Not a dramatic one. Not one that arrived in a single lightning bolt moment. More like a slow hum that crept in quietly, the way important questions tend to. It goes something like this:

What if the system that keeps not choosing you was never really built to hold you in the first place?

Stay with me here. Because I think this might reframe some things.

How Self-Expression Got Sold Back to Us

For much of the last century, industrial culture often favored standardized goods, shared media, and broadly similar everyday styles. Conformity was not just a side effect of how things were made and sold, it was built into many of the systems people bought into.

Henry Ford famously captured that logic with the Model T, even though the car was not always black throughout its production history. Mass production was built to make goods predictable, efficient, and widely available.

Households often relied on the same television sets, the same furniture catalogues, and a relatively small number of channels at night. Supermarkets stocked a limited range of staples. Clothing looked broadly similar across generations. In that world, sameness was not just normal. It was the design.

Then artists pushed back. Creatives, rebels, people who were genuinely exhausted by the tidiness of it all. The punk movement in the late 70s said: we refuse your polish. The hippies said: we refuse your war and your suits and your sameness. The abstract expressionists said: we refuse your idea of what a painting is supposed to do. Across decades and movements, the message was consistent. Our difference is our power. Our individuality is the rebellion.

And for a while, it genuinely was.

But here’s what happened next, and this is the part nobody tells you clearly enough.

The system did not simply resist rebellion. It also learned how to package it. Nike built an empire around Just Do It, a slogan that sold determination, identity, and aspiration as much as shoes. Starbucks became associated not only with coffee, but with a branded third place experience and a cultivated lifestyle aesthetic. MTV took punk, hip-hop, and alternative culture, sounds that were genuinely disruptive, and helped turn them into mainstream visual programming with commercial airtime attached.

Express yourself stopped being only a war cry. It also became a marketing language.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth that follows from all of this. Once self-expression becomes a default social norm, it stops separating people in a meaningful way. If everyone is trying to signal individuality through curated aesthetics, personal branding, captions, playlists, outfits, or an “authentic” online identity, then those signals start following recognisable templates.

That does not mean self-expression is fake. It means it becomes legible through shared conventions, just like a dress code or a genre. The more people use the same platforms, filters, phrases, and visual languages to be themselves, the more expression turns into a common code that others know how to read.

The Art That Gets Chosen

This pattern did not stay in retail. It moved into culture, into institutions, into the spaces that are supposed to support artists.

Galleries often fund work that is provocative enough to attract attention but still legible enough to fit donor expectations and institutional programming. Platforms often reward content that performs vulnerability in a highly visible way, even when that vulnerability is carefully curated.

Certain kinds of political art get celebrated not necessarily because they threaten power, but because they allow institutions to appear culturally fluent in their support of it. The anger becomes a programme note. The critique becomes a press release. The revolution gets an opening night.

The art being consistently chosen often has something in common. It fits. It fits the current vocabulary of what meaningful expression is supposed to look like. It fits the aesthetic of the moment. It translates neatly into the language institutions already speak.

And if your work does not speak that language?

You may get the polite, encouraging, ultimately closed door.

The Waiting Room We All Sit In

I want to be honest with you here, because I think honesty is the only thing worth offering.

Even understanding all of this, even seeing the system clearly, even feeling certain that you will not compromise what you make, there is still a part of you that waits. That hopes. That feels a very specific, very tender thing when you put your work out into the world and listen for a response.

The waiting is not weakness. The hoping is not naivety.

It is one of the oldest, most human things there is, the need to be seen. To have someone look at what you made from your most honest place and say: yes, I see it. It’s real. It matters.

We are allowed to want that. Needing recognition is not vanity. It is part of what makes us reach toward each other at all.

The question is just whose recognition actually counts. And whether you are letting the silence of the wrong audience become the measure of your worth.

What the Private Folder Already Knows

Here’s something I keep returning to.

The work you make without an audience in mind, the piece you finished late at night that you have not shown anyone, the thing that came out strange and specific and entirely yours, sitting in a folder or a sketchbook or a draft you keep meaning to revisit, that work already knows something you are still waiting for the world to confirm.

It knows it is real.

It did not need to be chosen to become real. It became real the moment you made it, because you made it from the truest place you have access to. That place, the one that creates not to be validated but because something in you simply has to, is not niche in the dismissive sense. It is not too quiet or too specific or insufficiently legible to the moment.

It is the whole point.

There is a version of making things that exists underneath all the noise. Older than the algorithm. Older than the institutions. The kind of making that is really just a conversation you are having with yourself and the few people in the world who are waiting, without knowing it yet, for exactly what you have to say.

Your niche is not your limitation. It is your address. It is where your people may eventually find you, not because you made yourself more palatable to the system, but because you stayed true enough, long enough, that the right people arrived.

The Line Worth Keeping

You will make compromises. Every person who has ever made things in a world that requires money to survive has made compromises. That is not failure. That is the basic condition of being human in a system you did not design and did not get to price.

But here is what is worth knowing before the next pitch, the next submission, the next warm and reasonable person who gently suggests your work might land better if it were a little more like what is currently being celebrated:

Know your line before they ask you to cross it.

Because they will ask, kindly, with good intentions, with a genuinely compelling reason. And in that moment, the only thing standing between you and a slow, barely noticeable drift away from your own practice is already knowing what you will and will not give away.

Your niche is not the problem. Your niche is the work. Protect it.

To the Artist Still Waiting

You were born into a world already running. Already measuring. Already deciding what counts as serious creative work, whose vision is legible enough to be worth investing in, what belongs in the gallery and what belongs in the hobby room.

You did not choose that world. But you are making things in it anyway, sometimes in the margins of your day, sometimes late at night, sometimes just for yourself, in a folder nobody has opened but you.

That is not a lesser version of a creative practice.

That is, I’d argue, one of the most alive versions of it.

There is something in you that existed before the first rejection. Before the first time someone looked at your work and said it was not quite what they were looking for. Something that does not need to be selected to be real. A way of seeing that is entirely, irreducibly yours.

Make from that place. Keep putting your work out, because the world does sometimes surprise you, and you deserve to be seen. But do not let the waiting hollow you out. Do not let the silence of the inbox become the measure of your worth.

Your work already counts.

It counted before anyone said so.

It features Marina Abramović. She’s 79.

She’s been making art for over 60 years. And she opens the video with a question that lodged itself in my mind before I’d even finished watching:

“If I have to die like today, what do I leave behind?”

Now, you might think that of course someone her age is asking that. And yes, maybe. But here’s the thing: Marina Abramović isn’t just anyone asking that question.

She is one of the most groundbreaking figures in performance art. Her work didn’t just push boundaries, it dissolved them entirely. She turned her own body into the art. Vulnerability, endurance, presence, these weren’t just themes for her, they were the work.

She invited audiences in, not as observers, but as participants, asking them to sit with discomfort, with trust, with something deeply human.

And the world noticed.

• The Golden Lion at Venice.

• The Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts.

• A retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Artist Is Present, which became one of the most visited and talked-about performance exhibitions in history.

• Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People.

She even founded her own institute to make sure performance art doesn’t get forgotten after she’s gone.

She has, by every measure, done the work.

And yet, she still asks: “what am I leaving behind?”

Doesn’t that get you a little bit? Here is a woman who has received some of the highest honors art can offer, who has quite literally changed the definition of what art is, and she still holds herself to something more.

She doesn’t coast. She doesn’t declare herself finished. She expects to outlive her mother, who lived to 105. She’s aiming for 110. And she plans to keep performing the whole way there.

The video ends with her saying, almost as an aside, “Anyways, lots of things to do…”

I laughed when I heard it. And then I felt something shift a little.

Because we’re often told, quietly, culturally, that a certain point in life is when you wind down. When you’ve earned the right to stop. And there’s nothing wrong with rest. Rest is sacred.

But Marina seems to be living proof that hunger doesn’t have an expiry date. That the question of what we’re here to make, to say, to offer, it doesn’t get answered and then put away. It just keeps evolving.

And if someone with 60 years of work and a roomful of awards is still asking what do I leave behind? maybe the question isn’t a sign of doubt. Maybe it’s a sign of devotion.

We are raised, most of us, with a very specific idea of what it means to leave something behind. Land. Jewellery. A savings account. Something you can hold, divide, and pass down. Something with a paper trail. And there is nothing wrong with that, but I wonder how many of us have ever stopped to ask:

“what about everything else?”

What about the way you saw the world? The things you made at 2am when you couldn’t sleep. The stories only you carry. The creative life you lived, quietly or loudly, in the margins of everything else.

I hadn’t, honestly. Not until Marina asked that question and I found myself pausing the video just to sit with it.

We are so conditioned to measure legacy in things that can be inherited that we forget a life can be left behind too. Not as instructions. Not as a lesson. Just as a record that says: I was here. I felt this. I made this. This is what I believed beauty could be.

Your work counts as something worth leaving. Not because it is perfect or finished or widely seen. But because it is yours, and because you made it with intention, and that is enough to make it matter.

Your grandchildren may not understand it. Your children might not either. That’s not the point. The point is that it existed. That you existed, fully, in the act of creating it.

So the question isn’t really about who will receive it. It’s about what it means to you to have made it at all.

What do you want to leave behind? And why?

You don’t have to answer it today. But I’d sit with it, if I were you. It has a way of quietly rearranging things.

A book about who gets seen. Questions about whether I see myself clearly. A video about where attention goes when you stop guarding it. And a painting built entirely around an eye. I didn’t notice the pattern until I sat down to write this. Maybe that’s the point.

I’m not sure all of this is easy to read. Some of it wasn’t easy to write. But the things worth holding onto rarely are. Make a cup of something warm. Stay a while.

A Book That Stayed With Me

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

I put this book down and sat quietly for a long time. Not because it was sad, though it is, in places — but because it named something I had been carrying without knowing what to call it. That particular ache of wondering whether you’re not good enough, or whether the room was just never built for you.

What starts as an art history question quickly becomes something much bigger, a quiet dismantling of how we understand talent, ambition, and who gets to be called a genius. The argument isn’t “women were just as good.” It’s sharper than that. It asks: what were the actual conditions under which greatness was possible and who was allowed inside those rooms? The answer turns out to be deeply political. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it, not in art history, not in the world, not in the way you’ve been measuring yourself.

If you’re a woman navigating any creative field, this book will probably feel like a light being switched on in a room you didn’t know was dark. I wrote a full post about it. Go read it if you want the longer version of why I think this belongs in everyone’s hands.

Subscribe now

Things I’m Thinking About Lately

No conclusions here. Just questions I keep returning to in the shower, mid-conversation, at 2am when I should be asleep. I’m sharing them not because I’ve figured anything out, but because I have a feeling I’m not the only one sitting with them.

1. Do I like me outside of the noise? Outside of the roles I play — do I have a self that exists without any structure at all?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot: how much of who I think I am is actually just... function. I am the person who creates things. Who shows up. Who holds it together. Who has opinions about art and books and the world. But strip all of that away strip the productivity, the output, the way I’m useful to other people and who’s left?

Do I even know her?

The scary version of this question is: what if I’ve been so busy performing a self that I forgot to actually have one. And the scarier version is that I’m not sure I’d know the difference.

When was the last time you did something with no audience not even yourself as an audience? No narrative forming in the background, no part of you watching and filing it away? That’s what I mean by “outside the noise.” It’s rare. Maybe I should go find her more often.

2. What is my relationship with anger and why does it feel like a question I was never supposed to ask?

I’ve been noticing how much I’ve been taught not explicitly, just through years of small signals — to manage my anger. Soften it. Redirect it. Make it more palatable. And I’m realising that’s not a personal thing. That’s political.

Who gets to be angry without it being used against them?

Whose anger is called passion versus whose is called difficult?

The thing I’m sitting with is this: I don’t think I fully know what my anger is actually about, because I got so good at quietly dissolving it before it became inconvenient. And now I’m wondering what information I lost in the process. Because anger, when it’s honest, is usually pointing at something true. Something worth paying attention to.

3. Self-trust and self-love are not the same thing. And gratitude and self-worth aren’t either.

I used to think if I was grateful enough, that meant I was okay. Like gratitude was proof that I liked my life and if I liked my life, that must mean I liked myself. But lately I’ve been picking that apart. You can be genuinely grateful for what you have and still, underneath all of it, not really like the person living it.

Gratitude is about what’s around you.

Self-worth is about whether you believe you deserve it.

