It's not how smart or talented you are
It's what you can contribute
Hello friends
It has been a giddy couple of weeks for me since I travelled from my quiet island home in Orkney for the launch of the exhibition In Orcadia at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh.
My stay in the city has been unexpectedly extended by a week because the preview that was meant to take place on January 24th (cancelled thanks to Storm Eowyn) has been rescheduled for Friday 14th February. If you are in or near Edinburgh it would be lovely to see you in the gallery between 6pm and 8pm for a glass of something and a chat.
This will have been my longest time away from Orkney for years, and I will be glad to get back home next week. Still, Edinburgh is a city I know well. I first came to live here to study at Edinburgh College of Art at the tender age of seventeen and lived and worked here, on and off, for the next thirty years. So I have been enjoying a taste of city living again: the cinemas, restaurants, bars, trams, galleries, busy streets, the general buzz, and most of all, reconnecting and spending time with dear old friends.
Some new friends too: last week some of our regular Life Raft Zoom co-working group met up in the gallery, most of us meeting in person for the first time. We have been meeting every Wednesday afternoon for the past year, and these lovely people have been in the studio alongside me while I have been working on the paintings in the exhibition. So we already felt like old friends and enjoyed a lovely leisurely lunch together.
Later that evening we reconvened back in the gallery with yet more friends for an evening of music and poetry. We enjoyed Fife-based poet Garry MacKenzie’s readings from a forthcoming book-length poem about the Firth of the River Forth, and a selection of water-themed music and songs from mezzo-soprano Taylor Wilson and pianist Karen MacIver. Taylor, Garry and Karen are all dear friends of mine too, and it was such a joy to just sit back and enjoy their skills and talents.
As I listened to my friends share their work I was reminded again of musician Brian Eno’s observation that creativity is not something that pops up in a lone ‘genius’ working in isolation, but flourishes within a shared community of conviviality, friendship and sharing that he called a ‘scenius’.
As Austin Kleon writes in his wonderfully enabling book Show Your Work:
Being a valuable part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are, but about what you have to contribute—the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you start. If we forget about genius and think more about how we can nurture and contribute to a scenius, we can adjust our own expectations and the expectations of the worlds we want to accept us. We can stop asking what others can do for us and start asking what we can do for others.
This sense of creative community is something that many of my coaching clients tell me they feel they lack. Working on your own, without the support or understanding of those around you is incredibly hard, even for an introvert.
But it’s also true that no matter where you live or who you know personally, there are still ways to connect with that wider sense of creative community. This is something I have had to learn since moving away from my previous ‘scenius’ in Edinburgh to live a much more secluded life in a rural part of Orkney.
We are all standing on the shoulders of giants and do our own work within a continuously re-woven fabric of all the art we have seen, the books we have read, the films we have watched, the music we’ve listened to, the conversations we’ve had, and, if we are lucky, the creative friendships we have made. I look along my bookshelves and see the names of friends who lived and died centuries ago, or who I know I’ll never meet in person, but who have been a valued part of my life nonetheless, through their words or their art.
‘Scenius’ recognises that creative ideas do not come out of thin air. They don’t even come out of us as individuals. They emerge from this whole ecosystem, and a big part of staying creative is continually taking in what is around us, looking, reading, and listening.
This takes so much pressure off. We don’t have to be anything terribly special or do anything remarkable. Our job is to collect good ideas, to soak them up, let them shape us and the work we do, always understanding ourselves and our work as just one small part of this long creative lineage.
And thank you to another lovely friend, Michael Wolchover, who took these beautiful installation shots of my work in the grand upper galleries of the Royal Scottish Academy.
I’m afraid our online Life Raft is still stuck in dry dock while I am away from my studio, but fingers crossed I will get home in a couple of days and we can all get back into our regular routine of setting sail together every Wednesday from 3pm to 4.30pm. I’ll share the Zoom link next week.
The exhibition continues until March 2nd and if you are not able to get to Edinburgh you can view it online here.
That’s all for now!
Sam
I enjoyed the exhibition immensely, both your ethereal, floating paintings and the other artists’ work. All conveying a sense of magical Orkney in very different ways. Also nice to meet you in person- if only briefly. Enjoy the last few days and your ‘preview’ and safe travels home.
Your exhibition looks intriguing and impactful; I wish I was closer to Edinburgh. The scenius concept is helpful for giddy sensitive egos but sometimes hard to enact when you arrive late to harnessing and sharing your creative authentic self. There is sometimes a sense of closed doors in the fine art world (if you’re not already a celebrity!) though this is probably a limiting belief… Sorry I ramble - love your writing here and memoir. Thank you, Helen