This week, we welcome Mark Pierce, the author of the book The Creative Wound. This is a book about creating your own medicine as an artist & about putting a soothing balm on your hurting spots.
In Mark’s words, it’s about “healing your broken art.”
If you have a creative wound — if your creative talents weren’t considered important growing up, if they were thought of as “less than” or superficial, if you have always felt like an “outsider, looking in” or just plain “weird” or been wounded in one of the hundred other ways that can stop a budding artist in their tracks, then this book is for you!
Its words are its healing medicine.
In it, Mark shares, with real vulnerability, both his own journey as an artist and insights that might give you clues about how to finally give yourself the love and compassion you might be seeking outside.
When I read The Creative Wound, it felt like reading the words of a kindred spirit who was talking directly to me. So, I am so happy to have Mark on the blog and to hear his thoughts on creative recovery and the artist’s journey. Here we go!
Ritu: Welcome to the blog, Mark! It’s so good to have you here! I know you are a creative entrepreneur with multiple talents. Can you tell my readers a little bit about yourself and your work as a multi-passionate creative person? How did your artistic career begin? Where all has it taken you?
Mark: It’s so good to chat with you, Ritu!
My creative career started way back in 1992 in a small nondescript market town in East Yorkshire, UK. Through an introduction from an old school friend, I landed a page-layout job at a multimedia news and statistics agency. The company supplied ready-made TV guides, sports results, weather forecasts and financial pages to local and national newspapers.
Here I got my first taste for graphic design, dropping rainclouds onto little maps. It was all quite fast-paced and cutting-edge for the time and I remember getting my first email address there, although in 1992 there weren’t many other people to actually send an email to!
From this foundation, I was hired by a series of UK design and branding agencies, and I worked on print and internet projects at increasing levels of seniority, until starting out on my own with Revelator in 2005.
Also, outside of the day job, I had consistently pursued my interest in music composition and production, and photography, and increasingly wanted to combine all of these disciplines together. But as I couldn’t find a job offering this diverse a combination I knew I’d have to create one for myself, and that’s what I did.
So, today, I get to play, record and produce music; I shoot photos for album covers, magazine editorial features, and stylised imagery for interesting people and brands; I design album artwork and book covers; I consult on marketing and brand direction for small businesses, and I coach fellow creatives. Oh, and I also write.
Ritu: Can you talk a little bit about your path to writing The Creative Wound? In the book, you talk about how you found yourself playing the unofficial counsellor at your various workplaces to different people with different creative wounds. Can you paint a picture of your interactions during this time for us? What patterns were you noticing? Was it clear to you at the outset that these people had such deep cuts to their creative selves?
Mark: In a nutshell, I’d see people hired for their creativity who consistently lacked the confidence to share their work, which is obviously quite a problem. It’s as debilitating as being a squeamish surgeon.
People were being paid to offer creative solutions—and they often did have good ideas—but they also seemed to be internally paralysed and unable to share them with anyone. So these creatives would hide away and be little more than technicians producing other people’s ideas, rather than following through with their own (usually better) ones.
If left alone, this scenario would often culminate in outbursts of anger, resentment, or frustration, with the person expressing feelings of being unappreciated, unnoticed and undervalued.
At times like this, I was a safe person for others to confide in and share ideas with without the fear of a harsh response. In some of the agencies I worked for, management or clients could be apt to make quick, forthright critiques. And even if they were accurate and a genuine attempt to be helpful, they would be received as crushing judgements by the creative.
So, I’d often talk these issues through with my creative colleagues (usually off-site during lunch hour) and together we’d find more accurate interpretations of what had been said and done.
From my perspective, the critiques I’d hear would often seem unnecessarily blunt and lack a vital understanding of the nuances of the creative process. But at the same time, I’d notice the creative would seem to overreact and behave as if their whole worth as a human had been called into question. And, while in an ideal world both sides would need to be addressed, it was usually the open-hearted creative where I’d get the most engagement.
We can’t control what other people think, feel, and say about our work, but we can learn to deal with and understand their words better.
Ritu: I really loved how you start the book by talking about why our creative lives matter. Beliefs around this is an area that can get so murky for us as sensitive creatives. You talk in a wonderful way about what art really is. You say that real art is not actually about art. Real art is about life.
I loved that! I think critics and academics tend to intellectualize art & make it into some distant thing. But that’s not what art is to artists. That’s also not what art is to viewers and readers. As viewers, real art moves us to tears, gives us an a-ha feeling and wraps its arms around us. As artists, real art helps us pull the sting out of our wounds and use it to make something truly transformative. It also helps us be joyous and feel part of the bigger whole.