Same with self-trust and self-love. I can love myself in the abstract, want good things for myself, talk kindly to myself, do the work and still not trust my own instincts. Still second-guess. Still hand the decision to someone else and feel relieved when they take it.

These things look similar from the outside but they feel completely different from the inside. I think I’ve been conflating them for a long time. And separating them out, even just naming them as different things, has felt unexpectedly useful.

Subscribe now

Things I Loved on the Internet

I’ll be honest with you, I found this video the way I find most things: mindlessly scrolling, one autoplay away from an hour I didn’t plan to lose. The irony isn’t lost on me.

But this one stopped me. The speaker said something that landed quietly and then just... stayed. That there is another way to live: slow, with presence, with intention. Not mindlessly chasing the next thing to watch, the next thing to consume, the next hit of something. A different way entirely.

And I sat with that for a while. Because I find it genuinely hard not to overconsume. I open an app to check one thing and resurface forty minutes later, slightly emptier than before. I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think a lot of us have quietly accepted that this is just what it feels like to exist now.

But that line cracked something open. If there’s another way what does it actually look like? What does it feel like in the body to move through a day with that kind of intentionality? I don’t fully know yet. But now, every time I reach for my phone to open YouTube or scroll through something, I catch myself asking:

• Is there another way I can spend this moment?

• How can I protect my attention not just from the internet, but from the version of me that hands it away without thinking?

It’s a small question. But it’s changed the texture of my days in a way I wasn’t expecting.

Work that pulled me in

The Cyclops

Odilon Redon · c. 1914 · Kröller-Müller Museum

A one-eyed giant peering over a mountain at a sleeping woman. The Cyclops Polyphemus, watching the Nereid Galatea, a love that will never be returned, painted in colours so vivid and strange they feel almost wrong for the weight of the scene. That’s what I noticed first: how beautiful it is. How unsettling it is that it’s beautiful.

But here’s the thing the story behind this scene is far darker than the painting lets on. Galatea isn’t exactly sleeping. She’s hiding. Polyphemus, the Cyclops, is obsessed with her in that particular way obsession works: he wrote her a love poem that starts as praise and slowly curdles into threat. He calls her beautiful.

Then he calls her an untamed heifer. Then he promises to tear her lover Acis limb from limb if she won’t choose him. Which he then actually does. He finds them together, hurls a boulder, and crushes Acis completely. Galatea jumps into the sea.

That’s the love story Redon chose to paint. Soft colours. Dreamlike blur. The most violent Greek myth wearing a pastel disguise.

And that’s precisely the point. Notice how little structure the painting has the borders bleed into each other, the proportions make no logical sense, the mountain looks almost small behind the giant. Redon wasn’t being careless. He wanted the whole thing to feel like a dream you only half-remember: one or two things in sharp focus, the rest just haze. And the one thing you can’t look away from? That face. That eye. Because Redon spent years painting eyes.

What stays with me is this: Polyphemus is not painted as evil. He looks almost innocent, a creature too simple to understand that love without consent is not love at all.

Redon wasn’t asking you to sympathise with him. But he wasn’t letting you look away either. Sometimes the most important seeing happens in the places that make you uncomfortable. Sometimes the eye watching from behind the mountain is also yours.

Everything in this month’s medley, I realised, was asking the same question in a different language: what deserves your attention and are you one of those things? I don’t have the answer yet. But I think asking it is somewhere to start.

Thanks for reading through my little collection. I hope something here sparked something in you too.

Subscribe now

If this space helps you understand art a little better, feel less alone in your creative practice, or feel seen and validated in your inner creative landscape, you can support my work.

Support

Your support helps me keep writing and creating for artists like you — slowly, honestly, and with care. Please subscribe and stay connected.

Every reader is part of what keeps this space alive.

And then, in a quieter corner room, the light changed.

A girl was shielding a small flame with her hand. That was all. No mythology. No court. No performance. Just a person, a flame, and the careful tender act of keeping it alive.

I stood in front of that painting and something shifted. The way things shift when you recognise something you didn’t know you’d been carrying. In a palace in Mysore, far from my own home, I was suddenly back inside it. Back in those warm evenings. Back with all its lovely, heart-warming memories. My father’s hands. My grandmother’s hands. The same gesture, the same quiet care, across every version of home I have ever known.

That is the beauty of art. Not that it necessarily takes you somewhere new, but that it brings you back to something true.

The painting, and the man people confuse it with

Glow of Hope is sometimes misattributed to Raja Ravi Varma because its polished realism and idealized female figure resemble the visual language commonly associated with him, but the painting is actually by S. L. Haldankar.

Both artists worked in a polished, detailed realism that feels immediately legible. But the mood could not be more different.

When you stand before a Ravi Varma painting, the subject often feels elevated admired from below, composed as an ideal. Haldankar’s girl, by contrast, meets you at eye level. She is not less carefully made; she is simply more immediate, more familiar, and more human

That gap between the idealised and the intimate is worth understanding, because it shows up everywhere in creative life, not just in art history.

A little context helps explain why that idea matters so much here. Raja Ravi Varma helped shape a widely circulated image of Indian femininity through mythological scenes, royal portraits, and idealised women, while the Bengal School pushed back against the visual standards he helped popularise. They wanted an art that felt more indigenously Indian, and that disagreement was never only about style — it was also about whose image of art gets to count as the standard.

I share this not to diminish Varma’s extraordinary skill. His paintings are genuinely stunning, and his technical achievement was remarkable for his time. I share it because I think there’s something in this story that many of us who make things quietly recognise.

We learn what “good art” is supposed to look like by looking up at the masters, the galleries, the celebrated names, the polished finished things. We absorb a very specific idea of creativity at its best. Then we sit down to make our own work and immediately feel small, because our work does not resemble that elevated thing we were taught to admire.

That gap between the idealised version of creativity and the intimate, imperfect, personal version we actually live is where imposter syndrome lives. It is where the voice that says this is not real art comes from. And yet, more often than not, the truest art begins there.

Subscribe now

Here is another detail that stops me every time I think about Glow of Hope: it is a watercolour.

In early 20th-century Indian art, watercolor was often associated with intimacy, lyricism, and immediacy, while oil retained the prestige of academic finish and monumentality.

And yet Haldankar used it to create something so luminous, so technically accomplished, and so emotionally immediate that Glow of Hope has remained memorable long after many more conventional works of the era were forgotten.

The light in that painting does not read as a technique. It reads as something you could actually be warmed by. The fabric drapes like real fabric in real evening light. The girl’s expression isn’t performing anything. She is simply there, present, doing a quiet thing with complete attention. The glow is not a trick. It is careful, patient, loving observation .

He took a medium often treated as secondary and used it to make a work of lasting force.

The gesture that crosses every border

The act at the centre of this painting is rooted in Hindu domestic ritual- the lighting of a lamp at dusk, a daily practice of offering and prayer. But the gesture itself, the physical fact of a person cupping their hands around a flame to keep the wind from winning, that crosses every border of religion, culture, and time that I can think of.

Most of us have seen someone we love do exactly this. The careful way they lower their hands around the light. The slight held breath. The relief when the flame steadies. There is something in that posture- that protectiveness over something small and lit, that is one of the oldest human things there is.

Haldankar didn’t paint an icon. He painted a person in a moment that millions of people have lived. And that is why, standing in a room full of grand and mythological things, this small watercolour is the one that glows.

I’ve been thinking about why certain pieces of art stay with us the way this one has stayed with me. I think it’s because they don’t ask us to become something. They simply reflect back something we already are, something we’ve already known and felt and carried, but never quite had a frame for.

If your creative work right now feels quiet, or intimate, or too personal to matter — if it feels like watercolour in an age of oil, I want to gently offer you this: the painting in the corner room is sometimes the one that keeps glowing long after the grand hall has gone dark.

You’re allowed to make the small, true thing.

The thing that looks like home.

The thing that brings someone else back to theirs.

Subscribe now

A QUESTION TO SIT WITH THIS WEEK

Is there a piece of art — a painting, a song, a film, a line from a book that has ever brought you home the way this painting brought me home?

What was it, and what did it return you to?

I’d love to know.

Hit reply and tell me.

Leave a comment

Every reader is part of what keeps this space alive.

Thanks for reading Medley! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I sat through an entire year of art history in college, dutifully memorising names like Picasso, Michelangelo, Van Gogh, Raza, Tagore, and I never once stopped to ask:

“wait, where are the women?”

Name after name, lesson after lesson. And I just... absorbed it. Like it was the natural order of things. Like history had sorted itself out fairly, and these were simply the people who deserved to be there.

I genuinely believed that.

Here’s the thing though. I don’t think I was unusual. I think most of us, when we’re students, absorb the world as it’s handed to us. We’re busy taking notes, trying to keep up, trying to fit in.

But looking back, I wish someone had gently nudged me and said:

“hey, have you noticed something missing here?”

So consider this that nudge. For your past self, your present self, or whoever needs it today.

Meet the woman who asked the question nobody was asking

In 1971, an art historian named Linda Nochlin did something quietly extraordinary.

To understand just how extraordinary, you need to picture the world she was living in. Women were still fighting to be heard in public spaces. Their roles were largely expected to centre around home and family. The idea of gender equality was still considered radical in many parts of the world. Not a mainstream value, but a protest.

And yet, in the middle of all that, Nochlin sat down and asked:

“Why have there been no great women artists?”

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. This question sounds like it might be an attack on women. Like it’s accepting the absence and just asking why women fell short.

But Nochlin had something else entirely in mind.

She didn’t rush to defend women artists.

She didn’t compile a heartwarming list of forgotten female geniuses.

She didn’t try to prove women were just as talented.

She asked why. And then she did something even more radical.

She asked whether the question itself was the problem.

What happens when you question the question?

Think about the assumptions quietly hiding inside “Why have there been no great women artists?”

It assumes that greatness is real, objective, and measurable (like height or weight). It assumes that if women were truly capable, history would reflect that. It assumes that those who are absent must have been... less.

Nochlin called these hidden beliefs an “erroneous intellectual substructure.” A fancy way of saying: the foundations of this question are built on sand.

What if talent doesn’t inevitably rise to the surface?

What if success doesn’t always prove merit?

What if absence doesn’t mean failure, but exclusion?

This is where Nochlin’s thinking becomes genuinely exciting, because she’s not just making an argument about women in art. She’s showing us how to think differently about any question that seems settled.

She shifts the conversation from talent to access.

From genius to opportunity.

From individuals to institutions.

And once you make that shift, the whole picture changes.

Subscribe now

The questions nobody thought to ask (until she did)

Here’s what I love most about Nochlin’s approach: she thought like a historian, not an activist. She asked calm, practical, structural questions that art historians had somehow never bothered to ask before.

Things like:

• From which social classes did artists usually come?

• Were they aristocrats, peasants, or middle-class professionals?

• Which groups had access to training?

• Which groups had access to workshops?

• Who was allowed into academies?

• Who had time to practice?

• Who had patrons?

• Who had teachers?

• Who had freedom?

• Who was allowed to study the human body, travel for inspiration, or exhibit their work publicly?

• And then, most importantly: who didn't?

The answer, for centuries, was women.

They were barred from academies.
They were denied apprenticeships.
They were not allowed to study the nude human form, which was considered essential training for serious painters.
They could not easily travel alone.
They were expected to marry.
They were expected to care for families.
They were expected not to excel too much at any one thing.

The absence of women from art history, Nochlin argued, was not evidence of absence of ability or talent. It was evidence of exclusion from the conditions under which greatness is produced, recognized, and remembered.

It’s evidence of missing access.

And that distinction changes everything.

The myth we’ve all been sold (a little bit)

Traditional art history has always loved a particular kind of story: the lone genius. The heroic individual whose brilliance burns so brightly that nothing can hold them back. The idea that true talent always finds a way.

It’s a beautiful story.

It’s also not quite true.

Because when you look closely, you notice that the artists we call “great” weren’t just talented.

• They are people who had teachers.

• They are people who had access to training, materials, time, patronage, and recognition.

• They had institutions that supported them and historians who wrote about them.

• They had systems that preserved their work and markets that valued it.

• They had patrons who funded their work and institutions that preserved it and historians who wrote about them.

• Greatness, in other words, is not just about talent.

It is about infrastructure.

Success in art is never just private; it is always shaped by who is allowed to participate.

A handful of women did break through, of course. And those stories are wonderful and worth celebrating. But (and this is important) exceptional individuals don’t erase systemic patterns. They just make it easier to say, “well, if she could do it, anyone can.”

