.POST ARTS UNIVERSITY CREATIVE BLOCK
When I was at university, me and my best friend were finding it hard to make ourselves be creative. You can’t force creativity, and being at uni you have deadlines that need to be met and projects that need to get done in a short space of time. We found that it started to kill our love for the medium of photography which was making us both second doubt ourselves at whether photography was the line we should be going down in our lives… but after many a cigarette and a good bitching session we would snap out of it (not even kidding).
In our final year, we were told to go to a seminar where ex-students would be coming in and telling us about how they found the course and what they are doing as a photography graduate in the real world. It like 3 hours long and both me and my friend gagging for a fag and started to tune out, but something interesting was said that caught our attention. All of the ex-students said they didn’t want to pick up a camera for about a year after finishing university. They had spend 3 years doing an intense course and forcing themselves to be creative that they just wanted (and needed) a break from it. This made me and my friend realise that it wasn’t just us and that it would be ok if we didn’t have any creativity for a while after uni.
This was then made very difficult in my situation. In March 2014 (while still studying in Cornwall) I started to open my studio back in West Sussex and getting all the business things sorted. I was constantly coming back home to do more painting, paperwork, ordering, and advertising, and prepping to open. All the while, still doing the coursework and projects. This wasn’t as easy as I thought it might have been as it was then a lot of photography based stress; university, and a business. This meant that as soon as I finished uni I was then straight into the photography world with a new business and all at the age of 21.
I was finding that I couldn’t create anything interesting. I kept trying to pick up my camera and do something with it. Brainstorming, researching, using Tumblr (one of the best places for inspiration I find), starting this blog, exhibitions. EVERYTHING… and still not a bloody thing. The more I tried, the more I was stressing out that I had a business that wasn’t doing anything and that I wasn’t getting any creative fullfillment. I was doing client work (portraits, family shoots, product shoots, etc.) but nothing that was being done with my own creativity and my own mind. I was so used to having concepts and not being ‘literal’ (fuck, I hated that word so much in critiques) that I couldn’t let myself just take an image for the sake of it. I was always thinking projects, collections, non-literal concepts, and series.
This block lasted about 7 months and was the worst 7 months of my creative life so far! And dear Lord did Netflix take a beating and a half! But I’m not angry at myself as clearly it was a good thing. I have now started looking at photography in a different light as I’ve been absorbing creative arts for the last 7 months and not applying it to anything. Its been a visual bank that has just stayed in my head and now given me a lot of ideas. I was sat at my desk in my studio one day thinking ‘come on Lee, do something creative today’ (maybe with some more R-Rated words thrown in) and I was looking at all the crap on my desk like coffee cups, pens, clock, and other everyday items, and decided to use them to my advantage.
I wanted to make the items look even more mundane than they were by removing all the detail from them. I used a white primer spray paint all over my arm and the items and gave the background all the colour. I was only going to create just these two images, but there were a number of other things I wanted to spray and see how it looked. From being just a couple of images it then turned into a series. (FUCK YES, IM BACK IN THE GAME!!). From doing this shoot, I have had a number of ideas and been drawing shoot sketches for use with models and other products. The 7 months was almost worth the wait as I have had my ‘break’, even thought it wasn’t intentional and I tried to fight it, it worked out to be one of the best things I could have done.
This shoot that I did opened my eyes to a whole different world of photography I had never really looked at before. My normal style of photography was very dark and non studio based, and always with people (figurativily or physically), whereas now I’m really interested by colour. It has really given me a mental pat on the back and I started to feel really good about myself and my work.
The thing with going to an arts university is that it can kill a passion that was once there. Some people make it and some dont. It is a very different ball game to being at college and doing it because of the deadlines, the ways of thinking, and how photographs should be taken. As me and my friend had come straight from A-Level, rather than doing a foundation art course first, we found it a massive leap and still came out with good grades and (somehow!) pushed our way through the course without a) killing someone, b) killing ourselves, or c) giving up on photography as a whole. (possibly a little bit melodramatic right there haha)
I do think that if you are in a creative block, just ride it out. But always keep your camera on yourself so that incase you are out and about and something does capture your eye then you can see where the inspiration takes you. It sucks ass to feel like you are shit as your passion, but things happen for a reason. The shoot I did with the spray painted items led onto playing with water and inks because I liked the use of the colour.
They are both very different in look, but similar in ideas. But these images will lead somewhere too and it then picks you back up in the creative senses again.
