We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jc Wayne a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
JC, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?
I was creating art, poetry and stories at a very young age, and while I was interested in and good at most subjects in school, art and music appreciation/choir classes were my favorites. Both of my parents were highly creative (they met at a Studio Art class as students at Brown University), and my childhood home was often filled with creators, but neither of my parents seriously pursued their artistic talents since they were of an age of conventional family expectations and roles. I did attend an arts high school in Providence, Rhode Island and went on to study Art History (and International Relations) at Brown as well. Unfortunately, my art teacher in high school gave me a particularly severe critique that essentially convinced me at age 15 that I had insufficient artistic talent to pursue art further and that I would never make it as an artist. My poetry professor at Brown, however, seriously pushed me to become a full-time poet and even got me into the poetry doctorate program at Stanford without telling me, but I could never envision a life as a poet, and I felt there was something else I was meant to do.
Always with one foot in the art world and another in International Relations, which was my focus as a graduate student and doctoral candidate at The Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy (a joint program of Harvard and Tufts Universities), the first decade of my early adult professional life pushed me towards International Relations and then towards expertise in the implications of the Internet in healthcare with the creation of the World-Wide Web in the early to mid-1990s as a futurist, consultant and magazine editor in California.
As I entered my second professional decade, I was saturated and bored as a knowledge expert and was yearning for greater wisdom and purpose, so I traveled the world studying, experiencing and connecting the dots between eastern wisdom and western knowledge. This resulted during my third professional decade in applying my international relations, diplomacy and forecasting experience in new directions, providing wisdom leadership teaching and advising to executives in business, international NGOs, the arts, technology, medicine and governance, including mayors of cities and presidents and ministers of countries.
In 2019, I felt the need for change again, and as I contemplated on what was to come next, I experienced a strong impulse and need to return more fully to my creative life and give it a chance to be my foreground focus. Then covid hit, and this was the door that opened me fully into my life as a visual artist, accompanied by my wordwork through poetry and stories. During covid, Lake Placid Center for the Arts (in the Adirondacks of New York) experimented with offering online art classes with artists they represented as a means to help support them when the center and its gallery shut down and tourism in Lake Placid dropped off.
I started taking their watercolor classes because I was just starting to use that medium at the time to illustrate my first handmade book, and most of my experience and skill development in the last art classes I had taken 30+ years earlier in high school had been with pastels. But it didn’t take long for my natural wide-ranging curiosity and multimedia tendencies to kick in, and I began to take every painting class offered. In my first palette knife class, I discovered the natural artistic talent I always knew was there, but had not been successfully evoked and surfaced. The teacher could not believe that the painting I produced in that class was the first I had ever done and that I had never even picked up a palette knife before then. The rest, as they say, is history. While the palette knife proved to be my magic creative wand, it also reconnected me to other mediums I loved and explored on my own as a young child, including paper construction, scratchboard and natural materials.
Since dedicating myself to a full-time creative life in my 50s, I have wondered how things might have been different if I had chosen a course that had allowed me to express the artistic, creative being I am through and through much earlier. But I also know that I couldn’t have been the creator I am now had I started earlier. The wisdom of my experience; my world travels studying diverse cultures and wisdom traditions; the time it took to really get to know myself, to trust my artistic intuition and to free from conventional ideas of “good art” and when art is “done”; my choice in my 30s to live a full plant-based life – these are the ingredients I needed to make the creative leap. My trek as an existential sustainable creator, revealer and messenger in search of life’s beauty, magic, mysteries and meaning has been shaped by universal wisdom and a reality that everything that has happened in my life has been in its exact right timing. While people appreciate my poetry, opportunities to exhibit have essentially fallen into my lap and people buy my art, so it is clear that that 15-year-old aspiring artist just needed time to ripen.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My core creative identity is as a Cartographer of the Unseen. My mission is revealing the beauty of our seen and unseen worlds through the existential arts to illuminate life’s deeper magic, mystery and meaning.
My work has three main distinctions:
1) I am a sustainable artist, handmixing Natural Earth Paint sustainably-sourced, non-toxic powders into various mediums – oil, gouache, acrylic, watercolor;
2) I am able to perceive and make seen the “unseen” geometries of energies beyond and shaping our physical forms and experiences;
3) I am adept in both poetry and visual art, which is an unusual combination.
The discovery of Natural Earth Paint was a game-changer in my practice. Living a plant-based life, it presented a major challenge when I committed myself to artmaking full-time that I was using materials filled with plastics and toxic ingredients. I had never been able to explore oil painting because of my sensitivity to the smell of the solvents, and I was alarmed when I started painting full-time that even the minor bits of acrylics I was scraping off my palette quickly backed up my sink drain. When I found Natural Earth Paint and all of the accompanying non-toxic mediums, I was able to differentiate myself as a practitioner and advocate of sustainable, eco-friendly artmaking. My local art supplier/gallery even started carrying the full line of paints based on my use and advocacy of it and the quality of results I was getting in the paintings I was submitting to their gallery’s regular group exhibitions.