In fact, exceptional individuals often reinforce the myth that success is purely a matter of talent and perseverance.

Token inclusion does not equal equality.

Real equality requires changing the structures that shape opportunity — education, training, patronage, and recognition.

The question underneath the question

There’s one more layer to Nochlin’s argument, and it’s my favourite part.

She doesn’t just explain why women were left out. She goes deeper and asks:

What does “greatness” even mean, and who gets to decide?

Terms like “greatness” and “genius” seem straightforward, but they are surprisingly vague. It sounds simple, but sit with it for a second.

• How can the same word describe artists as different as Michelangelo and Marcel Duchamp?

• What makes one artist “great” and another merely competent?

• Who decides which artists are remembered and which are forgotten?

• Whose taste, whose values, whose cultural moment decided which artists got remembered and which ones didn’t?

• Who made that call?

By questioning greatness, Nochlin destabilized the very criteria used to judge artistic achievement. She encouraged readers to move beyond heroic myths and toward a more historically grounded understanding of art as something shaped by cultural values, institutional frameworks, and social conditions.

Nochlin also isn’t saying art doesn’t matter or that some artists aren’t more influential than others. She’s saying: let’s be honest about how these judgements get made. Let’s stop pretending they’re neutral. Let’s ask who was in the room when they were decided.

The question was never really just about women.

It was always about who gets to decide what counts.

Why she still matters (and why this is personal)

What moves me most about Nochlin is the sheer courage of the timing.

She asked these questions in 1971, she asked them during a time when women had limited institutional power.
When feminist scholarship barely existed.
When art history was overwhelmingly male.
When the canon felt fixed and unquestionable.

And yet she questioned it anyway.

Thoughtfully, rigorously, without melodrama.

What Nochlin ultimately proposes is a new way of studying art. Instead of asking why individuals failed to achieve greatness, she suggests we examine the conditions that make greatness possible for some and impossible for others.

This transforms art history from a discipline that celebrates extraordinary individuals into one that examines history, power and access.

Now here’s the part I want to bring home to you. The part that lives beyond art history, beyond 1971, beyond Nochlin’s essay.

How many times have you looked at your own creative struggles and quietly concluded:

I’m just not talented enough.

I’m not the right kind of person.

If I were really good at this, it would be easier.

How many times have you mistaken a lack of support, access, or encouragement for a lack of ability?

The Question I Never Asked

Looking back, I don’t judge my younger self for not noticing. We can only question what we’ve been taught to see.

I was just a naive student who thought:

the world was simple,

that history was neutral,

that greatness was obvious, and

that talent naturally found its way into the spotlight.

But I do wonder what it means that the absence was so total it became invisible. That a curriculum could be built entirely around men with little to no women and feel, to a student sitting in that classroom, completely normal.

Maybe that’s the most insidious thing about exclusion done well. It doesn’t announce itself. It just becomes the way things are.

Nochlin’s essay reminds us that history is not neutral. It is constructed. It is shaped by institutions, values, and power.

And sometimes the most important questions are not the ones that give us answers but the ones that make us realize we’ve been asking the wrong questions all along.

A gentle closing thought

Some things have genuinely changed since 1971. More women in the art world. Canons being slowly, imperfectly revised. Conversations happening that weren’t possible before.

But the deeper question Nochlin was really asking is still alive and well:

Who gets to be remembered?

By whose rules?

Those questions don’t have tidy answers. But I think they’re worth sitting with, in art history yes, and also in your own life, your own creative practice, your own quiet moments of self-doubt.

Sometimes the most powerful thing isn’t a new answer.

It’s realising you’ve been asked to answer the wrong question all along.

Did this resonate? I’d genuinely love to hear. Hit reply and tell me:

Has there been a book, an essay, or an idea that shifted the way you see yourself or the world?

Leave a comment

If this space helps you understand art a little better, feel less alone in your creative practice, or feel seen and validated in your inner creative landscape, you can support my work.

Support

Your support helps me keep writing and creating for artists like you — slowly, honestly, and with care. Please subscribe and stay connected.

Every reader is part of what keeps this space alive.

Here are 10 lines that caught me this time around:

“I don’t believe in art, I believe in artists.” — Marcel Duchamp

Sit with that for a second. Would art even exist without artists to create it, recognize it, name it? You are not an afterthought in this equation. You are the equation.

Don’t worry about doing research. Just search.

There’s something so freeing about this. Research says: I need to find the answer to this. Search says: I wonder what’s over here.

Curiosity doesn’t need a destination and honestly? It’ll take you somewhere far more interesting than the place you originally planned to go. You’re allowed to wander. You’re allowed to get wonderfully, productively lost.

It’s in the act of making stuff and doing it out that we figure out who we are.

Only after years of drawing, writing, and quietly reflecting did I begin to notice my own patterns — the feelings I kept returning to, the questions that wouldn’t leave me alone, the stories I was trying to tell without even realizing it. I started to see what I care about, what moves me, and what I want others to feel when they encounter my work.

That understanding didn’t come from thinking about art. It came from making it again and again and again.

So make what you want to make. Not what feels impressive. Not what feels correct. Not what you think will succeed. Just start with what feels honest.

It might not make you rich in the traditional sense. But it will shape you. It will deepen you. It will give you a richer inner world, a stronger voice, and a clearer sense of who you are.

And at some point, almost quietly, you realize:

You don’t find your work by waiting.
You find it by doing the work you want to be doing — even before you fully understand why.

“If you copy from one author, it’s plagiarism, but if you copy from many, it’s research.” — Wilson Mizner

Influence becomes originality when it’s filtered through your own mind. Every artist you love has loved other artists before you. The lineage is long. You’re part of it too.

Steal the thinking behind the style.

Don’t just look at what an artist makes — ask how they think. Who influenced them? Why did they make these choices? How do they see the world? That’s where the real treasure is. Style is the surface. Thinking is the gold.

Whenever you’re at a loss for what move to make next, ask yourself: “What would make a better story?”

And then follow that instinct. It’s a surprisingly reliable compass, especially when everything else feels foggy.

Take time to be bored.

You can have the best ingredients in the world: experiences, feelings, influences, ideas- but if you never give them time to cook, you’re just eating raw ingredients.

Boredom is the heat. It’s not empty time. It’s cooking time. And in a world that’s constantly handing us something to look at, choosing to be bored is actually a quiet act of creative rebellion.

Subscribe now

The best way to get approval is to not need it.

Real validation starts from within. Only then can you decide what feedback to accept and what to let go. This one is a whole journey, I know. But it starts with trusting yourself just a little bit more today than you did yesterday.

Work gets done in the time available.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Deadlines aren’t the enemy — they’re the container. Give yourself one.

Try to be utterly schizoid about it all — using each personality as a refuge from the other.

Think about it this way: when the artist in you is exhausted and overstimulated, the homebody in you gets to rest, cook dinner, and exist quietly. And when the homebody gets restless and a little dull, the artist gets to come back out and make a mess.

Each version of you is a break from the other. You don’t have to be “on” all the time. You just have to keep rotating. This balance makes it possible to hold your various roles in life without losing yourself in any one of them.

Subscribe now

If you’re somewhere in the middle of figuring out your creative voice: feeling a little lost, a little in-between, maybe a little like you’re not quite “there” yet — I just want to say:

that place you’re in? It’s not a waiting room. It’s the actual work.

Keep making. Keep searching. Keep showing up for the artist you’re becoming.

And if any of these lines sparked something for you- a thought, a memory, a question you’ve been sitting with, I’d genuinely love to hear it.

Hit reply and tell me. Every single message I get reminds me why this little corner of the internet is worth showing up for.

Leave a comment

If this space helps you understand art a little better, feel less alone in your creative practice, or feel seen and validated in your inner creative landscape, you can support my work on Ko-fi.

Support

Your support helps me keep writing and creating for artists like you — slowly, honestly, and with care.

If Ko-fi isn’t your thing, you can always subscribe and stay connected.
Every reader is part of what keeps this space alive.

Subscribe now

We grow up thinking education works like a video game—complete all the levels, collect your certificate, unlock “Expert” status, and boom, you’re finished. But creativity? Creativity doesn’t work that way. And honestly, I’m so glad it doesn’t.

The Permission We’re All Waiting For

Maybe you never went to art school. Maybe you took a few classes years ago and stopped. Maybe you’re completely self-taught, learning from YouTube videos at 2am when you can’t sleep. Or maybe you did get that degree, but now you’re standing in front of your easel or keyboard or sketchbook thinking, “Shouldn’t I know more by now? Shouldn’t this feel easier?”

Here’s what I want you to know: wherever you are in your creative path, you’re not behind. You’re not too late. And you’re definitely not done learning, none of us are.

The truth is, being creative means being a lifelong student. Not in a stressful, “homework due tomorrow” kind of way, but in a gentle, curious, “I wonder what happens if I try this” kind of way. And actually? That’s the part that keeps it magical.

Why Learning Never Stops (And Why That’s Actually Good News)

Your creativity isn’t a fixed thing. It grows with you. The way you saw the world at 25 isn’t how you see it at 35, 45, or 65. Your experiences shape what you want to express. Your emotions deepen what you need to create. The things that move you change. The stories you want to tell evolve.

If you stopped learning the day you decided “okay, I’m good enough now,” you’d be freezing yourself in place. And I don’t know about you, but I’m a completely different person than I was five years ago. My art needs to reflect that, or it stops feeling true.

Here’s something that helped me: the fundamental principles of creativity—things like balance, contrast, rhythm, harmony, those stay the same. They’re like the rules of grammar. But the way you apply them? That’s constantly evolving. New tools emerge. New platforms appear. New ways of expressing old truths keep revealing themselves. You’re not relearning everything from scratch; you’re discovering new ways to use what you already know.

And here’s the really good part: every new thing you learn feeds your originality.

• That poetry book you read? It changes how you see light in your photographs.

• That documentary about architecture? It shifts how you think about composition in your paintings.

• The watercolour technique you learned from an Instagram tutorial? It might inspire a completely new direction in your digital work.

You’re not learning to copy someone else. You’re gathering ingredients for something only you can make.

Subscribe now

What Learning Can Look Like (When It Feels Safe)

I know “keep learning forever” can sound exhausting, especially if you’re already feeling overwhelmed or unsure of yourself. So let me be clear: this isn’t about pressure. This isn’t about being productive or hustling or keeping up with some imaginary standard.

This is about feeding the part of you that loves creating. This is about staying curious. This is about giving yourself permission to grow at your own pace.

• Explore what genuinely interests you. Not what you think you should learn, but what actually sparks something in you. Maybe that’s watching videos about color theory. Maybe it’s studying how your favorite illustrator uses negative space. Maybe it’s a book about creativity and mental health. Follow what feels nourishing, not what feels like an obligation.

• Learn from artists who make you feel something. Spend time with work that moves you, confuses you, challenges you, or makes you think “I want to try something like that.” You don’t need to study the “important” artists if they don’t speak to you. Study the ones whose work makes your heart beat faster. Pick one artist each month and really explore their process, their journey, their evolution. Not to become them, but to understand what draws you to their work.

• Be gentle with new tools and techniques. Yes, there are always new apps, new software, new technologies. But you don’t have to master everything. You don’t even have to try everything. Stay aware of what’s out there, and be thoughtful about what you adopt and how you can use it to enhance your practice. Some tools will excite you. Others won’t. Both responses are valid. You’re allowed to be selective.

• Let your learning be meandering and joyful. Read books that aren’t about art. Watch movies from different countries. Listen to music that’s nothing like what you usually play. Visit museums, even virtual ones. Go for walks and really look at things. Your creative education happens everywhere- in galleries, yes, but also in conversations, in nature, in moments of paying attention. You’re not collecting facts; you’re collecting experiences that will eventually filter into your work in ways you can’t predict.

• Try things that scare you a little. I know, I know—when you’re already feeling uncertain, “try scary things” sounds like terrible advice. But I mean the good kind of scary. The “I’ve never tried painting with my non-dominant hand” kind of scary. The “what if I made something without judging it” kind of scary. Growth happens when we step slightly outside our comfort zone, not into panic territory, just into the unfamiliar. And sometimes those experiments lead to the most honest, surprising work.

• Find your people. Learning doesn’t have to be lonely. There are communities everywhere—online forums, local art groups, Discord servers, workshops, Instagram artists who share their process. You don’t have to go back to school to find teachers. Some of my best learning has come from casual conversations with other creators who were willing to share what they’ve discovered. And here’s a secret: when you share what you’re learning, even if you feel like a beginner, you help other people feel less alone. Your struggles are someone else’s struggles too.

