"I'm not like you. I could never do that." Someone said this to me during a studio visit, and it broke my heart a little - because I don't think audacity is a type of person. I think it's the most important creative skill there is, and anyone can learn it.
This one's for anyone who's ever counted themselves out before they've even had a go.
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Monsters and jewellery and butt stuff
At some point last year I had a woman come to the studio. She wanted some business advice, and we were talking about all the different things that she could do. I was giving her a lot of suggestions for things that she could try, and at one point she got very, very flustered. She looked around the studio and she said, "I'm not like you. I can't do monsters and jewellery and butt stuff." And it was funny, we laughed, and then she left and I never heard from her again.
I found out later from a mutual acquaintance that she'd been intimidated, and that really, really broke my heart. Because I think what she was reacting to was not me. It was seeing somebody who was comfortable taking up space in lots of different directions, and feeling like that was something that wasn't available to her because she wasn't that sort of person.
And this video is kind of what I would say to her if she ever came back. Because I think that taking up space and being audacious is not a sort of person. It's a skill that, like any skill, can be learned and honed and developed over time.
So that's what we're talking about today. If you're new here, welcome, welcome, welcome to the Haus of Cats. My name is Zuzu. I am an audacious art monster, a glittery bitch and a certified weirdo. And on this channel, we talk about art, obviously, but we also talk about books and clothes and having the audacity to take up space, especially if you feel like the world wasn't made for you.
And while we talk today, I'm just gonna be swatching out some art materials. I am planning a two-week at-home painting retreat in November, and I have a bunch of materials that I've just dug out of a drawer which aren't my usual colours, but I just want to see what I've got and have a little swatch.
The most important creative skill
So when you call somebody audacious, you know, "the audacity", "how could you have the audacity to do something like that?", it's often meant in a sort of pejorative way. Like it's a "how dare she" kind of thing. How dare they?
But what if audacity was actually the most important creative skill that you can develop? I think it is. And I think it kind of falls into four key areas.
1. The audacity to believe in yourself
The first of which is having the audacity to believe in yourself. Having the audacity to please yourself first, or to trust in your own judgement, your own sense of self, your own creative vision. Trusting in your own taste and being able to delight yourself.
I just don't think there's any point in making creative work if it's not work that you're super stoked about. Like, you're super excited to make, to think about, to talk about, to share with the world. It has to feel delicious to you, even if nobody else on the planet understands it.
I think that's part of the curse of being somebody who has a singular vision: people aren't gonna understand it. People aren't gonna necessarily believe in what you're doing straight off the bat. And the truth of the matter is that no one's gonna give a shit about whatever it is that you're making unless you do. Your response to it almost has to be dialled up to 11 before anybody else is prepared to even give it a second look.
We're so conditioned to think that's selfish, but I think when it comes to being an artist, you have to be selfish. You're literally translating the world through your own eyes, through your own experience, in order to connect with other people. And if that's tainted in any way by the opinions of others in the creation process, then you've already kind of lost the battle, really, I think.
That's not to say that it's not worth getting feedback and critiques and stuff, but your vision is your vision. You have to understand what's valuable feedback and what's just, "Okay, well, that's how somebody else would have done it," but that's not how you want to do it.
That phrase, like, "I'm not like you," or "I couldn't possibly," or "That's just not who I am" – that's what that sounds like when you don't believe this is available to you.
2. The audacity to trust you can figure anything out
Secondly, we have the audacity to trust that you can figure out how to do literally anything. It does take a bit of audacity to look at a problem, to look at whatever, and be like, "I have no idea how to do that, but I can figure it out." And I think that, again, it comes from experience. It comes from trying stuff out and having a bank of "Oh, well, I figured out that, I can figure out this" – having that experience sort of built up behind you in a big evidential pile.
And her, you know, "Oh, I can't do monsters and jewellery and butt stuff" – I get that from people so often. They're like, "Oh, I'd love to do that, but I don't know how to make a puppet. I don't know how to build a website. I don't know how to do business strategy. I don't know how to set up a mailing list." And that's… sure, you don't know right now. But I didn't know how to do any of those things before I actually did them. And nobody knows how to do any of those things before they actually do them.
We live in this incredible age of information where literally anything you want to do is figure-outable, you know? There's so much knowledge and information on the internet for free. But it's fear in fancy trousers, you know? It's just like, "Oh, I'm scared that I can't be the sort of person who can do that sort of thing."
The bold part, the audacious part, isn't knowing how and then doing something. The audacious part comes from, like, "I have no idea how to do this, but I'm gonna figure it out and I'm just gonna start. And I'm gonna trust that I will be resourceful and I will figure it out. I'll cross each bridge as I come to it and it'll be great. We can do this."
