You are an artist. Our world needs your creative vision, imagination, expression, and action in a time where it also needs you to advocate for what these things are, and why they are important. Crucially, you are the individual who needs to lead this advocacy work, because as a creative individual, you are the one who understands creativity best.

It is important for creative authority to be held by the artists themselves. Without this authority, we instead seek templates more than canvasses, “likes” more than listening, “views” more than seeing. We struggle to find the firm ground of self-generated validation, and rely heavily on the approval of others, even if it feels empty. We lose the ability to see our gifts, see the extraordinary value of failure, and to engineer it into our work for the purpose of learning and growing. We lose sight of the often latent nature of our talents. We focus more on our products than our processes, and find it difficult to value our work in the absence of comparing it to someone or something else. We seek meaning through competition rather than creation. We begin to think we must guard our knowledge rather than share it. We believe we must sacrifice emotional and spiritual well-being in order to be professionally successful. We tune out our intuition and question its wisdom. We make our suffering invisible so as to try and erase it. We hunger perpetually for something more.

Ironically, embracing our creativity is the off-ramp from such an unhappy place. Exercising our own voices is our best ticket to the kinds of beautiful, moving, and deeply inspiring experiences that led us to gravitate towards creative disciplines in the first place. I am a music professor in order to try my best to teach and model the reality that the path towards living a life as a successful artist is through the extraordinary difficult, but also extraordinarily simple, work of embodying and communicating truth and authenticity.

Healthy artists are on a continual path towards optimizing their creative individuation. They may have questions about how to succeed on this path, while feeling haunted by the mysteries of what lies at the end of it. They have questions, fears, and doubts about how to move away from vaguely defined “big goals” of fame and fortune, and instead towards focused, concrete outcomes.

Innovation lies at the heart of these tangible outcomes. By definition it eschews traditions, templates, norms, jargon, competition, and external expectations. It exists. It is inherently diverse. It is constructively disruptive. It is contradictory and inconsistent. It can be both beautiful and ugly. It changes and evolves. Our innovative genius is more likely something that is already in us, pre-existing, rather than something we need to find or create. In many years of working as a mentor I have seen, over and over again, that artists manifest their genius not by synthesizing something, but instead by removing what stands in the way of what has always been there. Doing so requires love and acceptance of what emerges from the dust after the walls come down. And here the process begins: built on what may be unexpected, but also on what is true and real.

You may have questions. If so, please reach out.

Thanks for visiting.

Kevin Komisaruk

Toronto, July 2024