• Keep a record of your journey. Not for performance or to build an audience (unless you want to), but for yourself. A sketchbook where you try new techniques. A journal where you write about what you’re noticing. A folder where you save work that inspires you. Looking back at where you were six months ago, a year ago, five years ago—that’s where you’ll see your growth most clearly. And on the days when you feel like you’re not getting anywhere? That record will remind you how far you’ve already come.

The Quiet Magic of Continuous Growth

Here’s what I’ve noticed after years of showing up to my creative practice: learning keeps the work alive. It keeps me alive in the work.

When I’m curious, when I’m discovering something new, when I’m letting myself be a student again, that’s when I fall back in love with creating. That’s when the imposter syndrome gets a little quieter because I’m not pretending to be an expert; I’m being honest about being a learner. That’s when the comparison spiral loosens its grip because I’m focused on my own path, not someone else’s highlight reel.

You don’t improve in a straight line. Some weeks you’ll feel like you’re making huge leaps. Other weeks you’ll feel like you’ve forgotten everything you ever knew. Both are part of the process. Both are normal. Both are okay.

The creatives I admire most aren’t the ones who seem to have it all figured out. They’re the ones who stay curious. The ones who admit when they’re struggling. The ones who try new things even when they might fail. The ones who treat their practice as an ongoing conversation with themselves rather than a performance for others.

You’re Already Enough, And You Can Still Grow

I need you to hold two truths at the same time: you are enough exactly as you are right now, and you’re also allowed to keep growing.

Your worth as a creative isn’t tied to how much you know or how skilled you are. You don’t have to “level up” to deserve to make art. You don’t have to be “good enough” before you’re allowed to enjoy the process.

But also? You’re allowed to want to learn. You’re allowed to be excited about getting better. You’re allowed to feel proud when something clicks into place that didn’t make sense before.

Learning isn’t about fixing what’s broken. It’s about nurturing what’s already growing.

So Where Do You Start?

Right here. Right now. With whatever interests you today.

Maybe that’s rewatching a tutorial you didn’t fully understand the first time. Maybe it’s trying a technique you’ve been intimidated by. Maybe it’s reading an article about an artist whose work you love. Maybe it’s just sitting with your materials and being curious about what wants to emerge.

There’s no curriculum you have to follow. No timeline you’re behind on. No test at the end.

Your creative education started the first time you picked up a pencil, a brush, a camera, a pen—whatever tool first helped you translate what was inside you into something outside you. And it continues every single time you show up, every time you try, every time you let yourself wonder “what if?”

The learning never ends. But that’s not a burden.

That’s the promise that you’ll never run out of things to discover, ways to grow, or reasons to keep creating.

And honestly? I think that’s beautiful.

So what are you curious about this week?

Not what you should learn. Not what would make you a “better” artist.

Just... what makes you want to pick up your tools and play?

Start there. That’s enough.

Some shifted something in me. Others just felt good to discover. All of them are things I wanted to share with you.

Here’s what January brought my way.

A Book That Stayed With Me: Almond

I just finished reading Almond and I’m still thinking about it days later.

It’s about a boy named Yunjae who can’t feel emotions—not happiness, not love, not fear, not anger. Nothing. Two tiny almond-shaped neurons in his brain never developed properly, and because of this, he doesn’t have friends. He doesn’t understand why people cry or laugh or get upset. But his mother and grandmother love him fiercely anyway, building a world where his difference doesn’t make him less.

Then on Christmas Eve—his sixteenth birthday—everything shatters. A shocking act of changes his life completely, leaving him alone and trying to navigate a world he’s never quite understood.

This book kept me on edge, made me gasp out loud, broke my heart a little, and somehow made me fall in love with these characters. It’s about what it means to be human when you experience humanity differently. It’s tender and devastating and hopeful all at once.

If you’re looking for something that will make you feel deeply, this is it.

Things I’m Thinking About Lately

• Why did women have to fight so hard in the first place? What is it about being a woman that threatens people so much? I keep circling back to this question, and this article gave me a small glimpse into its origins.

• At the end of the day, we all turn to dust. And before that, we were made from stardust. Isn’t that the most beautiful thing? We come from stars and return to earth. There’s something comforting in that.

• Your perception filters every experience, so much of your suffering arises from how you interpret events rather than the events themselves. For instance, Buddhist teachings distinguish the “first arrow” of unavoidable pain (like illness or loss) from the “second arrow” of self-inflicted suffering through resistance, attachment, or negative framing. You bear responsibility for that second layer by choosing your mental response.

• When you're an adult, there's always work waiting. Always. The to-do list never actually ends. I'm still learning how to be okay with that. And maybe the real question isn't how to make it stop, but whether I'm going to approach it with love or resentment. That choice, at least, is mine. But how do I actually choose love when I'm exhausted? I'm still figuring that out.

• What makes us stop being curious? Kids ask “why?” about everything. When did we learn to stop asking? And how do we get that back?

  

  Subscribe now

Things I Loved on the Internet This Week

1. This video —a small remainder about: no matter how small, invaluable or different you think you are, there is always a special place in this world, just for you.

2. Designing the Powerpuff Girls — Did you know the Powerpuff Girls was inititally named as Whoopass Girls?

   This article is a fascinating deep dive into the design process behind one of the most iconic animated shows. I loved discovering how many iterations it took to perfect The Powerpuff Girls. It's clear proof that success often hinges on the right person meeting the right moment. So don't give up—persistence unlocks the magic.

Work that pulled me in

Ali Cherri reflects on how these earth-derived structures, meant to sustain "world-sustaining relations" (per Lauren Berlant), instead eradicate life-forms and ecosystems. The work captures a metamorphic tension between creation and annihilation, blending organic fragility with imposed monumentality.

That’s what January looked like for me. What about you? What made you pause this month? What questions are you sitting with? I’d love to hear what’s been on your mind.

Thanks for reading through my little collection. I hope something here sparked something in you too.

I used to be a meticulous planner. Every hour accounted for, every project mapped out months in advance. On paper, my goals were perfect—aligned with my values, ambitious yet achievable. But somewhere around month three, something shifted. The joy started leaking out. My days became a series of checkboxes. My creative practice felt more like homework than play.

And here’s what I finally understood: if my happiness depends on everything going exactly right, that’s not happiness. That’s control. And control, for all its promises of safety, quietly suffocates the parts of us that need room to breathe.

So I want to hold space for two truths today. Maybe you need to hear one. Maybe you need to hear both.

If You’re Tired (And I Think You Might Be)

If you’re someone who tends to burn out, who gives everything until there’s nothing left, I see you. And I want you to know that rest isn’t something you have to earn.

Here’s the gentlest practice I know: At the end of your to-do list, add one more line:

“What spontaneous thing am I doing today?”

Then actually do it. Keep your other lists safe- this isn’t about abandoning the things that matter. It’s about remembering that you matter too.

So let me answer that question for today, and maybe it’ll spark something for you:

I’m taking my coffee to a different room not my desk, not the kitchen table. Maybe the floor by the window where the morning light pools. I’m going to sit there for ten minutes without my phone, without a plan, and just notice what it feels like to break my own pattern.

Later, when I’m cooking dinner, I’m going to put on a song I loved when I was fifteen and haven’t listened to in years. I’m going to let myself remember who I was then, what I dreamed about, what made me feel alive before I learned to be so careful with my time.

Maybe it’s listening to my creative intuition. If I sit down to work but feel drawn elsewhere, I let myself switch. Sometimes what feels like resistance is actually your creative intuition saying “not this, not now.” And that’s okay. You’re allowed to listen to yourself.

These aren’t grand gestures. They won’t change my life overnight. But they’ll remind me that my life is mine to shape, even in the smallest ways. That joy doesn’t have to be earned or scheduled. That spontaneity isn’t about doing something wild, it’s about choosing presence over autopilot, even for a moment.

Subscribe now

Your spontaneous thing doesn’t have to look like mine. It just has to feel like a small rebellion against the tyranny of productivity. A gentle reminder that you’re allowed to live, not just accomplish.

If You’re Ready (And I Think You Are)

Now, if you’re someone who thrives on structure and wants to move toward something meaningful, I have a different invitation for you.

Take a breath. Then picture your future self. Not the one who finally has it all together, but the one who stopped needing to. The version of you who feels deeply, genuinely at peace. Who’s learned to be kind without keeping score. Who carries joy not as an achievement but as a way of being.

This person isn’t imaginary. They’re the you that’s waiting on the other side of the decisions you’re sitting with right now.

So let me ask you gently: What would that version of you want you to change today?

Not what sounds impressive. Not what would make others proud. What would make you feel like you’re finally being honest with yourself?

And here’s the question that might sting a little: What decision am I making now that I’m quietly afraid my future self will wish I had changed sooner?

Maybe it’s setting a boundary you’ve been too scared to set. Maybe it’s finally asking for help. Maybe it’s admitting that the path you’re on isn’t actually yours, it’s just the one that seemed safest. Maybe it’s letting yourself rest without guilt.

Whatever it is, your future self isn’t judging you. They’re just holding the door open, waiting for you to walk through whenever you’re ready.

The Question That Changes Everything

Every year, I choose a guiding question instead of a resolution. This year, mine is:

What would I choose if love and fullness shaped my decisions today?

Not fear of missing out. Not anxiety about falling behind. Not the pressure to prove something or become someone. Just: what would love choose?

Love might choose the disciplined practice of showing up to your art every morning. Love might also choose to skip a day because your body needs rest. Love might push you to finally share your work publicly. Love might also protect you by saying, “Not yet.”

The beautiful thing about this question is that the answer changes. It asks you to check in with yourself, again and again, and trust what you find there. And I think that’s what we’re all really looking for: permission to trust ourselves.

As We Step Into the New Year

I’m not asking you to abandon your goals or stop planning. Structure can be beautiful. Discipline can be an act of self-love. But maybe this year, we make room for both the plan and the surprise. The root and the wing. The doing and the being.

Ask yourself tonight, not with judgment but with curiosity: Am I moving toward a life that feels alive, or one that just looks good on paper?

Your future self already knows the answer. And they’re not disappointed in you, they never were. They’re just hoping you’ll be a little gentler with yourself this time around.

So whatever you’re carrying into the new year, whether it’s hope or exhaustion or some tender mix of both, I want you to know: you don’t have to have it figured out. You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to keep showing up for yourself, in whatever way feels truest.

That’s enough. You’re enough.

Happy new year folks!!!

With wedding bells ringing across India and the holiday season wrapping us in its beautiful chaos, I wanted to reach out with some news: November and December will bring you just one combined newsletter instead of our usual two. But here’s the thing: I’m pouring everything I’ve learned this year into making it something special. Think of it as a creative care package for your soul.

When Life Gets Heavy (And How I’m Learning to Dance With It)

I’ll be honest with you. I’ve been juggling more than I can gracefully handle lately. There have been nights when the overwhelm hits so hard that sleep feels impossible. Maybe you know those nights too. The ones when your mind won’t quiet, when tomorrow feels too big, when you wonder if you’ll ever get back on track.

What’s been saving me? Three simple things:

• Remembering my why. When I feel lost, I go back to the beginning. Why did I start creating? Why does this matter to me?

  And here’s what grounds me: I think about my future self. She deserves this effort. She deserves to look back and see that I didn’t give up on her. So I pick up the pieces and keep moving, because that’s the only way forward.

• Permission to pause. Not giving up, just stepping back to breathe when the waves get too high.

• Small plans, big impact. After that pause, I make one clear, gentle plan for moving forward.

Here’s something I’m slowly accepting: Life won’t always give us those dreamy 6-7 hour stretches of uninterrupted creative time and work. Especially not in the season I’m in right now. And you know what? That’s okay. Instead of mourning what I don’t have, I’m learning to work with what I do have. Even 15 minutes counts. Even one hour makes a difference.

Some days, working for just a few precious minutes transforms everything. It reminds me who I am beneath all the chaos. It reconnects me to my voice.

So I’m learning to be realistic about where I am. Not where I think I “should” be, but where I actually am. This season, this phase, this moment. Meeting myself here, with kindness.

Subscribe now

Your Turn: Let’s Reflect Together

I’ve put together some journal prompts for you. These are gentle questions to help you look back on this year with curiosity and compassion. Grab your favorite notebook, make yourself comfortable, and spend some time with these:

On Growth & Voice:

• How did I grow this year as a creative?

