🖼 TREE 438: Brave Artists

Mark Pierce is a multidisciplinary creative and super nice guy. He’s into music, design, photography and writing. His speciality is helping creative people get unstuck. Check out his studio and Instagram. Mark’s posts this week are taken from his latest book Brave Art.

I’ll be supplying the images and music choices.

Grow slowly
Jeff

One.

I met Ed at a creativity workshop I was delivering. A warm, unassuming character, he had travelled over an hour to join us in a cosy coffee shop, buried in the back streets of a small Welsh town.

The first exercise I assigned everyone was to draw a coffee cup. Most drew simple line drawings, but Ed’s was dimensional, balanced, and showed a masterful grasp of light and shade. Evidently, he was a seasoned artist.

And terminally ill with cancer.

He told me, “In years gone by I would have expressed my emotions in painting or music but, at a time when I really needed to, I had forgotten how.”

Then he shared how he was rediscovering belief in himself and that his artistic desire was returning. The last I heard, he was learning guitar and had started a creative writing degree.

Who starts a three-year course not knowing they’ll be alive long enough to finish it?

Brave artists do.

Like Ed.

Never underestimate the catalytic potential of your creative life and the courage it can inspire in others. You may never reach the Tate Modern, or whatever your equivalent is. You might do something greater, like helping renew a fellow human’s hope. You might remind them why they should never stop creating. Meeting Ed did that for me.

As I gathered up the pens and pads at the end of the night, I came across Ed’s coffee cup sketch. He’d left it behind.

I’m keeping it.

Two.

DALL-E has done a wonderful job of capturing the emotion if not the animal type of the monkey from TREE 327.

Three.

I had not heard of Telenova before today. My life is better now.