This is the space for our members to discuss and share their creative projects, ranging from written works to drawings, photography, and even craft projects such as knitting and woodworking. Self promotion is welcome (websites where we can view and/or purchase your work). Please do continue to preface if content is NSFW and be sure to properly spoiler/link such content.

Warning: plenty of political content to follow. If you don’t want to see that kind of thing right now or ever I totally understand if you just scroll to the comments, and if so I apologize for the length, as this might be the longest Creative Endeavors Thread I’ve ever written.

The morning after Election Day 2016, I was listening to Tom Allen’s radio show on CBC 2. I think it was Shift, wherein he’d present orchestral music and then segue into rock, pop songs etc. chronologically, linking the different pieces through common themes and stories which struck me then (and still does) as a great programming idea. Like anyone else who was paying attention in North America or abroad (I used to think that was most people, but then that seems many lifetimes ago), I was in a dark place and wasn’t sure what else to do with my day other than go through my usual motions (I’d requested off work just in case; this year I got it anyway). These included listening to Canadian radio. Having the latter available over regular airwaves was a perk of living in Southeast Michigan to which I rapidly became accustomed. I’ve sadly fallen away from regular listens, but it’s still good to know it’s there, not least as it’s been there for me when it counted in the past (I emailed Julie Nesrallah and her Tempo team to thank them for being a source of solace during my traumatic breakup a year before that, and got a proper email back saying that I’d made their day—it was a big help). Something tells me I’m likely to fall back into that habit a lot more in the next couple of years.

In any event, that day Allen focused on Paul Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler. Hindemith was a German composer of the mid-twentieth century whose atonal-adjacent orchestral works put him in the sights of the Nazis as a primary force in so-called “degenerate art” (Hindemith and his wife would flee to Switzerland and then the US in 1938). Mathis, like Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe, more usually performed in a shortened version (the first a symphony, the second a suite) looked at the life of visionary German artist Matthias Grunewald, whose astonishing apocalyptic visions seemed to prefigure the violence of the Reformation and especially the Peasants’ War of the 1520s (he’s long been someone I should investigate further; a lot of his stuff reminds me of Blake’s illustrations). His masterwork, the Isenheim Altarpiece, is the header this week and lives in Colmar’s Unterlinden Museum in eastern France (Alsace). Hindemith found striking parallels between Grunewald’s struggles and his own, and the connection gave Allen the perfect springboard to look at art and what it means in times like theirs—and now possibly ours.

On the surface, events like last Tuesday make me realize (on top of so much else) both how much my artwork means to me and how microscopically little it means even on the smallest observable scale. It’s the one place where I can most truly express (however opaquely) my thoughts and emotions. My paintings or illustrations usually have little textual relation with politics or pressing contemporary topics, but the latter often meld with the conceptual or operational process (at least a couple, for instance, were direct comments on climate change), and obviously catastrophes like the election can make me even question the fitness of continuing to do creative work. The 2016 election happened while I was in full spate making my webcomic and I had to take a few months off before I picked it back up again. And that was back when I was just doing that and one or two pictures a month; I wouldn’t start painting for another year and my production method and quota hadn’t really evolved yet.

So now I find myself, like the rest of us, at another dark crossroads. Artwork and creativity have been a human constant for over twenty millennia and it seems ridiculously self-important to call my own to a halt just because of one (albeit potentially disastrous) election. Nevertheless, it was hard to do much of anything. I voted early in October and decided to spend much of Election Day in Detroit at the DIA; no premonition or anything—I just wanted to be in a place I loved where I enjoyed spending time. Got in a few sketches, particularly of their excellent “Art of Dining” exhibit on medieval and early modern Islamic food culture (pottery, metalware, utensils, related artwork), rode my bike around, and then went back home and got to bed relatively early (spent some of the evening at my local with a couple of pints working on my previously featured digital art project). Like many others, I figured the election would take a couple of days to call—and eventually for the good—and had no idea it would wrap up so quick and so horribly. I spent the entire next day in my apartment, napping and occasionally doomscrolling.

Eventually I was able to rouse myself to eat and catch up on Lower Decks and the first series of Detroiters (a scene in the DIA’s Diego Rivera hall raised the first mild chuckle I had in hours, considering I’d been there less than a day before). Headed to work the next day with great reluctance, not least as I would be working a shift with the crypto-fascist boomer coworker (who, I learned from my other co-worker, had been all but pleasuring himself throughout his shift that Wednesday). Weirdly enough, work improved my mood. Being around other people helped a little, and realizing that part of my determination to fake it till I made it grew from an equal determination not to let my coworker get to me (or at least see it happen) helped even more. By Thursday evening, I was almost myself again. It would go back and forth over the weekend and likely still will (especially after a phone call with my dad; it was good to talk with him, but unnerving to hear him say that for the first time in three-quarters of a century he was embarrassed to be an American).

Something that’s really inspired me the past several days, though, has been the determination of more vulnerable friends and colleagues, whether I’ve met them or not, to keep persvering, dreaming, and creating. One resolution I’ve made is to keep my cool; as a cishet white guy, I figure I owe it to my female, POC, trans and queer friends, not least in order to be a potential support if necessary. Seeing them post thoughts and work on Instagram and Facebook has been really galvanizing, and if there’s anything the enemy would love to see happen, it’s to give up on any meaningful creativity in particular (I’ve seen sentiments before that a large factor in the buzz over AI art is a weird anger on the part of certain less imaginative techbros at the very concept of human artistic creation; I suspect this feeds into a lot of aforementioned coworker’s resentment). So while I haven’t really had the energy the past week to create or even exercise, I know it’ll come back. That goes, too, for the will to resist, organize, support, and all the rest of it. Some of it’s already happening; getting slightly more active on Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/fluvialhoedad.bsky.social) has helped a little (the alt-text function is fantastic not just for growing accessibility for low-visibility users but is also a great way for me to improve how I describe my own work).

I started writing this post late Wednesday morning as both copium and distraction, and it wound up taking me almost the entire week, so apologies if this seems rambling or disjointed.

How’s your work going?