• Have I been true to my voice, or have I been performing someone else’s version of creativity?

• What new skills or mindset shifts did I discover this year?

On Courage & Fear:

• What has been stopping me from expressing my work boldly?

• Did I conquer a fear this year, even a tiny one?

• What’s the biggest lesson this year taught me (even if I didn’t want to learn it)?

On Joy & Inspiration:

• What did I enjoy doing the most this year?

• Who became a new source of inspiration for me?

• Did I give myself permission to experiment and play with my whole heart?

On Resilience & Pride:

• What kept me going when times got rough?

• What am I genuinely proud of from this year?

• Did I achieve the goals I set? Were they actually aligned with what I want, or were they “should” goals?

Looking Forward:

• What changes do I need to make to my goals so they feel safer and more joyful?

These aren’t meant to be perfect answers. There’s no right way to respond. Just you, being honest with yourself. Maybe you’ll discover you’re further along than you thought. Maybe you’ll realise you need to shift direction. Both are beautiful realisations.

Keep your answers somewhere safe. Next month, we’re going to use them as our foundation for planning a creative year that actually serves you. Not some Instagram-perfect version of productivity, but something real, sustainable, and yes, fun.

Here’s to the Messy, Beautiful Journey

Whether you created a masterpiece this year or simply survived, both are worthy. Whether you found your voice or you’re still searching, both are part of the path. Whether you worked every day or took six months off, both choices deserve respect.

This is your invitation to be gentle with yourself as this year closes. To honor both what went well and what didn’t. To rest when you need to and create when it calls to you.

I’ll see you soon with that combined newsletter. Until then, be kind to yourself, and if you feel called to, share your reflections with me. I’d love to hear what this year has meant to you.

With warmth and creative solidarity,

Anjali :)

P.S. Get your paper, pens, and maybe a friend or two ready. We’re going to plan an incredible, sustainable creative year together. One that honors who you actually are, not who you think you should be. Let’s make it safe, fun, and deeply, authentically yours.

I've been there. I've started the 100 Head Challenge with grand ambitions. I've committed to daily drawing streaks and, yes, I've jumped into Inktober with the best of intentions. But here's what I need to tell you before this year's wave of challenges begins:

I've never completed a single one.

The Beautiful Accident of Art Challenges

Art challenges didn't start as Instagram content. Back in 2009, Jake Parker created Inktober as a simple way to improve his inking skills and develop positive drawing habits. It was personal, it was practical, and it worked.

What Parker couldn't have predicted was how social media would transform his quiet creative practice into a global phenomenon. By the late 2010s, challenges were everywhere. Then came 2020 — lockdowns, isolation, and suddenly everyone was recreating Van Gogh with toilet paper and pasta for the Getty Museum Challenge. Art challenges had become our collective creative lifeline.

This evolution tells us something important: these challenges succeed not because they're perfect systems, but because they meet us where we are, craving connection, growth, and permission to make something, anything, with our hands.

Why Challenges Work (Even When We Don't Finish Them)

Let me share something vulnerable: When I started the 100 Head Challenge, my goal wasn't to draw 100 heads. It was to understand facial anatomy better, to make my portraits more expressive, to push past the stiffness I felt in my figure work.

Guess what? By day 30, I'd achieved exactly what I'd set out to do. My understanding of head construction had deepened. My portraits felt more alive. The challenge had worked — just not in the way the internet expected it to.

The same thing happened with my daily drawing experiment. I wasn't chasing a streak; I was hunting for my artistic voice. After a month of consistent practice, I started seeing patterns in my work, themes that felt authentically mine. Mission accomplished.

With Inktober, my goal was pure joy: have fun, stay committed to something, and get better at digital illustration. Did I make it to October 31st? Nope. Did I discover new techniques, connect with other artists, and fall back in love with the process? Absolutely.

Here's what I learned: The challenge isn't the point. Your growth is.

Subscribe now

The Pressure Trap

I've watched too many artists torture themselves over these challenges. The daily posts become obligations. The joy gets buried under performance anxiety. The exploration turns into a race.

This breaks my heart because it misses the entire point. Art challenges exist to serve your creative development, not to provide content for an algorithm. They're tools, not tests. They're invitations to play, not contracts you're legally bound to fulfil.

If you're feeling pressure to complete every challenge you start, I want you to hear this: Your worth as a creative isn't measured in completion rates.

Setting Goals That Actually Matter

Before you pick up that ink pen this October, pause and ask yourself: What do I actually want from this experience?

Maybe it's:

• Learning to work with traditional media again

• Building a more consistent creative practice

• Exploring darker, moodier themes in your art

• Connecting with other artists in your community

• Simply having fun after a stressful period in your life

These goals are infinitely more valuable than checking off 31 boxes (checking the 31 boxes isn’t bad too). They're also more likely to create lasting change in your creative practice.

When I approach challenges now, I set what I call "growth goals" instead of "completion goals." Instead of "I will draw every day for 31 days," I might say "I will explore ink as a medium until I feel confident using it in my regular practice." One feels like a prison sentence; the other feels like an adventure.

Making Challenges Deeper

Here's where I want to push you a little further. What if this Inktober became about more than just skill-building? What if it became a month of creative education?

Art is thinking as much as it is making. While you're developing your technical abilities, why not also develop your artistic mind? Pick up a book about art history, read interviews with artists whose work moves you, explore the cultural contexts behind techniques you're learning.

When we grow our skills in isolation from broader artistic understanding, we miss opportunities for deeper creative development. But when we combine making with learning, something magical happens. Our work becomes more intentional, more connected to the larger conversation that art has been having for centuries.

Permission to Quit (And Why That's Powerful)

I'm giving you permission to quit any challenge that stops serving you. If Inktober becomes a source of stress instead of joy, stop. If the 100-day drawing challenge feels like a burden instead of an opportunity, pivot. If any creative exercise makes you feel inadequate instead of inspired, walk away.

This isn't failure. This is wisdom.

The most successful creative people I know aren't the ones who finish every project they start. They're the ones who have learned to recognize when something is no longer helping them grow, and they have the courage to redirect their energy toward what will.

Your Creative Journey, Your Rules

As October approaches and the Inktober posts begin flooding your feeds, remember this: every artist's journey is different. Some people thrive on completing challenges. Others, like me, use them as launching pads for different kinds of growth.

There's no right way to engage with creative challenges. There's only your way: the approach that serves your goals, honors your creative needs, and leaves you feeling more connected to your practice, not less.

So if you decide to join Inktober this year, I hope you'll approach it with curiosity instead of pressure, with your own goals instead of someone else's expectations, and with the understanding that the real victory isn't in the completion — it's in the creative courage to begin.

What matters most is not whether you make it to October 31st with a perfect grid of drawings. What matters is whether November 1st finds you more excited about your creative practice than you were on September 30th.

That's a challenge worth taking on.

What's your real goal for this year's creative challenges?

I'd love to hear about it in the comments: not the goal you think you should have, but the one that actually excites you.

Leave a comment

In 1924, poet André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto, defining the movement as "pure psychic automatism" — in other words, a way of creating that bypassed rational thought and trusted the unconscious.

Artists like Salvador Dalí and René Magritte painted melting clocks, floating bowler hats, and impossible landscapes, but the point wasn’t just to make “strange” images. Surrealism was about something much deeper: giving the unconscious mind space to speak.

And that’s what makes it so relevant to us today. In a culture obsessed with productivity, efficiency, and clarity, the Surrealists remind us that creativity also thrives in contradiction, confusion, and dreams.

What Surrealism Actually Taught

Surrealism wasn’t about being random. The surrealists understood that our rational, waking consciousness represents only a fraction of our mental landscape. It was about exploring new ways of seeing. Here are some of the practices they pioneered:

• Automatism: Writing or drawing without censoring yourself. Letting the hand move faster than the mind.

  

• Juxtaposition: Placing two unrelated objects together to spark new meaning ("an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table").

• Dream exploration: Recording and analyzing dreams not as nonsense, but as raw truth. Dreamlike imagery opens narratives that challenge conventional storytelling, allowing creators to communicate complex psychological states through visual metaphor rather than explicit description.

• Exquisite Corpse: A collaborative game where multiple people add to a drawing or sentence without seeing the whole — a way to unlock collective imagination.

  

• Defamiliarization: Making the ordinary strange so we see it with fresh eyes.

Each of these was more than technique. They were ways of saying:

• the unconscious matters.

• The irrational has value.

• The weirdness inside you is worth exploring.

Subscribe now

Why This Matters for Your Creativity

Think about your own inner world. Maybe your depression feels like a gray blanket that whispers back at you. Maybe your anxiety makes everyday life feel like a surreal stage set. Maybe joy arrives as colors that don’t exist in any paintbox.

The Surrealists would have celebrated all of these. They weren’t trying to escape reality. They were trying to reveal its hidden layers.

Perhaps surrealism's greatest gift is its permission to embrace contradiction and ambiguity. When you use your imagination to give form to emotions, contradictions, and strange associations, you’re not "making things up." You’re translating the unconscious into art. That is a deeply valid and deeply human creative act.

Key Creative Lessons

The surrealist legacy offers several practical insights for contemporary artists:

• Dreamlike imagery opens narratives that challenge conventional storytelling, allowing creators to communicate complex psychological states through visual metaphor rather than explicit description.

• Finding magic in the mundane transforms everyday objects and situations into sources of wonder. A telephone becomes a lobster, a bowler hat floats in the sky; these transformations reveal hidden poetry in ordinary life.

• Creative liberation from societal expectations allows artists to explore personal truths without conforming to market demands or critical approval. This freedom often produces the most authentic and powerful work.

• Blending rational and irrational elements creates tension that reflects the complexity of human experience. Life itself is neither purely logical nor completely chaotic, it exists in the spaces between.

• Symbolic communication enables artists to convey emotions and ideas that resist direct expression. Sometimes a melting clock communicates the relativity of time better than any philosophical treatise.

• Experimental playfulness keeps creativity alive by prioritizing discovery over predetermined outcomes. The surrealists' games and collaborative exercises remind us that art can emerge from joy and spontaneity.

• Art as revolution positions creative work not just as aesthetic expression but as a force for social and political change. By challenging how we see reality, art can challenge how we structure society.

Subscribe now

Try It: Surrealist Tools for Today

You don’t need to be a trained painter or poet to experiment with these methods. Start small:

• Automatic Writing or Drawing: Set a timer for 10 minutes. Write or doodle nonstop without editing. Let whatever emerges flow.

• Weird-Thoughts Journal: Collect strange images, metaphors, or associations you notice in daily life. Don’t judge them.

• Dream Notebook: Keep a notebook by your bed. Write down your dreams as soon as you wake. See what ideas or imagery might spark creative work.

• Exquisite Corpse (Solo Version): Fold a paper into three parts. Draw on the first fold, hide it, continue blindly on the next. Unfold at the end and surprise yourself.

• Emotional Translation: Ask yourself: If this feeling were a place, what would it look like? If it were an animal, what kind would it be? Then sketch or describe it.

Each of these practices adapts a genuine Surrealist method, but you can use them in your own life as tools for emotional processing, creative play, and discovery.

You’re Not Broken. You’re Surreal.

If your mind works in non-linear ways, if you notice unusual connections, if you feel "too much," you are not broken. You are part of a long tradition of artists who understood that contradiction and complexity are signs of richness, not flaws.

The Surrealists would have called you a kindred spirit. Your sensitivity, your strangeness, your vivid inner landscapes — these are not mistakes. They are features of your creative mind.

Courage in Weirdness

To create from your inner world is to be brave. Every time you trust a strange impulse, honor an odd metaphor, or share something that feels too personal, you are continuing the Surrealist experiment in your own way.

Art is not only about aesthetics. It is about truth, even when that truth looks strange, messy, or vulnerable.

So here’s my invitation: What if you trusted your unconscious a little more? What if you let yourself get weird in your next sketch, story, or song?

Because a century ago, a group of artists proved that the unconscious mind could change art forever. And your inner surrealist — chaotic, illogical, magical — still has the power to change your creative practice today.

Question for you

What’s the weirdest creative idea you’ve been too scared to pursue?

Share it in the comments — not for judgment, but for celebration.

Leave a comment

You know that feeling when someone really sees you? That's what your subscription feels like. In a world where we're all drowning in notifications and endless content, you chose to make room for Medley. You chose to trust a fellow creative who's still figuring it all out, who has definitely questioned whether any of this matters.

