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The Different Types of Creatives

Picture a typical high school classroom at midday in between periods: there are desks askew, bags half-open in between seats, paper crumpled underneath them, and the chatter of sweaty and energetic 16-year-olds unmistakable in the background. If you direct your gaze at any of the far corners of the room, you will see one particular student hunched over with a pencil in hand, a pad of paper on the desk. She is distinct, but not readily noticeable perhaps sketching a pastoral landscape or her favorite anime character. In the typical high school social setup, this one is your artist.

In fact, when the word artist comes to mind, one would inevitably associate the word with drawings – textbook representations and even mainstream media relegates the idea of an artist to an individual hunched over a piece of paper coming up with a realistic sketch of her surroundings, or a sketch that bears semblance to her crush. This is the artist.

What we fall short of doing though is to recognize the full breadth of the word “artist” and as well, the multitude of activities and even careers that can be attached to the word. These days, we have added the word “creatives” to our daily industry parlance, which refers to individuals whose jobs are mostly about producing media content on various platforms; but the word isn’t quite all-encompassing.

With the advent of the digital platform as a major medium in producing and showcasing creative work, we feel that there’s a need to revisit the idea of an artist in the context of the production of various forms of work present today.

The Digital

She pores over her laptop for hours, and sometimes at the end of the day all she has done is choose the right colors to put together on a single poster or find the right place to put her vectors within the canvas of her work. The digital artist is a consummate perfectionist. She spends hours trying to put together disparate elements into a singularity, to evoke her message and to capture the attention of her audience in a single glance. Like a logo, her work has to capture the entirety of an entity through the careful difference between a serif and a sans serif, or from one pantone to another. She understands how it is to negotiate the nuances between the smallest of things, how a slightly darker shade with the move of a cursor can alter the direction which her work may take. The graphic artist dabbles in the art of nuances while navigating the difficult social milieu she is trying to appeal to.

The Filmmaker

The filmmaker sees the world through the lenses of the camera, and quite unlike the photographer who captures the plurality of a moment in a singular photo, the filmmaker captures life in its breadth and touches upon its nuances within the width of a single frame. Each filmmaker has her distinct style – from the type of lens to use, to the angle of crucial shots, to the undertone of the post-processed video. Every thought in her head is translated to a scene in a movie, every conversation comes with a corresponding emphasis on the visual elements. The filmmaker has her own way of telling a story – by way of depicting life in a scene with the grit of reality and the velvet of sophisticated artistry.

The Musician

A deep appreciation for music is where it all begins. Then sooner or later, these people have already begun recording short bars of sounds they made on their own with their keyboards and guitars, and experimenting with various apps that mix and match different sounds. On their laptops, they could produce their music, recording their songs while strumming to the sound of an acoustic guitar or even a tiny ukulele. Much like writing, music conveys an emotion – from Mozart’s Moonlight Sonata which drew a picture of the moon through music to relay to the eyes of a blind boy, to Honne’s Warm on a Cold Night, which by some working of God or genius, really makes you feel perfectly snug on a cold night. To many people, music is life; and if so, these musicians are oxygen.

The Photographer

A pre-nup or wedding photoshoot against a picturesque landscape, or even just the casual shots from your most recent vacation – a good photographer knows how to make the beauty of a moment come out and last forever. With the internet as a veritable mine of these photographs, free stock or otherwise, these photographers can be found anywhere. From the unseeming high school classmate whom you never saw hold a camera before, but now has an excellently curated spread on Instagram, to the professional ones whose pictures appear on magazines, to the occasional enthusiast who posts his photos on Pinterest, a good photographer is all about capturing the moment in a perfect way – someone whose passion for this extends well beyond the output but transcends to the idea of storytelling in a thousand words without even saying anything.

The Stylist

Perhaps the least considered of all types, the stylist, the fashion designer, are no less artists than their counterparts in other fields. Despite the long-standing debate of whether fashion is a true art form, we daresay it is and weigh in on the affirmative. For the longest time, fashion in various eras has spoken of the ethos of its times – it takes with it the energy, the frustrations, the desires, alongside practical considerations of its respective milieu without sacrificing the notion of what is beautiful and truly distinct. Fashion designers make considerations for the emotions they wish to convey, and the message they send across from the simple choice of what fabric to use, to the level of flamboyance their creations possess. It is inextricably linked to the workings of human consumerism and industry, and for what its worth, is a silent witness to the changing of times and the people living in it.

The Writer

The screenplay, the script, the occasional blog post, and maybe, even poetry – these are all products of the mind of an individual with a story to tell. Whether it be wrought from experience or imagination, the beauty of the written word, and the ability to stir feelings among readers, is a gift that only writers have and continue to hone every day. With the presence of various websites that host any user’s writings, it is all about being distinct and dedicated to the craft one produces. To be a writer is to partake in the art form of articulation – to fold over the complexities of human experience and emotion in the brevity of a word, and to recreate these feelings in the minds of other people.

Perhaps, we only yearn for recognition for all the work we do. And maybe, through it all, be recognized for the intricate craft we all partake of when we create. The modern world has made creative works more democratized and readily available for everyone to see, and with it comes the risk of watering down the value of each work created. Artists have an added duty placed on their shoulders – to remain dedicated to the craft of what they live and breathe everyday.

[thewhitedoe-blog]

Las Flores

[thewhitedoe-blog]

Dear,

Framed Ocean by Horacio Salinas

I sat across from you the day we decided to spend every weekend in each other’s solitude, and I’m reminded of how you once said we could live together, alone with each other, by the ocean.

But we know we can’t yet, if at all. Our city lives, and daily dues are an ache we need to salve with the balm of our urbanity – lives lived in the interstices of tall buildings, brief lunch breaks and stolen moments of idleness in between clicks on a bright computer screen. But we have our moments of respite, moments when, during the languid hours of the nights and weekends, we put our heads together and we know that we have come alive under the talk of poetry—my mistress, of typefaces, straight lines, and curlicues, of flowers and cream undertones. We come alive at the birth of our pale attempts to create, and once in a while when we create, we get to breathe in a fresh world far bigger than ourselves.

We create because we live. We live because we love. We love possibilities; we love limitations. We love breaking them.

And this, this is the sound of glass shattering to a million mornings of idle solitude, and a million nights of hushed company. This is the sound of glass shattering to a million ideas.