The Gremlin Pledge
There is No Weekend Version
To be an artist isn’t a choice. Either you’re born with a beast inside of you, or you aren’t.
The choice is whether you follow it or not. And once you begin to feed the beast, it will consume your whole life. I don’t say it lightly when I say it can feel like life or death. If you’re an artist, a true artist, you’ll know exactly what I mean. You listen to the work of others and instead of feeling satisfied you feel possessed. You listen to Bob Dylan. Prince. Patti Smith. Nina Simone. Kendrick. Joni. Whoever it is. And rather than quieting the voice within, it awakens it. You don’t leave inspired. You leave with a fury to make your own thing.
Other people can go left, right, backwards, forwards. For us Gremlins however, there’s only up or down. Up towards growth, evolution, ascension, truth and ego death. Or down towards stagnation, resentment, depression, illness and suffering. For a Gremlin, I repeat, there is no other way.
Once you walk the path, everything else eventually gravitates into the slip stream of the art. Family. Friends. Work. Love. Money. Success. Failure. Connection. All roads lead back to the same question: are you becoming more of who you are or less? Because the more fully you execute the thing at the centre of your being, the stronger a pillar you become for your family, your team, your community and your profession.
The more you art, the more you ARE. The less you art, the weaker you become.
Art isn’t a hobby for a Gremlin. It just isn’t. It’s on or it’s off. There is no weekend version. No watered-down version. Because the beast will consume you from the inside out if you don’t feed it.
And once you give the Gremlin a single taste of freedom, the bite won’t be enough. It never is. It will take your hand. Then your arm. Then your heart. It will ask for more, and more, and more until one day you realise the thing you thought you controlled has become the organising principle of your entire life.
And AlhamdulillAllah for that.
Because one day you will wake up and you will realise you’ve crossed over. You’re no longer trying to become an artist. You are one. A fully fledged Gremlin playing among civilians. The beast in beautiful clothing.
And that, my friend, is the wild. WELCOME. To the choiceless choice.
Not because there aren’t other options. There are plenty; you can ignore the call or negotiate with it. You can tell yourself you’ll get around to it later and build a perfectly reasonable life around avoiding the thing you know you were put here to do.
But every day you do, a small part of you dies. Every. Single. Day.
So.
What will it be?
From The Factory >
Travel sketches. More than anything, these are making me a better painter. They teach me to pay attention to light, and the atmosphere as it unfolds in real time. They require me to sit amongst strangers, and work with speed rather than perfection. What begins as a small sketch often carries a freedom that I later try to preserve when scaling up into larger works.
Prompts >
JOURNAL:
What part of myself am I starving by not creating?
ASK SOMEONE:
When do you feel most alive?
What dream have you abandoned that still haunts you?
CREATIVE ACT:
Listen to a song that empowers you.
Musings >
“The artist’s job is to be a witness to his time in history.”
- Robert Rauschenberg“One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth.”
- Abraham Maslow“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
- Joseph Campbell“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
- Anaïs Nin