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One of the main things that I always want to say to people that remember that those times when you were four, five and six years old and you knew exactly how to be creative effortlessly you still have that inside you yes it can't go anywhere.
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How could it go somewhere?
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It's not if people feel like oh, I've lost it, you've just misplaced it you.
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You've buried it underneath.
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Buried it, yeah, it's there, it's there, it's always there.
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Hey, it's Maddox, and I'm here with my co-host, dwight, and we are the Connections and Community Guys.
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And yes, of course, you're listening to the For the Love of Creatives podcast.
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Today, our featured guest is Patrick Williams, and we're excited to have him on today because we've read a little bit about his bio and seems like he has an absolutely fascinating story and we believe he's going to impart some real wisdom.
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So, patrick, welcome to the podcast.
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Happy to be here.
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Thanks, Maddox, Thanks Dwight.
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Glad to have you, glad to have you.
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So I'm going to turn it over to you and let you tell the audience a little bit about you.
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Sure, thank you.
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I'm Patrick Williams.
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I'm a lifelong artist.
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I've had many hats, including this one, throughout my life.
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As most artists, most people into creatives, are people with many backgrounds, so to speak, and many avenues.
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I've driven a school bus.
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I taught ice skating when I was in high school not for money, though, it was purely as a community service, so to speak.
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Let's see, I was self-taught.
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I taught myself how to draw and paint at home and then went off to college and got a BFA in painting.
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I had a wild, crazy, amazing painting professor named Richard Tricky.
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He is no longer on this planet, as far as I know, longer on this planet, as far as I know and he was a major person in my life to accelerate my vision and drive and passion.
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He gave me a studio when I was a sophomore undergraduate, which is essentially unheard of when there were graduate students on a waiting list.
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So he saw something in me and it was very powerful.
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After college I had, like I said, many jobs.
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I've worked in daycare and community centers and I've done private.
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I was a painter of houses also.
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Lots of artistic visual artists also have had backgrounds in painting interiors and exteriors of houses.
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One way, one thing is that we could do it faster than most other people because we're painting all the time.
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That's my theory of why that happens, and in some ways it's easy for us to paint.
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So I did that.
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I got married later in life.
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My wife and I met in 1999 at a show I was having in Omaha, nebraska, which is we're living back here now.
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And then we started a nonprofit we've had for 25 years now, called Satori Institute.
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It's an arts education, investigative, journalist, healing, research Organization and we've gone through all that.
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That organization has had many incarnations, so to speak, as we've been indifferent.
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We've lived in Chicago for years and and then in Boulder for years and now we're here in Omaha.
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What else?
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I've made a lot of paintings in my life.
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I've always had a studio wherever I've lived, so that has been a constant.
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I'm passionate about drawing also and art history, and that maybe sums up the skimming of stone across the pond of my life.
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That's a little snippet of who I am.
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Yeah, it's great.
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I can't wait to dive in a little bit deeper.
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Sure, why don't you tell us how it all got started?
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I mean that very, very I know, as I read a little bit of your stuff.
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You talk about how children come into the world with the superpower of creativity.
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When did you discover your superpower?
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Yeah, that's a good question.
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I felt like I always knew about it, specifically about drawing.
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You know, when we're little we have crayons and pencils and I was always doodling and drawing.
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My wife and I just had a conversation about going to church and the two things I remember as a little boy of being in church is the painting on the wall of this little tiny Methodist brick building church in Omaha, nebraska, and drawing in the whatever that's called the schedule for the day for the service.
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So I would just draw everywhere on those things and I kind of wish my mom would have kept all those.
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It would have been a cool show to have dozens and dozens of these little drawings that I did on those little pamphlets that were given out every Sunday the schedule of what hymns we're going to read and when we're going to do whatever we're supposed to be doing during the Sunday sermon.
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I agree, that would have been way cool.
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Yeah, yeah, super cool.
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I can remember them in a way of what was kind of going through my head.
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But back to the subject.
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I was drawing all the time and then in the TEDx talk I tell the story of how those two things in my life really came together and it wasn't until I was accepted to do the talk, when I was thinking I would tell two stories to people.
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I would tell stories about how I started drawing around age 10, but then I would tell another story about what happened with my woods.
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And and it wasn't until I started writing the TEDx talk that I realized oh that's, they were integral.
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One one spark literally sparked the other, that I had to put all that, that grief and that sorrow and that heartache of losing those trees, into something.