Thank you. Not just thank you- but thank you with tears in my eyes and gratitude spilling over my coffee cup kind of thank you.

If We Haven't Met Yet, Welcome Home

Maybe you just found us, maybe someone shared this with you, maybe you just stumbled here. However you got here, I'm so glad you did.

Here's what I want you to know about Medley: this isn't another place telling you to "find your artistic voice" or "unleash your creativity" (though we might accidentally do both). This is the space

• where we say the quiet parts out loud,

• where we admit that sometimes our art feels terrible,

• that imposter syndrome is a daily visitor, and

• that creating something can be both magical and absolutely terrifying.

What We're Building Together

Think of Medley as that friend who gets it. You know, the one who doesn't judge when you haven't touched your sketchbook in months, who understands why looking at other people's art sometimes makes you want to hide under a blanket, who celebrates tiny victories like finishing one small painting or writing three honest sentences.

I share my own stumbling, evolving journey as an artist, not because I have it figured out, but because I don't. Because maybe in my uncertainty, you'll find permission for your own. Because maybe when I talk about the days when creativity feels impossible, you'll feel less alone in yours.

We talk about how creativity isn't just about making pretty things; it's about processing our humanity, healing our hearts, and sometimes just surviving another Tuesday.

You'll find:

• gentle tools and techniques here, shared not as rules but as possibilities.

• Resources that meet you where you are, whether you're picking up a camera for the first time, writing your first blog post, launching a creative business, or returning to any creative practice after life knocked you sideways.

• Deep dives into creators who dared to be vulnerable, who turned their struggles into something beautiful, who remind us why creative expression matters.

• Sometimes we'll wander through books about creativity and art together, finding the sentences that make us gasp or the ideas that shift something inside us.

• We'll talk about the delicate dance between creating and surviving,

• between honoring our sensitivity and protecting our peace,

• between sharing our work and preserving our souls within the emotional landscape of being an artist.

Most importantly, we'll practice creating with our whole selves—messy hearts, anxious minds, tender souls, and all.

A Promise

A Special Gift for Our Milestone

In celebration of reaching fifty beautiful souls and more, I want to reintroduce you to the very first article I ever shared here: "Art and the Human Experience." There are countless definitions of art floating around out there—academic ones, pretentious ones, ones that make you feel like you need a degree to understand them. But in this piece, I've boiled it back down to its true intention, to what art really means in our messy, beautiful human lives.

I hope you'll read it and that it shifts something in how you view art the next time you encounter it—whether that's a painting in a gallery, a song that stops you in your tracks, or even your own creative work staring back at you from your desk.

A Promise

Medley will find you 2-3 times a month, never to overwhelm, always with intention. Some issues might make you feel seen. Others might inspire you to finally try that thing you've been avoiding. All of them will remind you that you belong here, in this creative life you're building one brave moment at a time.

Thank you for trusting me with your inbox, your time, your creative heart. Thank you for believing that art matters, that your creativity has value, that there's room in this world for whatever you're called to make.

Thank you for being here, exactly as you are.

Here's to the messy middle, the small victories, the quiet revelations, and all the beautiful, imperfect art we'll create along the way.

With so much love and creative solidarity🌻

So someone dropped this question in my comments recently, and honestly, it hit me right in the feelings: "How do I navigate through that awful phase where I'm terrible at everything? Are there actual things I can DO to make this easier?"

You know exactly what phase I'm talking about. That soul-crushing period where you're learning something new and every attempt feels like watching a toddler try to use chopsticks. Except the toddler is you, the chopsticks are your creative dreams, and the food keeps falling everywhere.

I wrote about why we feel like we suck at learning new things( do check it out), but I totally missed the most important part: how to actually survive it without giving up and binge-watching Netflix instead.

So here's what's been working for me (and hopefully will work for you too).

1. Become a Mistake Collector

Here's something wild: every skill has a learning curve, and mistakes are literally your GPS through it. The more mistakes you make, the faster you learn. I know, I know, it sounds like something a motivational poster would say. But stick with me.

I actually started setting a goal to make at least one or two mistakes every day while learning. Suddenly, messing up became a victory instead of proof that I'm hopeless. Try it! Go make some beautifully terrible art today and celebrate each wonky line.

2. Calendar Block That Sh*t

Sorry for the language, but this one's important. Put your learning time in your calendar like it's a doctor's appointment. Because here's the thing—if it's not scheduled, it's not happening. Your brain will find seventeen other "urgent" things to do instead.

Once it's in the calendar, it's sacred time. No negotiations with your future self allowed.

3. The Magic Five-Minute Start

Can't get yourself to begin? Set a timer for five minutes and just start. That's it. Not five minutes of perfect practice, just five minutes of showing up.

Most of the time, you'll keep going once you start (momentum is real). But if the timer goes off and you're still not feeling it? Stop guilt-free. You showed up, and that counts.

Subscribe now

4. Never Skip Twice

I live by the Two-Day Rule: never skip your practice two days in a row. One day off? Life happens, no biggie. Two days? That's how good habits go to die.

Even if you can only manage thirty seconds of practice on a tough day, do it. Your future self will thank you for keeping the chain alive.

5. Bribe Yourself (It's Not Shameful, It's Smart)

I turn everything into a game and reward myself when I'm done. If you are out of ideas, check this out! If you need more structure, try Habitica—it's like turning your life into an RPG where you level up by doing the things you said you'd do.

Whatever works, works. No judgment here.

6. Break It Down Until You Can't Break It Down Anymore

When something feels impossible, it's usually because you're looking at the whole mountain instead of the next step. I learned this the hard way when trying to pick up a new creative skill.

Instead of "learn this entire topic," I made it: Hunt for free resources → Get a practice notebook → Pick one tutorial → Start and write down what I learned etc. Suddenly, doable! If you find the above difficult, check this out, its a free resource!

7. Rewrite Your Failure Story

Nobody—and I mean NOBODY—has ever gotten good at anything without sucking first. Think about your creative heroes. They all have a pile of terrible early work somewhere. The only difference between them and everyone else? They kept going anyway.

Failure isn't the opposite of success; it's the raw material for it.

8. Make It Stupidly Easy to Start

Find your friction point and eliminate it. For example, mine was literally having to unroll my workout mat (yes, I'm that lazy sometimes). So now I leave it out before I need it.

Maybe yours is having to find your art supplies, or opening your laptop, or clearing space on your desk. Whatever tiny thing makes you go "ugh, never mind"—fix that first.

9. Just Start (Revolutionary, I Know)

Sometimes you just have to Nike it and do the thing. No perfect conditions, no ideal mood, no guarantee it'll go well. Just you, your stuff, and a willingness to be bad at something for a while.

10. Get Curious About Your Resistance

When all else fails and you're still stuck, grab a journal and get nosy with yourself:

• Why am I avoiding this?

• What's the worst thing that could happen if I try?

• Where's this fear coming from?

• Is this actually dangerous, or does it just feel scary?

Half the time, just naming what's going on is enough to shrink it down to size. The other half, you'll discover something interesting about yourself that makes the next attempt easier.

Subscribe now

The Real Talk

Look, learning new creative skills as an adult is weird and vulnerable and sometimes feels impossible. We're used to being competent, and suddenly we're beginners again. That's uncomfortable as hell.

But here's what I've discovered: the discomfort isn't a sign you're doing it wrong. It's a sign you're doing something brave. You're growing. You're refusing to stay small.

And honestly? The world needs more people who are willing to be beginners, to try things they might fail at, to create imperfect art just because they want to.

So yeah, you're going to suck for a while. We all do. But you're also going to get better, and that journey—messy and frustrating and beautiful—is where all the good stuff happens.

What's the creative skill you've been avoiding because you're afraid of being terrible at it? Tell me in the comments—maybe we can all be terrible at things together.

Leave a comment

💌Thanks as always for reading along and supporting my work. If you like what you see, hit the heart button, drop a comment, share this with someone you think will love it or simply press the subscribe button!💌

However, instead of adding to the chorus of accusations, I believe it is equally important to shift our focus toward celebration- towards honouring and highlighting the remarkable contributions of women artists whose talents have often been overlooked or under-appreciated.

But here's what moves me about these stories: they're not just historical accounts. They're mirrors for anyone who's ever questioned their creative worth, who's wondered if their art "counts," or who's felt like an outsider in their own creative practice.

I want to tell you about three extraordinary women whose work and legacies deserve far more recognition and whose journeys offer profound lessons for all of us still finding our creative courage.

Sunayini Devi: The Late Bloomer Who Painted Like a Child (On Purpose)

Sunayani Devi didn't pick up a brush until she was 30. Thirty! In art world terms, that's practically ancient for starting a "serious" practice. She was already married (at 12, which breaks my heart), already living the life society had mapped out for her in 1900s Bengal.

But then something beautiful happened. Her family including her uncle Rabindranath Tagore saw something in her and encouraged her to paint. And when she did? She painted like a child.

She chose to paint with soft pastels, rounded lines, and flat colours that looked naive and simple. She painted milk maids carrying brass pots, Hindu gods with peaceful faces, and scenes from ancient stories, all in a style that art critics might have called "unsophisticated."

But here's the thing: it was intentional. She was drawing from folk traditions, from the art that regular people made and loved, not from what European art schools said was "correct." Her painting Ardhanarisvar shows the Hindu deity that's half-male, half-female, painted with what she called "childlike simplicity." It's not childlike at all, it's revolutionary.

Sunayani proved that starting "late" doesn't matter. That painting from your own cultural memory, your own visual language, is not just valid, it's necessary.

She was respected within the artistic circles of the Bengal Renaissance and acknowledged by contemporaries, though the broader art world, heavily influenced by Western academic standards, often marginalized women artists. Nonetheless, her work received critical attention and she holds a pioneering place in modern Indian art history.

So, while not universally celebrated on the scale of her menfolk, Sunayani Devi did receive appreciation and praise in her time for her contributions and distinctive artistic voice.

If you've ever felt like you're too old to start or like your style isn't "sophisticated" enough, think about Sunayani. She changed Indian art by trusting her instincts.

Subscribe now

Hilma af Klint: The Artist Who Painted for the Future

Here's a story that gives me chills every time: In the early 1900s, a Swedish woman named Hilma af Klint was creating abstract paintings: geometric shapes, spiritual symbols, explosions of colour that seemed to channel some otherworldly energy. She was doing this years before Kandinsky or Mondrian, the men who are usually credited with "inventing" abstract art.

But Hilma knew something they didn't. She knew the world wasn't ready.

So she painted anyway. For decades, she created what she called "Paintings for the Temple"- works meant to explore spiritual dimensions and cosmic consciousness. She filled canvases with spirals and symbols, with colors that seemed to vibrate with meaning. And then she put them away.

She left instructions that these paintings shouldn't be shown publicly for twenty years after her death. She was protecting them and protecting herself from a world that would have dismissed her as crazy or delusional.

Hilma painted for an audience that didn't exist yet. She painted for us.

When her work finally emerged in the 1980s, it rewrote art history. Suddenly, the story of abstract art had to include this woman who was channeling the universe onto canvas while everyone else was still painting fruit bowls.

If you've ever made something and thought, "No one will understand this," remember Hilma. Sometimes we create for the future, not the present. Sometimes our weird, inexplicable art is exactly what the world needs but it just hasn't caught up yet.

Mangala Bayi: The Sister Who Stepped Out of a Famous Shadow

Imagine being the sister of one of India's most celebrated artists- Raja Ravi Varma, the painter who revolutionised Indian art by blending European techniques with Indian themes. Now imagine deciding to paint anyway, knowing you'd always be compared to your legendary brother.

That's exactly what Mangala Bayi Thampuratty (1866-1954) did. She was the first woman artist of the nineteenth century who worked within an atelier or a studio, and she even assisted her brother Raja Ravi Varma in his monumental painting projects.

But here's what moves me: she didn't just paint in his shadow. Despite living "a life fettered by the stringent social norms" that constrained women artists, she developed her own artistic voice. While Raja Ravi Varma became famous for his grand mythological paintings, Mangala Bayi carved out her own space in the art world.

She could have easily been overshadowed forever. Instead, she became a pioneer in her own right proving that talent doesn't diminish when it runs in families, and that stepping into your creative power doesn't require stepping away from those who inspire you.

If you've ever felt like you're living in someone else's creative shadow, whether it's a family member, a mentor, or just the "great artists" you admire—remember Mangala Bayi. She shows us that there's room for everyone's unique vision, even when you're standing next to greatness.

