About

When I real­ized I wanted to put all my Abouts togeth­ere, I wasn’t sure what to put under Art. I wrote a good few para­graphs which I’ve recat­e­gorised as a blog post, “On Making”. So now I’ll just reflect on my his­tory with creativity.

I’m not par­tic­u­larly good at any craft, and there’s no spe­cial affin­ity to any medium. I start things when I see others do them, when I realise that these things are doable. I have aped and mir­rored and derived, and stum­bled my way to a work­ing famil­iar­ity with things that still do not come easy. But I do feel amply repaid for every effort, and indeed am hardly con­scious of the strug­gle. I only pity those who have had to watch me scratch my head and mumble dis­con­cert­ingly when­ever I set out on a new artis­tic adventure.

I wrote my first story when I was about 7, because I saw my sister fill a school exer­cise book with a cathar­tic reflec­tion of my family in a season of loss. I wrote my first poem some four years later, but the bug only caught when I found a large col­lege text­book on World Literature. My first song came when I was 11, but half of the early ones are best left in the dust of his­tory. I fol­lowed my best friend to guitar prac­tice, and while the instruc­tor tol­er­ated my fum­bling basslines for the next two years, I got into the habit of rework­ing his com­po­si­tions at home. I bor­rowed a vector graph­ics pro­gram from another friend when I should have been learn­ing for a reme­dial exam. My brother had a clear ambi­tion for the adver­tis­ing indus­try; I kept seeing his books lying around, so I read them. 

Things haven’t gotten much more cohe­sive or pur­pose­ful in the present. I signed up for ASCAP last month, and cre­ated a branded account on Youtube some months before. And yet, prob­a­bly, if I make any­thing, this is where you’ll find it: Art, Music, Writing.

And that’s prob­a­bly it?