Painting an owl (or why "creating" matters)

When I joined ISB, I instructed myself to participate in every new event that I could join while on campus. It is always easy to lose track of time, fixated at a screen. Even when those screen related fixations are productive, we are meant to look outside them, at least once in a while. In this pursuit of events in the physical space, I came across and registered for an event on painting T-shirts. It was organised by Tanisha, a friend from my class, through her venture Mila, and I wanted to take some time to think about it but was ultimately forced by her brilliant sales tactics and thinking about my earlier pledge, I thought I'll just register and see how it goes.

I started writing this because Tanisha asked for my honest review of the event she had organized through Mila, but it felt incomplete without the full context of what shaped my experience that evening. In short, I loved it. It was very well organized, with all the required art supplies, guidance on how to use them, and artistic support for getting through creative blocks. I'd definitely attend it again. Now back to my experience.

I have always been interested in creative pursuits like painting, drawing, and music, but the idea of pursuing these interests always seemed better than actually putting in the work to practice and improve myself which required hard work. So while I loved the idea, I wasn't very keen on actually painting figures on a T-shirt. I was sure I'd mess it up and it would be a waste of a perfectly good piece of clothing. Plus the anguish of publicly performing something I already knew I wasn't going to be good at. Anyways, I learned something recently, which was to "Deal with the consequences when they actually happen in the physical world", and I was fully ready to embrace whatever I created instead of letting my thoughts dissuade me from participating before I had even picked up a brush.

The day of the event, I was super exhausted even before it began. Like most days on campus, the night before was another one of adding on to my sleep debt, and that evening I went to pitch my platform at an event doing cold outreach (will write about it separately). In hindsight, I guess the whole day was about new experiences. After being stuck in traffic, having a nice cup of coffee (actually 3) and coming back to campus drained, I wanted to take some time to rest, but I had to add colors to a T-shirt in the atrium. I reached just in time to help with some set up and was promptly handed a big T-shirt with a big owl drawn on it. There were some other options but I liked the owl, which also happened to be the one with the most segments and hence the most difficult to color. My task was to fill in colors and ensure that it still looked like an owl when I was done with it. Seemed easy enough, and I thought I would be done in a few minutes and would finally enjoy the snacks and drinks that they had as part of the event.

With some well defined guidance from Tanisha on which brushes to use and what colors to choose, I started painting. My phone was somewhere in the crowd, being used to photograph the event, this was a rare period of time when I had no device on me, even my watch had stopped working and my new one was still on the way. So I was without notifications, without any interruptions (Saturday evening), and I could just paint. I did not merge the smaller segments into larger blocks, rather, I chose to paint every small segment individually. I must say that I enjoyed it at first, but then I was not even half way done and the novelty wore off. Now it was repetition. And that was where it got interesting, because even creativity can be built and learned. The longer I sat with it, the more I started seeing the owl as a system rather than a drawing, there were patterns I recognized I had to avoid, and small insignificant experiments I knew I could run in a corner first. I'd try a combination on one tiny segment near the edge, see if it held, and if it worked I'd scale it across a whole wing. People started finishing their paintings, but I kept working. I painted the longest that evening, took me over 4 hours, but I was finally done. I did not use my phone or any other device, I was able to focus without getting distracted, and I could see and understand patterns in seemingly random things. It felt like I transitioned my thoughts from chaos into clarity.

So if there's one thing to take from this: try creating something with your hands, without distractions. It might unblock you and show you a completely different side of things. If "Attention is all you need", you have to take control of it for yourself first