What These Artists Teach Us About Creative Courage

These three women, two from India and one from Sweden, painted in different styles, worked in different eras, faced different challenges. But they share something crucial: they trusted their inner vision more than external validation.

They painted what called to them, not what sold. They developed their own visual language, not what art school taught. They created for audiences that might not even exist yet, not just for immediate approval.

And here's what moves me most: none of them waited for permission.

Sunayani didn't wait until she was "properly trained."

Hilma didn't wait for the art world to be ready for abstract spirituality.

Mangala Bayi didn’t wait for someone else to carry forward Kerala’s artistic traditions; she actively nurtured and sustained her family’s rich artistic legacy while carving out her own creative space.

They picked up their brushes and painted their truth.

Your Truth is Waiting

I'm writing this for everyone who has ever stared at a blank canvas, a empty page, an unstarted project and wondered if they have the right to create. For everyone who has made something beautiful and then immediately questioned its worth.

You don't need formal training to make meaningful art. You don't need to paint like anyone else. You don't need the world to understand your work right now or ever.

What you need is what these three women had:

• the courage to trust your vision,

• the persistence to keep creating even when it feels pointless, and

• the faith that your unique way of seeing the world matters.

Your artistic voice, however shaky, however unconventional, however late-blooming, is not a mistake. It's not less than. It's yours, and that makes it essential.

Subscribe now

The art world has always been incomplete without women's voices. But it's also incomplete without your voice, whatever stage you're at in your creative journey.

So paint like Sunayani with intention, drawing from what you know in your bones. Paint like Hilma for the future, for dimensions others can't see yet. Paint like Mangala Bayi, honoring tradition while making it unmistakably your own.

Paint your truth. The world needs it more than you know.

• What story are you waiting to tell?

• What vision are you holding back?

I'd love to hear about your creative struggles and breakthroughs in the comments. This community is here for all of it. I’m always reading them

Leave a comment

💌Thanks as always for reading along and supporting my work. If you like what you see, hit the heart button, drop a comment, or share this with someone you think will love it💌

Share

Sound familiar?

That heavy feeling in your chest has a name: guilt. And if you're an artist trying to build something real while juggling the demands of survival (that day job, those bills, that voice asking when you'll get "serious" about life) then guilt might feel like your constant companion.

The Inventory of Our Shame

Let's name what we're carrying, shall we? Because sometimes just seeing it all written down helps us realise how much weight we've been shouldering alone:

The Creative Guilt:

• Using "expensive" art supplies (even when they're student grade)

• Not being productive "enough" (whatever that means)

• The personal projects gathering dust while we chase commissions

• Skipping the "proper" process: thumbnails, studies, prep work

• Making art that feels too playful, too joyful, not "serious" enough

The Life Guilt:

• Choosing studio time over family time

• That look on your partner's face when you mention another show.

• The mom guilt that layers onto artist guilt like paint on canvas

• Feeling like you're disappointing the people who believed in you

The Professional Guilt:

• Not making your "best" work (again, who decides this?)

• Taking "too long" on pieces (by whose timeline?)

• Choosing between paying work and soul work

• Not creating every single day like the productivity gurus insist

Here's what I want you to know: When you look at this list through the lens of actual wrongdoing, none of it holds up.

Subscribe now

The Truth About Creative Standards

That guilt? It's not based on reality. It's based on internalised standards: rules we've absorbed from family expectations, cultural messages, social media highlight reels, and that persistent myth that "real artists" create in some mythical, uninterrupted flow.

But here's something I've learned that changed everything for me: You are actively creating even when you're not physically making art.

Every time you notice how light hits a building, every moment you consider color relationships while doing dishes, every "what if" that floats through your mind about a piece, that's creative work. Your creative brain doesn't clock out. It's always processing, always collecting, always composing.

That mental sketching you do while commuting? That's art practice. The way you unconsciously arrange objects on your desk? Creative thinking. The dream you had about floating through a painting? Your subconscious working through artistic problems.

The Cycles of Creativity

It's important to remember that creativity isn't linear. There will be natural ebb and flow: times when your output feels abundant and times when it feels scarce. These quieter periods aren't failures; they're necessary pauses for rest, growth, and inspiration to return. Guilt often strikes when productivity dips, but honouring this rhythm is part of a sustainable creative life.

The Value of Play

And what about those playful, joyful pieces you worry aren't "serious" enough? Play isn't a detour or waste of time; it's vital. Play fuels experimentation, frees your imagination, and often leads to breakthroughs you didn't anticipate. Embrace the fun and curiosity as essential parts of your artistic journey.

Rewriting the Rules

Most of the standards causing our guilt aren't even ours. They're inherited, absorbed, adopted from parents who wanted security for us, a culture that only values productivity, art school dogma, social media's curated perfection, and other artists' highlight reels.

What if we examined these rules? What if we asked:

• Is this standard reasonable?

• Is it truly mine?

• Does it serve my actual life and creative journey?

Because here's the radical truth: You get to decide what your creative practice looks like.

Maybe you can't draw every day, but you can observe every day. Maybe you can't afford premium supplies, but you can explore everything those student-grade materials can do. Maybe you can't quit your day job this year, but you can honor the creative thinking that happens during your commute.

The Importance of Boundaries

A crucial but often overlooked part of managing artist guilt is setting boundaries. Saying no to unpaid work, limiting unsolicited feedback, or gently pushing back on expectations from loved ones who don't understand your creative calling is not selfish. It's protecting your creative energy and honouring your needs, even if it stirs some guilt at first. Remember, boundaries are acts of self-respect, not failure.

The Gentle Revolution

I'm not suggesting we abandon all standards or stop growing as artists. But what if we approached our creative lives with the same kindness we'd show a friend?

• What if, instead of guilt, we practiced curiosity:

• What can I learn from this?

• What do I want to do differently next time?

• What's really possible given my actual circumstances?

What if we celebrated the small victories: the sketch made during lunch break, the color story noticed on the way to work, the way we pushed through creative resistance to make something, anything, instead of nothing?

You Are Enough, Right Now

To the artist and creators reading this, worried about all the things you haven't done: You are not behind. You are not failing. You are exactly where you need to be in this moment.

Your creative journey doesn't have to look like anyone else's. It doesn't have to follow anyone else's timeline. It doesn't have to meet anyone else's definition of "serious" or "successful" or "enough."

It just has to be yours.

And you, dear artist, are already doing something incredibly brave: you're choosing to create in a world that doesn't always make space for creativity. You're holding onto your vision while navigating practical realities. You're showing up, even imperfectly, even when it's hard.

That's not something to feel guilty about.

That's something to honour.

• What artist guilt are you ready to release?

• What creative standard are you ready to rewrite?

I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. I’m always reading them.

💌Thanks as always for reading along and supporting my work. If you like what you see, hit the heart button, drop a comment, or share this with someone you think will love it💌

Leave a comment

As artists juggling day jobs, family obligations, and the relentless hum of everyday responsibilities, we face a constant challenge: how do we keep our creative work from becoming an afterthought? The answer lies in building a morning practice that puts your art first, not last.

Three Questions That Change Everything

Before I check my phone, before I dive into emails, before the world starts making demands on my attention, I sit with these three questions. They've become my creative compass, helping me navigate each day with intention rather than reaction.

What is the single most meaningful goal I can focus on today that will fuel my creative growth and satisfaction?

This isn't about productivity theater or checking boxes. It's about identifying the one thing that will move your art forward; whether that's sketching for 20 minutes, writing 200 words, or finally mixing those colours you've been avoiding. Some days it's big, some days it's small, but it's always meaningful.

How can I align my tasks with my personal values and creative vision, rather than external expectations?

We're bombarded with shoulds, what we should create, how we should market ourselves, which trends we should follow. This question cuts through the noise and asks: what matters to you? Your authentic voice is your greatest asset, but only if you protect it from the constant pressure to conform.

What boundaries or supports do I need to put in place to protect my energy and nurture my creative process today?

Creative energy is finite and precious. Maybe you need to say no to that extra meeting, set your phone to airplane mode for an hour, or simply give yourself permission to create something imperfect. Honour what you need to show up fully for your art.

Subscribe now

When the Clouds Roll In

Even with the best intentions, some days feel impossible. The rejection stings, the work feels pointless, or that inner critic gets particularly loud. On those days, I return to these affirmations, not as empty positive thinking, but as reminders of deeper truths:

• My creative ideas have value and deserve to be expressed, no matter their scale. Your voice matters. Full stop.

• Each step I take in my creative journey helps me grow, no matter the results. The "failed" painting teaches you as much as the successful one.

• My worth is not measured by external recognition, but by my commitment to my craft. You are not your Instagram likes or gallery rejections.

• I give myself permission to create freely, without fear of judgment or failure. Freedom is a choice you make daily.

• I celebrate my progress, no matter how small, and honor my dedication. Showing up is 90% of the battle.

The Long Game

Making your practice priority isn't about massive overhauls or perfect discipline. It's about small, consistent choices that compound over time. It's about treating your creative work not as a hobby to squeeze in when convenient, but as an essential part of who you are.

The path to full-time artistry is different for everyone, but it always starts with the same fundamental shift: believing your art deserves your attention, your time, and your energy, starting today.

What's the one thing you'll prioritize for your creative practice tomorrow morning? Let me know in the comments below. Im always reading them :)

Leave a comment

Art happened wherever inspiration struck.

But somewhere in the messy transition to adulthood, when making art became my actual job, that freedom disappeared. Maybe you know this feeling too.

Now my spaces have purposes. My hall is for Netflix and unwinding. My bedroom is for books and sleep. My table is central for day-job tasks and Substack writing. Each area has its role, its energy, its unspoken rules.

And here's where things got complicated: I kept trying to transform my work desk into my painting space. Clear the laptop, move the notebooks, set up paints and brushes and papers. Create art. Then pack it all away the next morning so I could get back to "real work."

It was exhausting. And you know what happened? I started painting less.

That's when I stumbled onto something that changed everything—a simple productivity principle about reducing friction. The easier you make something, the more likely you are to do it.

Subscribe now

I realized I'd been creating barriers to the very thing that feeds my soul.

So I got creative about claiming space in a way that actually worked for my life, not against it. And maybe, just maybe, there's something here for you too-especially if you're navigating that tricky space between artistic dreams and adult responsibilities.

What I Mean by "Space" (And What I Don't)

Let me be clear, I'm not talking about the fantasy studio with floor-to-ceiling windows and perfectly organised supplies that haunts your Pinterest boards at 2 AM. That's not reality for most of us, and it's definitely not a prerequisite for making meaningful work.

Your creative space is wherever you consistently show up to create. It's the place that knows your rhythms, holds your tools, and witnesses your struggles and breakthroughs. It could be:

• That corner of your bedroom where morning light hits just right

• A folding table you set up and tear down each night

• Half of your kitchen counter (the half without dishes)

• A shared studio space you rent.

The magic isn't in the square footage, it's in the dedication.

Why This Matters More Than Your Next Supply Haul?

Here's what happens when you have a space that's genuinely yours:

• Your brain learns the assignment. When you sit in your designated spot, your mind starts shifting into creative mode before you even pick up a brush. It's like muscle memory, but for imagination.

• You stop wasting creative energy on logistics. No more hunting for supplies or clearing space every single time you want to create. That friction—those tiny barriers—they're creativity killers.

• You start taking yourself seriously. And when you take yourself seriously, others do too. Your space becomes proof that this isn't just a phase or a side hustle. This is who you are.

Justifying the Investment

Let's address the guilt. You know the one I'm talking about: that voice that whispers "this is selfish" every time you consider investing in your creative space.

Here's a reframe that changed everything for me: Every dollar you spend on your workspace is a business investment, not a personal indulgence.

That desk lamp? It's preventing costly color correction mistakes and eye strain that kills productivity. The ergonomic chair? It's ensuring you can work longer without pain interrupting your flow. The storage system? It's buying you back hours per week that you can spend creating billable work.

Start thinking like a business owner, because that's what you are:

• Calculate the cost of your wasted time at your hourly rate

• Track how workspace friction affects your output

• Consider the opportunity cost of projects you don't take because your setup can't handle them

• Factor in the professional image benefits for client meetings and social media

Most workspace improvements pay for themselves within months through increased productivity and better work quality.

The Non-Negotiable’s (That Won't Break Your Bank)

Every creative space needs these essentials:

• Light that doesn't lie. Natural light when possible, but a good lamp beats dim overhead lighting every time. Your eyes and your art will thank you.