And I think, like believing in yourself, the more you do it and the more you can practise in sort of low-stakes ways, the easier it gets over time. I guess you do have to be comfortable with a certain amount of discomfort. Willingness to look stupid, willingness to be a beginner. But that's where the magic is, you know? That's where you get to interesting places.
And sometimes things really surprise you. Like when my friend Jenny and I sat down to make a puppet – there's a whole video on that on my channel – we had no idea how to make a puppet. We found some random tutorial online, which we sort of half followed to get us started, but most of it we were just figuring it out. Like, what happens if we do this? What happens if we do this? And in an afternoon, we both had serviceable puppets. Are they the best puppets in the world? Absolutely not. Are they puppets that we could piss around and have fun with? Yes, they are. Are we gonna make more puppets? Fuck yeah.
And the figuring it out was sort of part of the fun. And it adds to my personal pile and Jenny's pile of, like, "Oh, I didn't know how to do that, and then I figured it out, and now I know how to do that." It's evidence for both of us that we are the types of people who can figure stuff out.
And all the failures and stuff, that all counts too. It's all learning and it's all data. So even if you try and do something and you can't figure it out, even not being able to figure it out is helping you, you know, because it's got you further. The next time you try it, you'll know not to go down that road. You'll know to make different choices.
I think that's why we're all here, really: just to learn as much as we possibly can and have a lovely time as much as humanly possible. And learning new things is one of the great joys of life that we shouldn't deny ourselves because we might look like idiots while we're figuring it out. I don't know how many times I've said "figure it out" in this video, but it's a lot.
There's a lot of stuff in my career that I have done which I look back on now and I'm like, "Oh God, I can't believe that I put that out in the world for other people to see." My first book is so incredibly cringey that I almost can't bear for people to know it exists in the world. It's so earnest and it's so cringey, and the art in it – most of it is very bad to my eye now. My taste has changed; my skills have developed, obviously, over 15 years. But the fact is that I made that book and I published that book and I put it out into the world, and it was my first step to being an artist in public. My illustration career was launched off the back of that book, and I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now if I hadn't have taken the leap and published that book. I just wouldn't.
Doing stuff that's awful and not perfect and putting it out into the world anyway, and trusting that it's just part of this evolutionary process – I think that's a really good skill to develop.
3. The audacity to do things differently
Now, the third kind of audacity, the third area in which you can be audacious, is having the audacity to do things differently: to zig while everybody else is zagging. And I think this is probably what I'm most well known for in my corner of the internet.
I mean, for a start, I'm an artist and I'm not on Instagram, which is unusual. I have also eschewed traditional website design to build a beautiful labyrinthine adventure to showcase my work and my ideas. I do this YouTube channel as an artist, but I don't really show my process. There's another video on this channel that you can see called You Don't Owe Anyone Your Creative Process. I don't like to show people my process when I'm making my important work, because in order for me to make my best work, I need to be in the process and I need to not be observed. So I make this channel and I talk about my ideas, and I talk about creativity, and I talk about the compost that goes into the work that I make and where it comes from intellectually, rather than how it is produced on the page.
Also, when I market my artwork, I don't do the standard thing. I make more art. So I've marketed a collection by doing a photo essay scavenger hunt across Copenhagen. And recently you'll have seen on my channel the Lights in the Darkness campaign, which was an enactment of this kind of occulty, ritualistic thing. And when I was doing the marketing for the zine that I made, Send Nudes, which was part of Things That Men Have Said to Me Instead of Hello, we did a naked photo shoot. All of these things are different from how you're supposed to market and sell art.
And for me, there's no real distinction. I feel like marketing is just another medium for creativity, and it makes me happy, and I get excited about coming up with crazy campaign ideas. And I would much rather do that than, you know, your classic Instagram posts and email sequences and all the rest of it. I want people to lean in, not switch off, when I share my work for sale.
And the question that I always ask myself about anything – and I think partly being autistic comes into play here. I do think that is a big factor in my own personal journey and my own personal sort of methodology. Because I'm always thinking, like, "Why do things have to be done like that?" I pay attention to my own reactions and responses to the way other people do things, and what brings me delight.
I'm constantly, constantly on the hunt for delight, whether I'm delighting myself or looking for other people to delight me: art to delight me, media to delight me, all of it. I just want to be delighted. I want to be surprised. I want to go, "Fuck, I've never seen that before." And that's what I try and do for you as well: to bring things to the table that maybe haven't been seen before, or haven't been seen in this context.
4. The audacity to ask for impossible things
So that was the audacity to do things differently. And then the fourth part of the equation is the audacity to ask for impossible things.
