The Heavy Lift of Creativity—Kate Gaston

Some Thoughts on Craft, Community, and the Call to Generosity

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by Kate Gaston

Back in the day when his show aired on PBS, I fell in love with Bob Ross. The man was mesmerizing. Episode after magical episode, Bob, with his soft voice and gentle chuckle, would load his brush with color. Then, my friends, he would paint.

The camera would zoom in for a close-up, and you’d hear it: the scruffy tap, tap, tap of his brush on canvas. That glorious, bristly sound is quite possibly the most gratifying sound ever produced by a human.

My parents’ budget was tight back then. Even so, they purchased an oil paint starter kit for me. My dad, in an act of engineering genius, constructed an easel out of a pair of rickety old crutches and scrap plywood.

Whenever Bob came on, I’d crank my crutch easel open in front of the television, and we’d paint together.

Over the intervening years, my relationship with painting has shifted and lurched. It reminds me of the relationship you might have with that one childhood friend. You know the one. Back in the good old days, the two of you were inseparable. You were carefree. Every morning promised a new adventure, full of romping good times. You were best friends for life and had the friendship bracelets to prove it.

But then, something changed.

Maybe you joined the middle school band. Maybe you got distracted by cute boys. Maybe you went through a Goth phase. Whatever the reason, you drifted apart. You’d still hang out on occasion, but the ease you used to share was gone.

That’s me and painting.

Sometimes it’s fun, sure, but it’s almost never easy. Standing in front of an in-process canvas can be fraught with uncertainty. The cunning whispers of the inner critic dance around every brushstroke.

The process of making things is hard. It can be lonely. It can be emotional. Everyone, at some point or another, falls prey to doubt. We will all wrestle with comparison and envy. There will be frustration and despair. There will be power walking the streets of your neighborhood, wondering how Bob can paint such happy little clouds, but yours look churlish and lumpy.

Yet, day after day, you show up. You do the work despite the fact that your amygdala—that almond-shaped danger cowboy—is pummeling your psyche with waves of fear and anxiety, urging you to run, it’s not safe. Go fold some laundry, check your email, watch another episode of Severance. Do anything, please, but this hard, scary thing that you may or may not be able to get right.

It’s true, you have no certainty that you’ll get the work right. Yet, that same work somehow seems undeniably linked to your very humanity. The act of creation is a process of wrestling with your incompetence until it becomes competence. And it requires the chutzpah to do it when, literally, no one asked you to do it.

It’s crazy. Who would do such a thing?

You would.

Let’s say, last Tuesday, at precisely 2:37 p.m., you just happened to be paying attention when the light hit that infinitely beveled edge of God’s glory. That glint of refracted glory caught your eye.

Not mine. Not someone else’s eye. Yours.

It hit in just such a way as to give you a tiny gleam of understanding, a bite-sized insight into God’s character. You could die happy with this vision.

But instead, you translated this vision into a poem. Or maybe you choreographed a dance to express it. Or you paint, sing, or blow a long, sonorous note on your didgeridoo about it.

Whatever your preferred method of creating happens to be, your creation casts further tiny refractions of glory hither and yon, refractions that the rest of us will then pick up and admire, knowing God more deeply by their light.

Lewis Hyde’s landmark book on the subject of creativity, The Gift, puts flesh on the bones of the age-old question: Why create? Simply put, our creativity is a gift. It is a gift first to the artist, but then the artist becomes a channel through whom beauty, meaning, and insight are gifted forward to the community at large.

On the topic of artistic generosity, the entrepreneur and marketing guru Seth Godin said, “The work exists to serve someone, to change someone, to make something better.”

And from writer, speaker, and creativity coach Amie McNee: “Making art and sharing it with the world is an act of profound generosity. When you sit down to write, to paint, to make music, you are doing something that is both good for yourself and great for society.”

I find myself nodding along in agreement. Who doesn’t like generosity? It’s a great word. Add it to pretty much anything and it makes the thing better. A generous host. A generous friend. A generous pour.

Yeah, baby, two thumbs up for generosity.

The creative work I share is a gift I give to my community. It’s generous to share my finished work with you, yes. But sharing my successes—those pretty, polished-up projects—is only half the reality.

I would love nothing more than for you to think I am limitless; that the Muse and I are besties. That while I’m busy writing these words, she’s refilling my coffee mug, ready to reward me with a gold star and a foot massage.

But what about all those failures leading up to the success? What about the uncertainty, the doubt, and the occasional howling woe? If I hide that long, heavy labor of creating—tidying it up so that you’ll think it’s effortless—well, that’s not very generous at all.

I’d like you to consider your whole artistic process, every high and low, and crack it open wide. Take a good look. There, within those peaks and valleys, lies the very stuff that makes you human. There, in the vulnerability of creation, in its joy and pain, is a shared human experience so powerful it can be perceived across space and time.

Here are two truths:

1. Making stuff is inherently vulnerable.

2. Vulnerability is an essential building block to deeper relationships.

I’d like you to grab these two truths by the hand. You possess the ability to create, yes. But there’s another, more intricate plotline at work. In a fractured, lonely, anxious world, you possess a relational superpower: the ability to invite others into the vulnerable, shared, human experience of creation.

Remember all the joy and pain of your creative process? Start talking about it. Invite people into those spaces with you. By doing so, you expand your definition of hospitality. You leverage the power of your creative vulnerability into deeper, richer relationships. This vulnerability, like the art you create, is a gift you can give. Give it generously.

