Creative Immortality

A drawing that survives me. A story that finds its way into a child’s imagination. A tree that keeps growing long after I am gone. A conversation that changes the direction of someone’s life by half a degree and keeps travelling through time without either of us ever seeing where it ends up.

I always thought success was about reaching some destination. The gallery. The book deal. The full time art career. The thing that would finally prove all the people who said art was not a real job were wrong. Looking back, I can see how much energy was spent chasing permission from a world that never really understood what I was trying to do in the first place.

I spend my time moving between hospital maintenance work, family life, paddocks, animals, drawing, writing, podcasting and whatever strange idea currently has hold of my attention. It is not a neat life. There is always something broken, something unfinished and something demanding to be fed. Yet somewhere amongst all that chaos I have become far less interested in building a career and far more interested in building a life.

The world seems obsessed with scale. Bigger audiences. Bigger businesses. Bigger houses. Bigger numbers on a screen. Everything is measured by growth, yet very little attention is given to whether the thing growing is actually making life better. We are encouraged to produce more and consume more while somehow feeling less connected to each other, less connected to nature and less connected to ourselves.

Nature operates differently. Some of the most remarkable living things on Earth are not the biggest, loudest or most powerful. The platypus ignored every rule and became something entirely its own. The aardvark quietly reshaped its environment night after night without demanding recognition. The immortal jellyfish found a way to keep beginning again instead of endlessly pushing forward. 

The same seems true for art. The work I am proudest of rarely came from trying to follow a trend or manufacture relevance. It came from curiosity. It came from falling down rabbit holes about obscure animals, conservation, pattern, storytelling and all the strange connections that sit between them. The more specific and personal the work became, the more people seemed to find themselves inside it.

I think creative immortality has less to do with legacy than most people imagine. Legacy sounds grand and important. It sounds like statues and buildings named after you. Creative immortality is smaller than that. It is the decision to make something meaningful even when there is no guarantee anybody will notice. It is planting seeds knowing someone else might enjoy the shade.

One day my books will outlive me. Some drawings probably will too. The podcast episodes will keep drifting around the digital wilderness for as long as the servers stay switched on. The trees we plant on our little patch of land will hopefully become homes for birds I will never see. None of that requires fame. None of it requires permission. It only requires showing up and making the next thing.