Creativity: Why “Professional” Often Means “Amateur”
I’ve been a “professional” creative since I was a kid. Well, I’ve been paid for my work since I was about 13 years old. Thinking back, I don’t remember a moment when I made this transformation from amateur to professional. The idea there was a difference didn’t really occur to me.
You see, both my parents are artists and craftspeople. They’ve also both been art teachers. So I grew up surrounded by art and craft and creativity. When my dad founded a craft and art centre / commune, I lived there with him for a few years, surrounded by other artists and creatives.
As a 6 year old, I would wander around the commune, which was a converted farm. Through one door would be carpenters and through another potters. I’d turn left and find myself in a life drawing class. If I was bored I’d be given a pencil and some paper and I’d simply start drawing. I made pots on a potter’s wheel. I weaved wool to make thick cloth.
My dad would make etchings of Glastonbury Abbey. And I remember the ink and the rollers for rolling the ink on the etching plate and the big heavy press and and the smell of ink.
I took it all for granted because I never knew anything different. In other words, I experienced creativity in the same way a dolphin experiences water.
There was no distinction between “professional” and “amateur”. You just created, like a dolphin swims. It’s what you did to live, but not as a job. Because without it you would be a washed up dolphin on dry land. You would die, but not because you weren’t professional.
Simply – through a terrible event – you had found yourself separated from the substance that sustained you.
When I was 13, I made action man sized sweaters with my mum’s knitting machine. My mum had a stall at Camden Market selling sweaters and I took my mini versions along. People started buying them (actually young girls for their Cindy dolls). So I made a little rail for them and some mini fold up paper bags (I had to take apart a Sainsburys bag to work out how to make one).
At 15 I designed sweaters for my mother’s business. I did it for fun. My mum moved from the scruffy Camden Market to the new, rather posh Covent Garden Market. At the time, the £ was low and American tourists came to Camden and bought our hand knitted sweaters with sheep and pigs on them.
I designed one with snowmen on it. One day a BBC producer came and bought one and a few weeks later it appeared on Blue Peter, worn by one of the presenters. Which was fun. But I still didn’t really consider myself a professional. I mean, it wasn’t that difficult. Do dolphins congratulate themselves for swimming?
It was only later that I encountered this strange idea.
All my childhood it was assumed by me and everyone around me that I would go to art college. That prophecy came true – and that was when it all got a bit weird. Imagine a dolphin who shows up to his first day of swimming class with a lot of other dolphins who for some reason do not consider water to be a fact of life. Instead, these dolphins see it as an alien element to conquered and mastered and delivered in a professional manner.
Eh… what?
I tell you now, I was not professional. And I did not continue past one year of art college.
The problem for me was, the people who were desperately trying to be professional quite often looked… well… amateur. And this came about almost entirely due to their need to be taken seriously.
I began to see that this being professional thing was a thin veneer. It was cover to hide insecurities. Fear of being judged.
What if I don’t look professional?!
*insert horror face emoji*
People will laugh at me. They will sneer and tell me I suck. To avoid this awful possibility, I must do everything I can to appear professional.
Why am I telling you this? Well, it just came to my mind, as I was going to write a post on how to shoot a music video with your smartphone. Then as I watched this music video with 42 million views, shot by a very well known director, and it adhere’s to none of these “professional” qualities.
Look, it’s just someone holding a camera (who happens to be Spike Jonze). And Kayne West and Kayne West’s cute kid.
No stabilisation. No lenses. No lights. No “film look”, “cinematic”, or make your video “professional” tips. And yet it looks better (more true, more real, more honest, more creative) than all those terrible YouTube videos, with overdone colour and bokeh background.
What the hell is Spike Jonze doing being so unprofessional? Is it because he knows that it’s a load of crap sold to desperate people?
So you see, you actually make yourself look amateur by trying to be professional. Because only an amateur would worry about that.
That’s not to say, as a smartphone filmmaker, you should forget about stabilisation, exposure, lenses and the like. Just that only amateurs slavishly follow the rule book – because it’s all they’ve got. And they’re scared of getting their feet wet, let alone their whole mind and body.
But why is Spike Jonze shooting a video and ignoring all that stuff you were told is necessary to make your video professional? Ah, now we are asking the real question, aren’t we?
I remember my dad once had a moment of inspiration. I must have been about 14 years old or so and he was busying himself with something, pacing around the cottage in the West Country he lived in at the time. The it suddenly struck him.
“That’s the difference!” he exclaimed. Us kids all looked him, awaiting explanation. “Most of us would just say, ‘we walked about on our own a bit’. He wrote, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’. And that’s what makes him special.”
Dad was briefly excited at the revelation and then we all continued our lives. Maybe it’s not such a big discovery: Genius, or poetic insight, is something you can’t manufacture by being professional.
But let’s try to answer that question about Spike Jonze. If he’s not a master of professional filmmaking standards, what is he a master of? And why does it set him above your average director?
I will suggest to you it’s the creative aesthetic he’s a master of. When he shot that Kayne West video – pretty much as anyone would shoot a video with an iPhone if they weren’t trying too hard – he knew very well the aesthetic he was trying to achieve.
The same goes for Wordsworth. He knew the feeling he wanted to convey to the reader about loneliness. And he didn’t achieve that by reading an English spelling and grammar textbook to ensure his writing was at a professional standard.
Because maybe creativity isn’t about applying a bunch of simplistic rules. Or acquiring a qualification to prove how educated you are. Perhaps it’s actually about understanding which tools and methods you need to create certain feelings and moods and know how to apply them effectively.
The other thing is that some of the best creative stuff happens by accident. When all your great plans and professionalism collapse and you’re forced to confront what you really wanted to say but didn’t realise it because you were so busy trying to get the rules right.
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