Asking for impossible things is one of my absolute favourite hobbies, because the wonderful thing about asking for impossible things is that sometimes people say yes. Sometimes you actually get the thing that you thought was impossible. And you know, when you never get impossible things is when you don't ask for them.
This is something that I've cultivated over many, many years. I suppose it's a bit like rejection therapy – I don't know if you've heard of that. If you pitch to a hundred things, if you aim to get a hundred rejections, you'll end up with like 80 rejections and 10 incredible opportunities. So I suppose it's a bit like that. But really it's just a case of having the audacity to be able to say, like, "Yeah, why not? Why not me? I'm just going to go for that thing anyway." I'm just going to, I don't know, pitch for that opportunity, or go for that grant, or put myself forward to speak on a panel at the UN, even though I'm absolutely shitting my pants about it – which is an actual thing which is happening to me.
I think the trouble is – and I used to do this all the time – most people self-reject before anybody else has a chance to reject them. So they will tell themselves all the reasons why something is impossible for them, all the reasons why this thing won't happen. All the reasons why, "Oh, you know, I can't send off my book proposal," or "I can't pitch for that exhibition," or "I can't go on that podcast or be on that TV show." And then, before anybody else has a chance to tell them no, they've already told themselves no, and they've already just shut themselves down and made themselves small.
It drives me crazy. It drives me crazy when I do it to myself, because, you know, audacity is a muscle. If you're not using it all the time, it will atrophy. So there are periods where I'm like, "Oh shit, I need to do something scary," and my audacity muscle has atrophied somewhat. But I'm better these days at catching it before it happens and just being like, "No, this is part of the job. You never know. You might get a yes. It might lead you to something else." Even a no – I love a good no, because quite often a good no comes with an alternative, and often it's a "not yet", not an outright "never".
How the four audacities build on each other
Each one of these four elements of audaciousness build on each other. You have to start with truly believing in yourself and trusting that your vision is valid, even if you're the only person at the moment who thinks that it's valid. You have to trust that you will figure out all the parts that you don't know how to do. You will find a way to make that happen, and to learn, or to get help, or you'll get there. You will figure it out. You are resourceful. You're brilliant. You can do this.
And that then gives you the audacity to do things differently. Because if you trust in your own vision, and you trust that you will figure it out when you're going down an uncharted path, then it's much easier to go, "Okay, well, everybody else is doing this. So, you know what? I think I'm gonna try this over here and just, you know, fuck around, find out, see what happens."
And then that gives you the audacity to ask for impossible things. Because what you've done by building those first three is you sort of make yourself remarkable, in the classical sense of the word, in that you are worthy of being talked about. You're worthy of being remarked on, which tends to make impossible doors open for you a lot more easily. Because if you are being true to yourself, if you're following this path, you then have something really, really interesting and unusual to talk about that nobody else is talking about. And that makes you the sort of person that people want to give opportunities to.
Audacious doesn't mean fearless
One little caveat before I wrap this up. It doesn't mean that once audacious, always audacious. It doesn't mean that you never wobble or that you never get scared. I spent half of my life fucking petrified about everything. I am such a scaredy cat. But that doesn't stop me from putting myself forward in service of my creative vision, because I believe in my creative vision so wholeheartedly that I know that I just need to get out of the way. I just need to let my sort of emotional hang-ups and baggage and self-confidence and all the rest of it – that just needs to stand aside and let the creative juggernaut through.
You don't have to be like me
It really made me sad to hear that this woman was intimidated, because that's never, ever the impression that I want to leave anybody with. What I want to leave people with is the idea that they can do whatever they want. I mean, obviously there are limitations – there are systemic limitations, there are personal limitations, there's all sorts of crap in our way. But I genuinely believe that you don't have to be one of the things in your way.
And I would really love to make people feel like, "Oh wow, I can do this." You don't have to be like me. You don't have to do monsters and jewellery and butt stuff, but you have to be like you. And you have to believe that that's good enough. You have to believe that that's worthy, you know?
I hope that people see me and they aren't intimidated, and they don't think, "Oh my god, I could never do that." I hope they realise, "Well, she can do it, so why can't I?" This fucking autistic ADHD crippled spoonie who grew up in abject poverty and lives in a country where she doesn't even speak the language – if she can carve out a little creative career for herself, then there is hope for somebody else.
So that's it! I hope this was useful! Thank you so, so much for watching. If you've enjoyed this video, please subscribe. I hope you'll enjoy my other videos. I make a lot of videos on a lot of different topics, but these sort of philosophies and things are at the core of everything that I do. So I hope that you will enjoy that and stick around, and I will see you in the next one. Bye.
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