I always have an eye open for interesting unpolished creative stones when I’m wading through the streams of my social feeds.
There is an urgency in many of us who make stuff to fit in. We work towards a certain grade of production quality. We make to fit into a mould of commercial viability. We try to stand out in a crowded field by following the so-called rules.
It’s all so much water rushing past our feet.
It’s the stranger things that capture my attention, the jagged, colourful rock stuck mostly in the muck of the riverbed, just poking out and catching the light in an interesting way, that snags my eye.
I have explored this theme routinely on this blog. There is a gentle conflict between the pursuit of high quality products that build one’s portfolio, represent one’s best work, and meet a threshold of acceptable value—and on the other side, transcend formula, represent something new and interesting, and break the mould.
In the middle is a tension in the heart of many artists of any field. To ignore the rules completely is to be overlooked for failing to meet expectations, but then to become little more than a photocopier for ideas of others before us is to be shrugged off as uninteresting.
We all want to be a polished stone. But someone needs to pluck us out of the river of obscurity before that happens.
Under the category of Pomp & Popularity I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.