But as we know, young artists find it very hard to value art and their own selves in the world we live in. Creativity is seen as either a frill or as a disruptive force. Can you talk a little bit about some of the common beliefs you have either had personally about creativity and art or seen other people hold unconsciously that muddies the waters of our creative lives?
Mark: The prevalent problem I see is the belief that creativity is largely superfluous, and is at best the preserve of the talented few.
For many, this attitude is passed on to us during our upbringing, throughout our education years, and then from our employers, and it makes the world a poorer place. As creatives, it then becomes harder to find a valid place in a world that we’re actually making so much better and more beautiful through our contribution.
In its most basic form, creativity is the act of making something new. A new idea. A new invention. A new combination of old ideas. Creativity fuses originality and imagination to make things better or more beautiful. Or both.
Spend five minutes looking around you, really looking around you, and you will see scores of examples right in front of you.
Without creativity, our world would have not developed one iota. I’d not be speaking to you, Ritu, from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Nobody would be reading this blog because computers wouldn’t exist, nor would the electricity to power them.
To belittle and decry creative thinkers, while at the same time taking for granted their contributions to our world hundreds of times every day, is perplexing to say the least. But this is the fight many of us face.
Ritu: Absolutely. I agree. That’s the good fight many of us fight as sensitive creatives. A part of The Creative Wound that really spoke to me was when you talked about how “a pear tree that bears no fruit is no less a pear tree than one that has grown thousands.” You talk so compassionately about how our soul essence and identity as artists is not tied to what we have or haven’t produced.
It might be that we are reeling under significant creative wounds and feel hopelessly stuck. But we are still artists. I have definitely been at this point in my own life. On the other hand, it is, of course, a very sad thing if a pear tree doesn’t come to fruition and fulfills its true purpose. The Creative Wound tells us to ask ourselves whether we are getting enough nourishment to support our growth as sensitive creatives.
Can you talk a little bit about the habits and practices that are essential nourishing ingredients for you personally? What would you say to someone who is at the very beginning of their journey back to their lost artistic self? What are the essential ingredients they need to start gathering first?
Mark: When we lose creative confidence, we usually lose a lot of trust in others along with it, as people are often the cause of our creative wound in the first place. Subsequently, sharing our best generative ideas with others can be scary and not seem to be worth the risk of pain. So, instead, we kill any sign of inspiration as quickly as we can to protect ourselves.
But if we want to see our creative confidence restored, we need to give our thoughts the chance to grow in an environment that has no judgment or critique. They need a safe place to be born and allowed to just ‘be’ without fear. This is the first necessary requirement.
Some of our best creative thoughts arrive in the twilight between consciousness and unconsciousness. When fully awake, our brains emit beta waves, but when relaxed, the waves change to alpha—sometimes referred to as being ‘in alpha state’. Simply put, it’s daydreaming on purpose. And one of the best places for prolonged daydreaming, alone and without fear, is in the shower.
Taking a shower is usually a solitary activity, and it’s typically a very safe place to be. You can lock the door, pull down the blind, and ‘lose yourself’ for as long as the hot water lasts. And nobody is going to judge your thoughts or ideas.
I know it is clichéd to hear of people getting their best ideas in the shower, but that’s because it is true. So, one of my own gifts to nourish myself, and my best advice to someone at the very beginning of their journey back to their lost artistic self, is to take longer showers!
Ritu: That’s such an interesting suggestion! I get a lot of my ideas in the shower as well. Getting back to the book, you also talk about your own process of writing The Creative Wound. I loved how you talked about deciding not to put added pressure on yourself by forcing yourself to have a deadline to finish the book. Instead, you scheduled regular “date nights” with your book. Of course, the caveat is that we can’t do this for paid work or work where we do have a deadline.
But when it comes to creative projects with more flexibility, this is an enticing as well as self-compassionate way to function! When I think about it, I feel like sometimes, we can get into this game with ourselves to do things perfectly or in some idealized way.
What other ways do you think artists frequently sabotage themselves and add unnecessary pressure that actually causes them to crash and burn? What internal “rules” can we break that will help us in our creative journeys?
Mark: Sometimes the biggest “rule” that people succumb to is one that says there are definitive rules to whatever it is you’re doing. For example, say you’ve been commissioned to produce a piece of work, and you finish it faster than you expected, there is a temptation to keep on working until you’ve used up your allocated hours.
If you think it “should” have taken you eight hours and you’re done in four it can cause internal conflict and exert pressure to keep going so that you feel you’ve given “value for money”.
The time to stop working on something is when further tweaks are making it worse, or when you have a nagging feeling that you want to start again from scratch.
This often indicates that you’re done and you need to move on to the next thing, or it could be that you should actually start your current project over again! There is no real rule for knowing that. It’s a judgment call, and one you can only learn through experience.
