When I go to a social function, I’m the weird guy with the camera.

Oh, I represent. I dance at weddings. I play games at parties. I help with the dishes at the holiday dinners. I’m not just the guy with the camera, but—yeah. I’m usually the one taking photos.

I call it a type because like every artistic pursuit there is always a cliché. There is always a tell. There is always a secret handshake that isn’t a handshake but maybe just a really nice camera that never leaves the hand and—shake: you recognize the other weird guys from a mile away.

Weird camera guys find other weird camera guys at social functions. We talk. We compare equipment, stories, and frustrations. 

Because… that’s community.

That’s the thing you want but you never recognize it until you’re driving home later that evening thinking you should have connected with that other weird camera guy on instagram or something so you could maybe turn an awkward social function conversation into something creatively productive—a collaboration, or maybe just someone to talk to about that thing you love to do.

I know my type. I’m the weird camera guy, and these hobbies are often lonely enough without pretending that we don’t see each other.

Building a community is an effort that requires not just surrounding yourself with other creative people, but finding good people who support you from the sidelines.

This step is easy to overlook when it’s missing, and even easier to take for granted when it falls into place. 

Having people in your life who want to read your writing, hang your art, and attend your concerts is never automatic. It’s precious and a reminder that someone is paying attention. It can be all that holds you together on those too-frequent days when it seems like obscurity and irrelevance is your only companion on a creative adventure. It can hold it all together when the path is unclear.

Cheerleaders are, of course, not devoid of creativity or otherwise lacking in motivation. Heck no. But they might be people who appreciate your efforts in a field that they themselves do not excel. They are almost certainly people who understand the soul of creative effort and know that encouragement and support are the lifeblood and fuel of its continuity. 

And most often, they come unasked. You can’t beg and plead for them to cheer and you cannot be anything but thankful that they stay for a day, a month or a lifetime. 

But when you find them, notice them, and cheer right back.

It is us, too. It is our penchant for gossip and rubber necking at disasters, but I would argue that it wasn’t until the algorithm turned it into a cottage industry and a lucrative product that meta creative content blossomed like an algal outbreak in mountain lake through our feeds.

Let me interject here with a definition. When I use the term “meta creative” I am referring to a genre of published media that falls somewhere in the uncanny valley between genuine creative works such as film, music, art, and literature on one end and critique-slash-analysis on the other end. In the middle there is a new variety of lazy, reactionary performance that often involves belittling, mocking, panning or otherwise pointing and laughing at (sometimes literally) the work of other people (and this is the important part) with nothing of value to add besides the raw reaction.

Honest critique and analysis plays a vital role in creativity, and any art school grad will tell you that learning how to gather and act on genuine feedback is vital to improvement. 

On the other hand, the kind of sloppy green screen overlay of a mocking primal reaction to something, positive or negative, serves very little besides its own self promotion and amplification on the work of others.

It is a spectrum, of course. There is no perfect critique and there is no absolutely pointless meta creative reaction, but the algorithm certainly seems to reward the lingering gaze of any and all of us who stare a little too long at the simplistic emotional takes of reaction clips. 

We’ve lost something for that, and I write that as both a creative soul and as grumpy old guy who knew a more supportive creative era, now passed.

This is cross post from Of Poets & Processors.

You’ve seen these: glass blowers, knife forgers, puppet makers, miniature modellers. The formula is usually the same: artists, judges, tears and hugs.

Yet I’ve often found the particulars of the art itself are less interesting than the side effect of bringing together a group of people with a shared interest. As much as the production demands of the show oft only glimpse at it, a keen eye can often spot that these people sometimes seem more torn about losing and being cast off one at a time per episode not because of the money, but because they are being torn out of a community.

Social media is a pale substitute to gathering with your artistic peers, I would argue. It can help find your tribe, sure, but there is something irreplaceable about the collaborative energy of a crowd and the erasure of the usual loneliness of a being a creative soul.

Not everyone need apply for the next reality television production, but seeking and nurturing an artistic social life is arguably almost as important as learning and practicing one’s art.

Under the category of Social & Community, I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

About a ten days prior to writing this we had our end-of-the-season concert, our final show, and  (after a potluck dinner a few days later) wrapped the season.

In the cadence of my creative musical soul I should have gone to rehearsal last night.

There was no rehearsal.

Again, we’re on summer break.

When I was a kid creativity was an obligation. I would have rather parked in front of the television, or played video games or—honestly—just gone out and hung around with my friends. Being sent off to extra-curricular activities, even as few and scattered as those opportunities were for me, were disruptions to my life.

A few decades pass by and here I am pondering how to fill the vacant summer months when the air is quieter and my creative contemporaries are off doing other things.

I’ll get over it. I’ll find something to write or draw. I’ll find music to play on my own. I’ll prevail.

But it does all make me realize how much I’ve internalized the creative twists and turns of my soul into the person who I think I want to be in this part of my life. Missing—craving—that creative community when it pauses is like a symptom for which the cure is just to keep making more stuff.

Are there places in the world that are better for certain types of creativity, or is it possible to find community outside of noted centres of imagination: San Francisco, Paris, Tokyo, to name a few that come to mind when pause to I think.

I find when evaluating spectra of a thing, it helps to look for the opposite: if we are asking if hotspots for creativity exist, what is the opposite of that?

As I write this I am coming off of a temporary gig up in the northern parts of my province where I was even deeper into nowhere than I usually am. I was in a small rural community for a whole week and out of happenstance and curiosity I tried to figure out if I could buy some watercolour paints (I’d left mine at home.)

“You’d probably need to get something like that off Amazon.” The hotel receptionist suggested.

Imagine that, I thought to myself. 

I personally got started in watercolour because I was in an art store and I impulse-purchased supplies. Then I took a local class. Then I found other people who could paint and I used them as inspiration. 

My home city is hardly a hotspot for watercolour painting, but it is very telling to see what something looks like when it isn’t even a “spot” let alone a hotspot for a specific kind of creativity.