My creative process has always been informed by a natural ability I’ve had from birth to perceive energies and currents beyond visible form and to sense in advance when things will happen, which is what made me a preternatural futurist and forecaster in my early career. This perceiving always affirmed my sense that there is more to life than meets the eye. That sense has shaped my lifelong nature as a seeker and connector of dots across histories and cultures to discover the universal truths that unite us – not only with each other as peoples and cultures – but also with our natural world and all of its species and phenomena. When I create a piece of art or poem or story, I am tapping into those energies beyond the form to reveal that we are way more magical and the world is way more wondrous than we even know. Existential frontiers exist that many people still know nothing about through over-identification with the physical, visible, “evidence-based”, and my work is to apply the existential arts to open windows into the fuller world we are a part of.
As an adept in both art and poetry, I can bridge worlds and expand consciousness for more people with my Cartography of the Unseen. Artists often create through visuals because words are not the language that can express their experience. And in my experience, poets are not often visual artists because poetic language is so native to them and so shorthand in nature that other modes of communication are not needed or feel foreign. To bring the two together is magical territory. I often write poetry in response to my art (the form of poetry called “ekphrastic”) and create art in response to my poetry. This is a delicious dance that creates a rich experience of exploration, experimentation and expression that can reach both those who respond to visuals and those who respond to words. This bridging provides context and deeper understanding of the art, especially my more abstracted pieces, and concrete, visual illumination of my poetry, which is quite existential and dense in concepts of universal wisdom that can be quite abstract because they are expansive and unfamiliar.
Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?
Much of my creative world is shaped by the esoteric and creative culture books I have been led to throughout my life. I don’t orient to management or entrepreneurial thinking. My philosophy and creative mission is existential and metaphysical. I create as an act of contributing to the universe knowing the beauty of its creation, so I am totally unconventional, and I create outside the traditional art and poetry matrices of “doing business”. I do not actively seek to exhibit, but exhibitions find me. I do not create art to sell, but people are magnetized it and buy it of their own volition. I give much of my art as gifts or to fundraising events. And while I spent more than four years actively engaged in typical poetry avenues and vehicles while I was building my Poartry Project initiative, it was not for me. People ask me how I “make a living”, and I always respond that isn’t a question I ever ask; it isn’t why I do what I do; and because of that and my conscious collaboration with the living energies of reciprocity and the practice of sacred salutation, I always have what I need.
In terms of resources, the majority of my creative inspiration comes from within and from consciously perceiving and collaborating with ideas from the future sourced through meditation, spiritual perception and my purpose as a messenger and cartographer of the unseen, so external sources are secondary and highly selectively curated.
Some of my favorite catalyzing sparks have been: “Creative Gatherings: Meeting Places of Modernism” by Mary Ann Caws; the Time-Life “World of Artists” biography series, especially those of Cezanne and Van Gogh; “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future” by the Guggenheim Museum, “The City We Became” by N.K. Jemison; “The Watchmaker of Filigree Street” by Natasha Pulley; “The Penumbra Trilogy” of books by Robin Sloan; “The Black Cauldron” series by Lloyd Alexander; “The Unicorn Tapestries” by Margaret Freeman; and “The Red Lion” by Maria Szepes.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
The most rewarding aspect of being an artist/creative is the field of exploration and experimentation it provides. The dedication and space I’ve given so relatively “late” in life (which I find to be a limiting construct and false concept) to being an existential artist has freed me from a long experience of seeking to avoid failure in my earlier years of trying to fit myself into a conventional path. Raised in a highly intelligent and culture-oriented family with an expectation of excellence channeled through elite education and multiple Ivy League degrees, failing or not being good at something was the worst thing that could happen to me.
I never expected when I started delving fully into art that it would be a source of liberation from failure because I had so many externally-imposed ideas of what art should be. I had fixed ideas about which of my art was “good” (i.e., looked sophisticated or or came out exactly as I envisioned in my imagination) and which was “bad” (i.e., looked “childish”). But as I very rapidly had opportunities of solo exhibits, I have been surprised over and over again by people responding more to the pieces I often feel don’t quite hit the mark or look childish, basic or incomplete to me.
When I make art, time drops away, and I relish the technical challenges and resourceful, unexpected ways I perceive to execute a vision or project. I always feel guided in what I’m creating, and I know when I am most immersed and flowing in that collaborative guidance when the execution of a work happens in unexpected ways or takes me to completely unexpected finished products. In the space of creating a visual representation of my experiences of the universe beyond the form, I experience self-initiated expansions of realization and a kind of “original thinking” far beyond what most people usually mean by that. How my creations land have become much less important than what happens and is realized and shared along the way.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://jcwayne.com
- Instagram: @jcwayne.creator