This scenario happens a lot when I’m mixing music. Sometimes I can paint myself into a corner, but rather than try to reshape what I’ve done so far, I’ll use the intimate knowledge of the track I’ve just gained, zero everything, and then start again with a blank slate.
In a way, it’s like working with the benefit of hindsight. Of course, this doesn’t work on every occasion and in every creative endeavour, but it’s worth keeping in mind. Used at the right moment it can work like magic and feels almost like you’re cheating.
Ritu: It was so interesting to learn that you are an INFJ personality type. As an INFP with extroverted intuition, I feel like my intuition is very different from that of INFJs with their introverted intuition. INFJ intuition feels more like creating a big picture to me (correct me if I am wrong!) while INFP intuition is often about experimenting and pushing buttons in the real world to see what happens.
Could you give us a picture of what intuition feels like for you as an INFJ personality type? Are there any “tells” or any ways you have found that show you that you are on the right track? I feel like trusting my intuition has both been a big challenge as well as a game-changer for me personally as an artist.
So, I am curious to learn how you think about your intuition and how you relate to it. What would you tell your younger INFJ self or INFJ creatives just starting out about intuition and its role in the artist’s life?
Mark: What a great question, and one that isn’t easy to articulate. But I’ll try!
I seem to see things pictorially or in patterns more than most. Images always come before words. So, when talking to me or reading my writing you’ll find I use a lot of visual metaphors. And it’s not always a quick process for me to find the words to express what I’m seeing, especially if the picture is only just forming.
The nearest thing I can think of to describe it is like those Magic Eye pictures that you have to ‘look through’ in order to see. A picture, or an awareness, forms in my mind but until it crystallises, to look at it directly makes it disappear. There’s a feeling of knowing something, but I’m not always sure what it is I know. I just make a note of it and explore it when I have the opportunity.
A trivial example of this would be regarding a big plastic spoon we have in the kitchen at home. Whenever I used it, I’d have an ‘awareness’ of Australian TV but with no idea why. My wife and I visited Australia four years ago for 6 weeks, but I don’t really remember anything about their TV or big spoons!
So I examined the spoon more closely, and on the handle it has a pattern of 9 dots in a 3×3 arrangement. I then Googled Australian TV channels and discovered that The Nine Network has a logo of 9 dots in a 3×3 arrangement. So, somehow I’d internalised this logo and the pattern on the spoon had brought it back into my subconscious.
Obviously, this is a inconsequential example, but by exploring occasions like this I’ve learned to trust this introverted intuition as reliably knowing things that my conscious logical mind can’t immediately articulate.
Oftentimes I need to leave a creative project alone and come back to it later. It is necessary to think things through, but rarely does the breakthrough come during the period of thinking around the subject. The revelation of my next move often comes when doing something entirely different. This is why I enjoy engaging in a number of creative disciplines.
I can get to where I feel like I hate music and everything about it, so I will leave the music work alone and hop over onto a photography or design project. I’ve discovered that don’t always need a rest as much as I need stimulation in an entirely different area.
For example, I can be working on a design job in Photoshop when suddenly a chord progression comes to mind, so I am then likely to jump back into my music software, Reaper, and quickly document the idea.
The advice that I’d give to my younger self, or to young creatives looking to explore this way of creating, is to never ignore the little things. Don’t ignore nudges, or patterns, or hunches you get. Explore them. Give them time and space to live, and learn to trust that part of your mind as much as you can because you know more than you know.
Ritu: It was also so interesting to read about synchronicity in your own life! The incident you talked about felt so magical that I’ll leave readers to discover it in your own words in The Creative Wound! I wanted to ask you what you think about synchronicity generally? I am definitely a big believer yet I also have a sceptical streak.
I have had many synchronistic experiences in my life where things just lined up and worked out. But that has not always happened. Sometimes, things haven’t worked out in quite that way. So, I feel like I am trying to understand synchronicity in a deeper way. I do believe in it but what are its limits?
Recently, I went to a talk by Sky Nelson-Isaacs who is a theoretical physicist and author in which he talked about synchronicity from a scientific perspective. One of the things he talked about was how synchronicity is not always a positive experience in the moment. Sometimes, “negative” experiences can also lead us in the right direction.
That has given me something to think about. What do you think? How do you frame synchronicity in your own life?
Mark: Firstly, I’ve now added Sky Nelson-Isaacs’s book to my reading list!
Synchronicity is a fascinating phenomenon. The more I’ve thought about and investigated it, the less dogmatic I’ve become about what exactly is going on, although I’m convinced something is going on! I’ve experienced too many unexplainable incidents to ignore it.