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And the blessing was that I had drawing to put it into.
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So after that point I really started focusing at looking at something and attempting to draw it.
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We had whatever I was using for paper you know, probably typing paper back in the day.
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The two of you know totally what I'm talking about.
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Sometimes I'm with younger folks.
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They're like typing paper.
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So I would you know totally what I'm talking about.
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Sometimes I'm with younger folks.
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They're like typing paper.
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So I would you know, have typing paper and number two pencils or my crayons, and that's what I would.
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I was constantly trying to figure out how to make things appear on a piece of paper as they appeared on the table or whatever I was looking at, and then also in school, I was always drawing.
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I was making up characters and animals.
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I was into dinosaurs, of course, like so many of us were, and I would give these creatures a Latin-sounding name.
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So I was exploring all kinds of imaginal directions as a kid, as a young kid, from 10 until I started painting about 14 or 15.
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I made my first stretched canvas at 15, I made my first stretched canvas at 15 and then it just accelerated from there.
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I made 20 or 30 paintings in high school that were 30 by 40 inches and some 6 feet by 3 feet.
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So they were unusual adventures, creatively, for a teenager.
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Usually, when someone starts painting, even as an adult, they'll pick, you know, like an eight and a half by 11 canvas to work on, or maybe 10 by 12 or whatever.
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It's a.
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It's a.
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It's usually an incremental baby step, baby step process, but I just dove in, you know, once I the.
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I just didn't have that, that uh ceiling for myself with respect to what I could do for some reason.
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Uh, I could do for some reason.
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It's a blessing for sure.
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And I just I kept, I just never stopped from that early age.
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Yeah, it sounds like you had a lot of encouragement with the artistic pursuits.
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I mean the path from drawing on the programs at church to having access to be able to work with these large canvases, to getting the BFA.
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I mean your experience sounds quite unusual.
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What did you have, or who did you have, that was encouraging these pursuits, when the more common story that we seem to hear is that people are told by their parents and caregivers that they need to do something very practical?
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Yeah, well, I certainly got the practical talk, but my mom was very encouraging.
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She supplied me with drawing pads and we had number two pencils everywhere, so I received the bare minimum, but that was enough to keep my spark going.
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And then in sixth grade I had an experience with right off the bat.
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In sixth grade we moved from elementary school to the junior high school in sixth grade and I think it was the first year they tried that in our school system back in the day.
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And when that started, there was an after-school program called Challenge and literally all my friends were in Challenge and I wanted to be in challenge and I finally got up the nerve to ask my teacher I want to be in challenge, how can that happen?
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And she said, well, you can't be in challenge.
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That's only for the gifted kids and they get all good grades and your grades aren't too hot.
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You know they're, they're, you're in the lowest reading group and the lowest, uh, math group.
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And I said, well, I want to be in challenge.
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You know, I had it was like one I had one direction that I wanted to go and it was to be with my friends, because they were telling me all these cool things that they were doing.
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They were going on field trips, they were watching documentaries, it was.
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I wanted to do that and she said, well, I don't think that's really possible.
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And then I, you know, I was just persistent and then, yeah, it was, it was amazing.
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uh, I was super shy when I was little and she said, well, you would have to get better in every subject.
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And I said, okay, how do I do that?
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And she said, well, you'd have to study.
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And I said, well, how do you do that?
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And before that I was not interested in school much at all, except they supplied me with manila paper and crayons.
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I could draw that's pretty much or be outside that's, those were my two interests.
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So she told me how to how to study and how to bring my grades up, and I applied myself and within like two or three weeks, you know, I was getting a hundred on spelling and a hundred on social studies and I had jumped into the highest math group and the highest reading group, and so I got into challenge and what was funny?
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She lit a fire under your ass, didn't she?
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Yeah, totally.
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It was two fires.
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I had a fire and she was like, okay, if you want to do this, here's how to do it.
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And I don't think she thought that I was going to be able to do something like that.
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But what was interesting is that once I got into the class I realized that these are my tribe right, and part of it was that my mother had, and part of it was that my mother had, we had my best friend's father had.
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He always had some side job going on.
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And that year you know it was a couple years before I was in sixth grade he sold us a World Book Encyclopedia set and it was like, oh, I love it.
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I would just pick up one of the letters and flip through it and just read all kinds of amazing things.
