Living Color in Marrakech / Nicholas Wilton – Ep 57

I believe that art making is about choices — choosing what you want to keep in and what you want to get rid of. What’s crazy, is that when you’re starting out on the creative path, those choices seem important and can be scary. There’s a lot of thought that goes into it because you don’t want to mess up.

But what I’ve discovered is that as you get on down the creative path a bit more, a realization comes to you: To get somewhere artistically, it doesn’t matter so much what you choose when it comes to colors or shapes and such. The more important thing is to simply make a choice. That’s a different way of approaching art.

It makes it a lot easier.

Listen if you are interested in…

• Why you must learn to simply decide and allow Art to become your teacher [2:24]
• Scenes from the backstreets of Marrakech [6:17]
• A conversation with children in the city, and a gift of candy [22:10]
• How memories of my time in Marrakech enable my art [24:32]

Deciding may be the most important thing you do

When you’re first on the art making path, it’s natural to look outside yourself to determine if you’re going where you should be going. But it produces a lot of pressure and it makes the process of growth very, very slow. Some of why that happens is because as a beginner, you allow every little choice to matter more than it should.

But if you can get this idea into your head — that it doesn’t really matter what you decide , you’ve got to simply choose something — you discover that a lot of information, call it feedback, enables you to better say “yes” or “no” about what you’ve done. The speed at which you progress increases, and things become easier.

That simple choice moves you into a place where it’s all about the learning, the improvement, and not getting stuck. Simply making decisions enables you to get closer to what you want to make, because you’re making more decisions, which by virtue of what it is, gets you closer, faster. That’s because you’re involved in learning what it is that YOU will say “yes” and “no” to. There is no incorrect or correct answer, both provide the feedback that stimulates a reaction in you about what you should do. As you go along, you get better at discovering the pattern of your own “yes” and “no” decisions. You’re able to see your way more clearly, make better and quicker decisions, and advance in your skill incrementally.

Marrakech in Living Color

As I walk the streets of Marrakech ( a city in Morocco, Africa) I’m assailed by vivid colors; the tanning shop with leather cow hides stacked and its buckets and buckets of dyes, the photo-shoot quality green patina on a vase, a prismatic array of belts hung up to dry, the rust on metal door after metal door. Pink, orange, and magenta cover the walls, layer upon layer painted over the surface of the stucco year after year. 

Everywhere I go there are tiny side alleys, many of them ending unexpectedly like a rabbit warren. Motorbikes zoom through the streets, one after another, exploding into view without warning — and there’s not a helmet in sight. People sit randomly all along the sidewalks and streets, homeless perhaps, or maybe not. But everyone seems to be taken care of, not as disheveled as you might expect, not begging or approaching me as I walk down the street. There is a respect, a dignity for each other that is moving.

The experiences I had in Marrakesh are like art to me. The memories impact me, they optimize me for creativity by connecting me to myself. Art and life aren’t separate, they exist and support each other.

Resources & People Mentioned

• Marrakech, Morocco

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