I’m a layman entirely, but I’m very intrigued by the discoveries within quantum physics and neuroscience and just how interconnected everything and everybody appears to be. Plus, I have a strong theistic worldview and, like most INFJs, have a desperate thirst to discover the meaning behind everything I encounter.
Science and faith are two worldviews that can often appear oppositional, but I think they overlap and inform each other tremendously, and this intersection is probably where the most complete understanding lies. Simplistically put, science explains the mechanics of what is going on, and faith helps us make sense of why.
So, this is the framework within which I best understand synchronicity or the unexplained and miraculous happenings in my life. That said, they are always accompanied by a barrage of questions.
For example, when something synchronous happens that seems impossible, I wonder if it should rightly be attributed to the actions of a personal God. Or could the event be entirely explainable by looking deeply enough into what quantum physics and neuroscience knows to be true? Even if the latter is the case, the question still remains of how these almost supernatural possibilities came into being in the first place.
They’re so intricate. So clever. And to me, they demonstrate strong evidence of design, purpose, and intentionality. So, whether the synchronistic event that happened was the active intervention of a personality, or a result of the mechanics of the way the world is designed to function, both trains of thought eventually lead me to a theistic worldview, one way or another.
For example, most of us would find it hard to accept that something as simple as a basic kitchen chair wasn’t the result of both intelligent design and purposeful crafting. Thus I find it implausible to conclude that a chair must have had a designer but the world and its ecosystem and multifaceted lifeforms did not.
I’ve thought about this so many times since being very young, and always reach the same conclusion: the world is a wondrous work of art and a masterful design, which strongly suggests an artist and a designer would be behind the work.
The way I see it, either everything came from nowhere and out of nothing, or everything came from somewhere and from something.
Of course, the question then arises as to where a divine being came from in the first place doesn’t it? I might just have to accept that absolute certitude will always be beyond me (although I’m not absolutely certain about that!).
Oh, I don’t know… Can we have the next question, please, before my brain explodes?!
Ritu: Absolutely! When we talk about synchronicity, we are also talking about mystery, which is almost impossible to pin down.
Another thing I wanted to ask you was how you relate to perfectionism as a sensitive creative who creates in so many mediums. I feel like the shadow side of the Artist archetype is our tendency towards perfectionism. We all, of course, know how debilitating perfectionism can be for our creative lives. But I feel like creative dissatisfaction also has a positive function.
Being able to see gradations is exactly what helps artists create something truly beautiful. So, I would be very interested to learn how you manage the balance between perfectionism and creative dissatisfaction in your own work.
How do you know when to stop a creative project and declare it done? When do you know that another revision is needed? What do you think is the difference between perfectionism and excellence?
Mark: My definition of perfectionism is when you only allow yourself to be happy once you’ve achieved flawless execution—a tough ask for anyone. Excellence is when you do the best you can with what you have and as who you are right now.
It is possible to be continually excellent in what you do and at the same time always be improving. This is much healthier than perfectionism, in which you only allow yourself a “pass” or “fail.”
Perfectionism in one form or another is pervasive. This seems to be true no matter what an artist’s skill level or experience, and it seems to have been intensified by developing computer technology. Artificial intelligence has led to a type of confusion that previous generations never had to face, and its speedy advancement in recent decades has muddied the waters as to what authentic creativity actually is.
It can be very unnerving if a computer algorithm can create something subjectively ‘better’ than you’ve managed after hours of study and practice. It’s easy, then, to ask “Why should I try to create something if a computer can do it better?” Why even try if I can’t be the best?
However, If ‘being the best’ is the only thing to aim for, then, when you arrive, there’s nowhere else left to go. It’s a dead end whichever way you turn—you either don’t try because you don’t think you can compete, or you’ll quit when you reach ‘the top’ because you’ve seen and done everything that is possible.
However, you can play a different game. If you constantly explore the infinitely broad horizon of meaning rather than perfection, you can go a lifetime and never exhaust all the possibilities. This seems far healthier to me than letting the paralysis of perfectionism stop you altogether.
For example, my wife and I made each others’ wedding rings even though we’re not jewellers and it was inevitable the rings wouldn’t be perfect. And they’ve been scuffed and scratched during the years since. They’re far from flawless and yet the meaning in those simple bands of gold is, to us, without comparison.
Ritu: It’s been so great having you on the blog! How can readers connect with you online? Where all can they find you and your work?
Mark: Thanks so much for inviting me. It has been wonderful to share thoughts and perspectives together.
If you’d like to know more, you can find me and my work by clicking the links below:
You can find The Creative Wound book on Amazon U.S. here and Amazon U.K. here.
Thank you for this interview, Mark! It’s been wonderful to have this chat. I think sensitive creatives finding their way back to their lost, fragmented selves will absolutely love The Creative Wound and your work. I wish you all the best with the book!
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