly true that for some people the hill to climb is far steeper than it is for others. But no matter who you are, how much money you have in the bank, or your immutable characteristics, harnessing creativity requires the same thing from all of us: having the mercy to listen when the universe speaks to you and the bravery to discover where it leads you when it does. 

That requires undertaking hard work and facing up to hard truths. And though the “direct path” is truly one that lacks an end, it nevertheless can lead someone to great revelations along the way… as they often say, it’s all about the journey. It is cliche and hackneyed, I know. But I reject the premise that an easier life never requires even some humility, because that, it seems to me, is the only direct path towards awareness. And if one lacks awareness, one might also lack the ability to explore and thus harness what they could be aware of; art in the world around them; a great wind that always carries them across a boundless sky.

Sincerely,

Tom Jakob, Managing Editor