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So it wasn't until I was in challenge that I realized that all of that time I spent with, you know, letter A or letter F or whatever was adding to my this knowledge that I didn't really think I I had.
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But it was so useful amongst the my tribe, so to speak.
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And it wasn't until then that I I had this, uh, awareness that there was a an intellectual side of of being on the planet.
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You know, for me it was just art and play, which is, you know, in some ways, what I do now.
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But there's also this it just turned on a switch for me that I started thinking about things and reading more thoroughly and paying attention to how things work, how relationships work.
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It was a vital part of my development.
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It all sounds very serendipitous.
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It does.
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But there's a through line that is so remarkable and we can't see it necessarily until we're in the moment and we have that choice.
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And somehow for me right now, I think back at who I was when I was whatever 11, in sixth grade, somewhere in there, somewhere in there, uh, what, what, what fire did I connect with?
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That got me up in front of the teacher during lunch.
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You know, all the other kids were at lunch and I was just.
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I stood, I was, I'm sure I was nervous as a saw hell, but yeah, that was.
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It just clicked, that's great.
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that really blows me away is that you found your tribe at such an early age.
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Oh my God, yeah.
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You're so blessed, I feel, feel blessed yeah.
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Yeah, you know it's funny as you.
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You talk about that, that process of curiosity.
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I'm thinking the the equivalent today would be for a young person who went to the random page on Wikipedia.
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You know it has a feature where you can just show me something random, totally.
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Or the sense of.
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I remember when Wikipedia came out and I was speaking to a, he's a millennial or maybe a little older, whatever, whatever we call generation X, maybe is that before millennials but he said okay.
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He said I just Wikipedia is amazing, I just lose myself inside of it for hours.
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And that's exactly.
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You were totally correct, right?
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That's exactly what I did with the analog version of Wikipedia.
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You know the actual encyclopedia.
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I would just get lost in it.
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I'd get lost in the dictionary.
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I would ask my mom for you know what does this word mean?
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And she said go look it up.
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I said I don't want to look it up, I know, you know what does this word mean?
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And she said go look it up.
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I said I don't want to look it up, I know, you know what it means.
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And she said you'll remember it better if you go look it up.
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And I'd go look it up and then I'd get, I'd discover all kinds of words and flip the page and just totally ran in the serendipitous quality of what creativity really is.
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It is a large part of bumping into things and being amazed Like wow, that's super cool, I never thought of that before.
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And then that often links to something that you're working on.
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You're working on, yeah, whether it's, whether it's an artistic piece or or something for a career or a job, or or a relationship, whatever it might be, but that's how that's.
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One of the blessings of creativity is that we're our curiosity nudges us in directions that help help.
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There's lots of overlap.
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Totally, I've just been, really recently, broadened into an understanding of creativity that I didn't have.
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You know, I've been creative all my life not incredibly artistic, I mean, I could decorate the house for Christmas, you know.
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Or I was in the beauty industry for 40 years makeup artist, hairdresser, colorist, wardrobe but I've just come to realize that creativity, I mean it is in every breath that we take Absolutely.
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In every breath that we take Absolutely.
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You know, I've come to really, really appreciate how we get to create our life any way we want to create it.
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Right Totally.
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It's like an ongoing piece of art.
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It is like an ongoing no-transcript creating my life until just recently.
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It's just like the dots got connected in a way that just kind of you know, wow, I just see it from a different perspective now and now, my God, creativity is not some frivolous thing that we get the privilege of doing, it's like a necessary it's like a necessary, it's like friggin oxygen.
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No, totally, yeah, I, I, I put it with the, exactly that oxygen, uh, water, food and creativity, you know we need, you know, with whatever the other ones are clothing, uh, a dwelling, the necessities, you, the absolute necessities of life.
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I mean, in some ways we lived for millennia without a house or home.
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But well, we had a home, but we didn't have a house.
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Or we had a cave, maybe a cave, I, I, I'm not sure about that.
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I know we did hang out in caves, but I think we did other things too to make a home.
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But anyway, so I, creativity is an essential to living and we, we do it.
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We, I, I have divided it up into a general creativity, conventional creativity and specialized creativity.
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So we do.
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General creativity is when I chose this shirt, you know, two hours ago, to have for the podcast.
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You know, those are little tiny creative acts and, maddox, you were describing something that is, I think.
