I used to think a sketchbook was where good paintings went to happen before the real painting. A warm-up. A place to get the bad drawings out of your system so the “actual” work could begin on a clean sheet, with better paper, where it counted.
It took me a long time to notice that the sketchbook was the only place I was still enjoying myself.
Everywhere else, I was managing an outcome. Would this sell. Would this look finished. Would this look like me, whatever that meant that week. Every brushstroke had a small committee behind it, weighing in before the paint had even dried. The sketchbook had no committee. It had a cup of tea going cold beside it, ten minutes stolen between things, and nothing riding on whether the shape of a roofline came out right.
That’s the gap this whole shift is about closing.
When I say “creativity without pressure,” I don’t mean creativity without effort, or without care, or without wanting to get better. I mean creativity without the constant audit. The difference between painting a house because you’re curious what its shadows do in the late afternoon, and painting a house because you’ve already decided what it needs to look like when you’re done.
Most of us didn’t lose our creativity. We just moved it somewhere it had to perform.
I think about this most when I’m running a workshop and I watch someone freeze over a blank page — not because they can’t draw, but because they’re waiting for permission to do it wrong first. That freeze is the whole problem in miniature. Somewhere along the way, “let’s see what happens” got replaced by “let’s not embarrass ourselves,” and creativity, which only ever really worked as the first thing, quietly stopped.
So here’s what I’m actually building, slowly, in public, through this newsletter and the studio work behind it: a way back to the sketchbook version of making things. Not because finished paintings don’t matter — they do, and I still make them, and I still care whether they’re good. But because the loose, unpressured, half-wrong pages are where the finished ones actually come from. You can’t skip the stage where you’re allowed to be bad at something. You can only hide it better.
If you’ve been circling a creative practice for years without quite letting yourself start — this is your nudge. Not toward a masterpiece. Toward a page. One you’re allowed to mess up.
More on this soon, including what I’m building around it.