First, gather your people. Writers, painters, musicians, poets, woodworkers, dungeon masters, and more. Gather every month. These gatherings could take a thousand different forms, but don’t underestimate the power of simply showing up. Let me say that again: Please show up.

Meet in a living room, art studio, coffee shop, or church basement. Gather around a meal if you can, but a box of Girl Scout cookies will do in a pinch. Circle up. Get close. Look each other in the eye. Each month, ask a different artist to share their story. Don’t be prescriptive; let the artist take you where they want to go. There is a strange alchemy that occurs when artists gather and speak openly of their craft.

Listen attentively. Encourage thoughtful questions. Edge deeper into those waters of relational vulnerability. Everyone might not share the same artistic medium, but your expressions of creativity are branches springing up from the same root. Let the musicians bring their instruments. Let the painters bring their canvases. Let the poets bring their angst.

Though by its very nature, much of the heavy lifting of creativity will be done in solitude, when we trust others with our creative vulnerabilities, we begin to dismantle the relational barriers between us, rolling back the isolating effects of fear, envy, and shame.

In Pete Peterson’s recent version of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is given the warning by the Ghost of Christmas Past, “What is hidden cannot heal.” When we create within the context of a trustworthy community, we begin to uncover what has been hidden.

One of the most toxic weeds that flourishes in artistic isolation is envy. Envy has the power to derail creative growth. It can devastate friendships. Where a creative oasis might have flourished, envy scorches it, making it a wasteland. Envy assassinates whatever joy you might have experienced and replaces it with rancid bitterness, a sort of fizzing, psychic heartburn. Find your people. Confess your envy out loud. And do it yesterday.

Weird things come out of the woodwork when you are in the process of creating. No one mentions these things. You’ll be plugging along, happily making stuff, but then your metaphysical shovel hits something—old wounds, past trauma—buried in the dirt. And suddenly, instead of creating, now you’re excavating.

You will need help with this weighty work. Someone can hold the flashlight. Someone else can bring you a sandwich. Or your people can simply sit with you, mourn with you, hold your hand as you behold that petrified pain, suspended there in the striated bedrock of your soul.

We all feel a longing, almost like homesickness, for our work to be better, to be good, to be perfect. Alas, it might not ever be perfect. Most of the time, it might not even be all that good. Own your inadequacy. Creating is messy.

Normalize the mess, mistakes, and failures. Normalize fallibility and the mundanity of work. Model persistence. Model the deep sigh when things don’t turn out like you thought they would. And then model what it looks like to eat a good dinner, go to bed, and pick the work up again tomorrow morning.

Peel back the moldy narrative that creative worth is only found in productivity. Strip that falsehood of its robe and crown, dethrone it, and send it running, naked, into the wilderness. Good riddance.

Your vulnerability is capable of making others feel brave, or of comforting someone in their pain. Your vulnerability is capable of provoking someone who's become complacent, unnerving them in the best of ways. It can reveal an existence that is bigger, wilder, scarier, and more untamed than we originally thought. So go ahead. Drop that fig leaf.

When you share your art, and especially when you are honest about the inherent vulnerability of making art, you are holding up a torch for others, showing them what it is to be human. More, you become a living, breathing expression of a common grace that whispers of a greater, more specific grace. You are revealing what it’s like, quite particularly and specifically, to walk with God.

It is a generous gift to share your glimmering reflections of God’s glory, holding up what you see for someone else to see. It is an act of deeper generosity when you share your creative vulnerability. In vulnerability, there is transformation. We begin to speak a unified, common language of our needs, our capabilities, our limits. Doubts are quieted. Belief is strengthened. This, my friend, is the beating heart of hospitality.

So find your merry band of weirdos and misfits. Let’s throw our arms around each other’s shoulders, bear each other up, and, together, go limping toward the source of true life and flourishing.

Maybe I’ll never be able to paint happy little clouds like Bob. Even so, I’ll keep right on painting, knowing we each get to share some small part of the story in which God is wooing souls to himself through truth and beauty. So, what are we waiting for? Let’s go make some stuff.

For your further reading and viewing pleasure:

• Amie McNee: We Need Your Art: Stop Messing Around and Make Something

• Seth Godin: The Practice: Shipping Creative Work

(Hat tip to Katy Bowser Hutson for recommending the two excellent books above.)

• Lewis Hyde: The Gift

• Susan Magsaman and Ivy Ross: Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us

• What is Severance, Kate?

• Pete Peterson: Christmas Carol Production Diary, Day 1: Let there be Lights

• Read more from Kate Gaston about loneliness

• Read more from Kate Gaston about having better, more vulnerable conversations

When it comes to creativity, here are some books I love. Read them and be forever changed:

• Julia Cameron: The Artist's Way

• Steven Pressfield: The War of Art

• Anne Lamott: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

• Stephen King: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

• Annie Dillard: The Writing Life

• Madeleine L’Engle: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

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An Alabama native, Kate Gaston was homeschooled before it was even remotely considered normal. She completed her undergraduate degree at Bryan College and went on to graduate school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. For eight years, Kate worked as a PA in a trauma and burn ICU before ping-ponging across the nation for her husband’s medical training. She and her family are currently putting down roots in Nashville, Tennessee. Today, Kate enjoys homeschooling her daughter and tutoring in her local classical homeschool community. She also finds deep satisfaction in long, meandering conversations at coffee shops, oil painting, writing, and gazing pensively into the middle distance. You can read more of her work at her Substack: That Middle Distance.

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