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And, maddox, you were describing something that is, I think even it's between conventional and specialized, when you were talking about hair, makeup, costuming.
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All of those things are, I would say, more in the specialized area of creativity than in the conventional.
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Conventional, for me is how an engineer is creative in designing and building a bridge, or when people are coming up with their ideas.
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How to when?
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When the two of you were conceiving of the podcast.
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You were using general creativity and a lot of conventional creativity that we have access to as human beings all the time.
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One of my favorite examples, of which I want to thank you're talking about conventional creativity is, I always laughingly say, I have this really special way that I fold the potato chip bag down so the chips stay fresh, and it was a form of creativity for me.
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I really spent time playing with the bag until I found, rolling it down, a way that they stay fresh for an extended period of time and people chuckle when I say that.
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It's true, and that's a perfect example of how we're able to tap into the spectrum of creativity that goes all the way from just the tiniest creative spark all the way up to the conflagration of total, amazing creative energies.
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I'm going to turn my other monitor on for a quick second, because there was something else that I saw in your profile that I wanted to ask about.
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This puts a lot of bright light on my face, so I'll turn it right off.
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Two other terms that I would love to hear a little bit more about.
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One of them was creative colonization and the other one was creative collapse.
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Yeah, those are.
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So I started.
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I started working on a manuscript more years ago than I want to admit that it's slowly getting there Within the idea of writing about creativity.
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I sat with myself and reflected on everything that I could tune into what I knew about creativity, into what I knew about creativity from the, the natural qualities that I had when I was, you know, three, four or five years old, that we all have, and then the what caused me to stick with it.
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When I saw I worked in education for a lot of years specifically with the arts, and I could see how some children kept going and some children stopped.
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Some children had the glass half full, so to speak, of their creative.
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Some kids it was full and overflowing.
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Some kids the glass was empty.
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But that was very curious to me.
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So after a lot of contemplation I came up with creative colonization, which means we are all natural in how we relate to creativity from when we're children.
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Children, there's no off switch on creativity for them.
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They are no questioning it either.
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One person sort of says well, I am.
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Colonization is what happens in between.
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It's when our natural creative nature is slowly pulled away from us and other things are put in its place, as in a culture where a colonizer comes in and introduces new language, new rituals, new religions, new books, whatever it might be.
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A whole new culture is pushed onto, the people being colonized, and I believe it's the same way with children.
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With respect to creativity, it's pushed out.
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It's a really strong description, but I think it really gets people to pay attention that we were all in different ways colonized with respect to our creativity.
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Some of it is instrumental or musical, vocal colonization, some of it is writing, some of it's reading, some of it's singing.
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I said that.
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Some of it's visual arts, so it's not just one For me.
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I was strong, I didn't lose, I wasn't colonized visually in my visual arts, but I was colonized with respect to music.
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I had no idea and I was terrified of music.
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I love music now, but I had to go through my restoration of that later on in my life.
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So creative colonization happens at home, in school situations, situations and in the wide world in, and it can be at different levels and and the colonization can be, can be direct or indirect, so it literally can be someone a teacher or a parent or a relative or somebody in a class that you're taking in the community that says that's not how you draw a tree, from an adult who has their own colonization and collapse and is being triggered by a little kid that has drawn a really great looking tree.
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But something comes out and that's malicious.
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Sometimes it's innocent, it's like maybe that's not how to draw a house or a fence or a bird or whatever it might be, but the child takes that really intensely, it makes an impression on them and after enough impressions then a kind of collapse happens.
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That's why I call it creative collapse.
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The music for me just collapsed that.
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The music for me just collapsed After third grade with those little flutes, the whatever I can't think of the name Recorders.
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Yeah, the recorders.
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I had no idea I was barely, I was just trying to, I was still figuring out the alphabet and how to read.
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Yeah, and when she put the teacher put up the scale and started drawing the notes, like what is going on, and those notes were connected to my fingers and a sound.
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I was not ready for that right.
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So I just collapsed.
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But with art, with visual arts, I never lost it.
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I was always filling my glass up more and more and more and more.
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So creative collapse happens when an event it could be a specific moment when a teacher says you can your heart and you reconnect with it.
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In between, that moment when our hearts are reopened and we restore our creativity after creative collapse, I call that the creative void, and that may last a week, a month, a year.
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It may last a week a month, a year, or it might last from third grade until someone is 95.
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And they have a very special moment and say you know what?