• Something that's uniquely yours. A photo that inspires you. A color you love on the wall. Plants. Whatever makes you feel like you when you're creating.

• Comfort that lasts. You're going to spend hours here. Invest in the one good chair or the cushion that saves your back. Future you will be grateful.

• Organization that actually works. Not Pinterest-perfect organization but functional organization. Tools where you can find them, supplies that make sense to you.

• Inspiration within reach. Books, images, music, whatever feeds your creative soul and reminds you why you started.

The Friction That Almost Killed My Practice

Here's the thing about that desk situation I mentioned, it nearly broke my creative practice entirely.

So I got rebellious. Now I paint on my coffee table with a good backrest, or spread out on the floor with cushions. My office desk stays a digital workspace. My living room becomes my art sanctuary.

This shift eliminated friction I didn't even realize was stopping me.

Look, we deal with enough daily friction already, the client who changes their mind, the day job that drains us, the constant hustle just to afford supplies. Why add more barriers to the one thing that feeds our soul?

If transforming the same space works for you, brilliant, keep doing it. But if it doesn't, give yourself permission to get creative with your solutions.

Maybe you're like me and need separate zones. Maybe you paint better standing at a kitchen counter. Maybe your best work happens curled up in bed with a sketchpad.

The point isn't following rules, it's reducing whatever friction you can so you actually show up to create.

When Space Is Scarce (And Money Is Scarcer)

I know the reality. You're reading this in a subleted room or a studio apartment where your bed doubles as a couch and your kitchen table is also your desk, dining room, and art station.

You don't need permission to claim what's yours, even temporarily.

Roll out a dedicated placemat for your art supplies. Use a tackle box or toolbox to keep everything portable and contained. Set up a folding easel that lives behind the door. Transform a closet into a standing workspace.

The point isn't perfection, it's consistency.

The Space That Grows With You

Your first creative space probably won't be your last. Mine sure wasn't. I've painted on dining tables, bedroom floors, borrowed desks, and shared studios. Each space taught me something about what I needed and what I could do without.

The corner you claim today that's practice for the studio you'll have tomorrow. You're not just organizing supplies; you're learning to advocate for your work, to set boundaries, to take yourself seriously as an artist.

And here's what I've learned: The space doesn't make the artist. The artist makes the space sacred.

Your Assignment (If You Choose to Accept It)

This week, claim something. Even if it's just six square feet. Even if it's temporary. Even if it feels too small or too messy or not artist-y enough.

Set up your supplies with intention. Clear away everything that doesn't belong. Sit there for ten minutes and just... be with your space.

Notice how it feels to have a place that's waiting for you.

Your art deserves that space. And honestly? So do you.

What's your creative space like right now? Hit reply and tell me. I read every response, and I'm genuinely curious about how you're making it work.

Leave a comment

Know someone else wrestling with their creative setup? Share this with an artist friend who's struggling with space. Sometimes we all need permission to get creative with our solutions.

Share

First, let’s look at some basic definitions.

The Traditional Framework

Drawing has long been anchored in familiar territory. We recognize it through graphite sketches, charcoal studies, and ink illustrations—works that speak through line, contour, and careful gradation. These pieces live in the realm of dry media, where marks build meaning through accumulation and precision.

Painting, by contrast, has occupied a different space entirely. Think of oil paintings with their rich impasto, watercolors that bloom across wet paper, or acrylics layered to create depth and luminosity. Here, color and form dominate, with brushstrokes that sculpt light and shadow.

But what happens when these boundaries begin to dissolve?

The Revelation

Here's where things get interesting: medium alone doesn't determine category. A work created with paint can still be fundamentally a drawing if the artist's approach emphasizes linear exploration, if the marks prioritize line over color, or if the surface becomes a field for drawing-like investigation.

Subscribe now

Consider the Drawing Biennial at Drawing Room in London, where works that might appear to be paintings are celebrated as drawings. These pieces challenge our assumptions, inviting us to look beyond surface appearances toward something more fundamental.

Why Drawing Transcends Medium

The Drawing Biennial reveals something profound about contemporary art practice. By inviting artists to donate A4-size drawings on paper while encouraging unlimited media experimentation, the exhibition reframes drawing as an approach rather than a technique.

What makes these diverse works "drawings"? It's the artist's intentionality—their engagement with mark-making as a primary language, their relationship to surface as a field of exploration, their commitment to process over product. Whether executed in traditional graphite or experimental mixed media, these works share drawing's essential DNA: the direct, investigative encounter between artist and surface.

This perspective elevates drawing from a preparatory phase to a complete artistic philosophy. It recognizes drawing as a way of thinking, seeing, and making that can incorporate any material in service of its core values.

The Expanded Definition

Drawing emerges as a methodology—a set of principles and approaches that can manifest through countless materials and techniques. It becomes defined not by what it excludes but by what it embraces: curiosity, experimentation, and the fundamental human impulse to make marks that carry meaning.

This understanding dissolves the rigid hierarchy that once separated drawing from painting. Instead, it celebrates a cross-media practice where artists might use paint like a drawing tool, or approach traditional drawing materials with painterly concerns, creating works that honor both traditions while belonging fully to neither.

The Drawing Biennial, held every two years as both a critically acclaimed exhibition and vital fundraiser for Drawing Room, showcases around 300 drawings by 274 artists, aiming to champion the unlimited potential of drawing.

Expanding Your Vision

This evolving understanding of drawing invites us to rethink our assumptions. It broadens our definitions, encourages experimental approaches, and celebrates drawing as an expressive, investigative practice alive with possibility.

Questions for Reflection

As you consider this expanded definition of drawing, ask yourself:

• When you think of drawing, what materials, techniques, or feelings come to mind? Are these definitions changing for you?

• How might embracing a broader understanding of drawing influence your own creative process or the way you view others’ work?

• Can you recall a piece of art that seemed to blur the lines between drawing and painting? What made it compelling or confusing to you?

• How do intention and method shape your experience of an artwork differently from its materials and surface?

Take a moment to reflect—and if you’re inspired, try experimenting yourself. Let your creativity roam free beyond traditional boundaries.

In between these pursuits, I wanted to learn photography, do mural paintings, and learn dance. My interests seemed to shift and expand like ripples in water, each new passion adding to the last.

At one point, someone said, "Why don't you stick to one thing?"

I shrank myself into a neat little box while secretly wondering if maybe they were right. Maybe I should just pick one thing and stick with it like everyone else seems to do.

But here’s what I’ve learned—and what I want you to know:
Your many passions aren’t a flaw. They’re your superpower.

I know that might sound counterintuitive. In a world that constantly urges you to “pick a niche,” I’m here to say: stop shrinking yourself to fit into one.

Stay with me—I promise this is worth unpacking.

In Today’s World, People Tell You to Find a Niche…

You’ve probably heard it a thousand times: “Find your niche. Focus on one thing and master it.” Whether it’s in art, business, or your career, the pressure to specialise and stick to one path feels overwhelming. The message is clear—be the painter who only paints, the sculptor who only sculpts, the expert who knows just one thing inside out.

But here’s the truth that many don’t tell you: some of the most innovative and celebrated artists don’t fit into neat little boxes. In fact, many thrive by exploring multiple mediums and blending disciplines, creating work that’s richer and more dynamic because of it.

Ryan Gander is a perfect example. He doesn’t limit himself to one medium but works across sculpture, writing, radio plays, clothing, and jewellery, constantly pushing the boundaries of what art can be.

Every skill you learn transforms how you approach everything else.

Learning sculpture isn't just art—it's how you learn to work with resistance, to decide what stays and what gets carved away, to live with presence as your hands shape something from nothing.

Think of Michelangelo, who was not only a sculptor but also a painter and architect, whose cross-disciplinary skills enriched his masterpieces.

Learning to code isn't just technical skill—it's systematic thinking, breaking complex problems into solvable pieces, and the patience to debug life's glitches one line at a time.

Consider Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code, whose background in law and politics fuels her innovative approach to tech education.

Taking that photography class isn't just about cameras—it's training your eye to see light, composition, and moments others miss. It's learning to wait for the right shot, both literally and metaphorically.

Annie Leibovitz, a celebrated photographer, draws on her experience in theatre and painting to create iconic images.

Studying psychology isn't just about understanding others—it's developing empathy, reading between the lines, and recognizing patterns in human behavior that help you navigate every relationship.

Carl Jung’s work in psychology was deeply influenced by his interests in mythology, art, and philosophy.

Learning to cook isn't just about food—it's chemistry, timing, creativity under pressure, and the art of nourishing others. It's improvisation when you're missing an ingredient.

Chef José Andrés applies his culinary creativity to humanitarian efforts, blending cooking with social activism.

That dance class isn't just movement—it's embodied confidence, spatial awareness, and the ability to be present in your body. It's learning to recover gracefully when you miss a step.

The Cross-Pollination Effect

Your diverse interests create neural pathways that connect in ways a single-focus artist's never could.

Associative thinking is your brain's way of finding patterns and relationships between ideas that don't obviously belong together. While linear thinking follows a straight path from A to B, associative thinking bounces between A and M and Q before landing on a solution that nobody else saw coming. It's the mental process behind every "aha!" moment, every creative breakthrough, every innovation that makes people say "Why didn't I think of that?".

This type of thinking is increasingly valuable because it's exactly what artificial intelligence struggles with. AI excels at pattern recognition within defined parameters, but it can't make the unexpected leaps that come from lived experience across multiple domains. When you've felt the resistance of clay and the flow of watercolour, when you've debugged code and debugged relationships, your brain has reference points that create unique connections.

The world loves specialists, but it needs Synthesizers.

Subscribe now

The person who studied music and became a software engineer writes more elegant code because they understand rhythm and structure.

The former teacher who learned woodworking brings pedagogical patience to every project, teaching themselves and others through the process.

The marketer who took up rock climbing approaches campaigns like route-finding—looking for the path others can't see, calculating risks, and finding creative solutions to get to the top.

When Your Skills Become Life Skills

But here's where it gets really powerful—these skills transform your daily life in ways you might not even notice:

That sculpture mindset comes alive when you declutter your home—like Marie Kondo's method—deciding intentionally what belongings truly add value and shaping your space to reflect calm and purpose.

The coding logic reveals itself during a family dispute, where you break down the argument into its core issues, much like debugging software, addressing misunderstandings one conversation at a time to restore harmony.

A photographer's eye for light and timing shows when you wait for the perfect moment to discuss a sensitive topic with a friend, or when you notice your child's subtle change in expression and gently ask if something's wrong before they say a word.

Psychology's pattern recognition helps you read your manager's body language and tone during a stressful meeting, intuitively choosing the right moment to propose your idea or hold back, navigating workplace dynamics smoothly.

Cooking's improvisation skills come into play when your dinner plans get disrupted—like missing a key ingredient—and you creatively substitute or adjust the recipe, turning a potential setback into a delicious new dish.

Finally, dance's embodied confidence is evident when you walk into a job interview with poise, or when you recover gracefully after a social faux pas, moving through life with presence and resilience.

The Future Belongs to Synthesizers

Your "hobbies" are actually life skills in disguise.

Your curiosity isn't a bug—it's a feature.

In a world obsessed with niching down, you're developing what the future actually needs: adaptability, cross-pollination of ideas, and the ability to see solutions that specialists miss.

This matters more than ever because we're living in an age of complex, interconnected problems that can't be solved by single-discipline thinking.

Climate change requires artists who understand science because they serve as vital translators and innovators—making the invisible visible, the complex accessible, and the urgent compelling, thereby broadening the impact of scientific knowledge and motivating collective action. Technology needs designers who understand human psychology. Business needs leaders who understand both data and emotion.

Your associative thinking gives you the ability to spot opportunities in the spaces between industries, to translate insights from one field to another, to see the forest when everyone else is focused on individual trees. While others dig deeper into narrower specializations, you're building bridges between worlds.

You're not building a career—you're building a unique toolkit that nobody else has.

Permission to Be Beautifully Complex

So the next time someone questions your "lack of focus," remember: you're not unfocused. You're building a toolkit that nobody else has.

You're not scattered. You're collecting dots that will eventually connect in ways even you can't yet imagine.

Keep learning. Keep exploring. Keep defying the narrow categories others try to put you in.

The world needs your particular brand of beautiful complexity.

What's one "unrelated" skill you learned that unexpectedly changed how you approach everything else? Hit reply—I love hearing these connection stories.

Leave a comment