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Transcript

Audio Journal: Blood on the Canvas · The Daily Writer

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm recording these next three audio journal episodes as I'm sitting in the high school parking lot waiting to pick up my son from school.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: So you're probably gonna hear some cars drive by, and I think I even heard some sirens in the distance.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: The wind's blowing, so it's kind of noisy.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: So just kind of disregard that for these next three episodes.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: A couple years ago, I was reading a biography of my favorite artist of all time, who's Leonardo da Vinci.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: He is one of the great creative geniuses of all of history, and there's just so many cool things to admire about Da Vinci.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the book I was reading is called Leonardo da Vinci Flights of the Mind by Charles Nicole, I think that's how you pronounce his last name.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: And close to the beginning of the book, he said something that struck me and I found so fascinating.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: The author was speculating that perhaps in some of Da Vinci's paintings, that there were actually droplets of blood mixed in with the paint.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I found that to be a really, really fascinating concept.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: And he went on to explain that when painters, at least in medieval times and then in older times, whenever they would paint, the tools that they would use would sometimes sometimes cause them to cut their fingers or cut their arms, and they would get very into their painting.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes they would actually start bleeding as they painted, and therefore some of their blood would actually get mixed in with the paint.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought that was a fascinating concept.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's a little bit weird, and maybe it's not very healthy, of course, for various reasons, but it's a fascinating concept nonetheless that the DNA of the artist is actually embedded within the artwork itself.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I think there's a good lesson there for us.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the lesson there is: does your creative work actually reflect you?
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Does it reflect your thinking?
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Does it reflect your priorities?
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Does it reflect your perspective on the world?
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Can people say that your creative work, your writing, maybe you do music or video or graphic design, whatever it is, is it uniquely you?
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now, for those of us who do client work, that's a whole different story because we're creating on behalf of someone else, and that's a whole different thing.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: But for the stuff that you create, can you say it's uniquely yours?
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason I say that is because it's so easy today to see people out there who are doing the kind of things that we want to do.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a writer, there's all kinds of people who are creating stuff, they're writing books, they're writing articles, they have podcasts that we really, really enjoy.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it's so easy to look at them and want to model everything that we do on that person.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: But I want to challenge you to look at what you're doing and and really think about is your personality, is the way that you see the world, is that embedded in what you're creating?
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: Because if it's not, then I think you should really consider doing that because the world needs your perspective.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: You're a unique individual.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: There's nobody else in the history of the world who's who has ever existed who is just like you, and there never will be again.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: So if you don't create what only you can uniquely create, then it will never get created.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: And you're actually doing us a disservice if you don't create what you feel called to create.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: That might be a book, maybe it's music, maybe it's painting, maybe it's something else.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: If it's painting, please don't bleed on the painting.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's probably not cool, although obviously Da Vinci and other artists did that in uh generations past.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: So let that let that be my encouragement to you today.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: If you feel called to create something unique, man, you gotta create it.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: You just you have to do it.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to find a way to get it done.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: It may take you a long time to do it, but but my goodness, um, our time on earth here is so short and it's so limited.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: And my hope and my prayers that when people read my books, whenever they hear my podcasts, there's a motorcycle back there, you can hear that.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Whenever they experience the things that I create, that they sense that my DNA is baked into that.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And my hope is the same thing for you as well.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see you in the next episode.