Why the best work has always been made by people who couldn’t help themselves.
There’s a particular kind of creative courage that has nothing to do with era or medium. You find it in a 17th-century Dutch painter who spent months on the quality of light falling across a simple domestic interior. You find it in a film composer who, after decades of defining what orchestral cinema sounds like, sits down with a young British singer-songwriter and makes something that belongs to neither of their worlds, and is better for it.
I’m talking about RAYE and Hans Zimmer recording Click Clack Symphony together. If you haven’t heard it, stop here and listen. It’ll tell you more about what I’m trying to say than anything else I could write.
Excellence doesn’t expire
When people hear that my work is heritage-inspired, they sometimes imagine I spend my days leafing through dusty archives. The truth is more specific than that, and I think more interesting.
What draws me to the past isn’t age. It’s the standard. The makers I return to, in art, in architecture, in textiles, in design, in music, were the ones who were ahead of their time. Not comfortably ahead, either. Uncomfortably so. The kind of ahead that gets you misread, overlooked, or quietly regarded as a little strange by your contemporaries.
And yet they kept going. Because the work wanted to be made.
That’s the thread I’m following when I look to the old masters. Not “what did people do then” but “who was brave enough, in their own moment, to do what hadn’t been done yet.” That quality, creative conviction carried further than convention allows, doesn’t age. It’s as alive in a centuries-old textile as it is in a collaboration that dropped last year.
Creativity isn’t a profession. It’s our nature.
Julia Cameron, whose book The Artist’s Way remains one of the most honest things ever written about the creative life, puts it simply:
“We are intended to create. As gray, as controlled, as dreamless as we may strive to be, the fire of our dreams will not stay buried.”
I’ve returned to that line more times than I can count. Because it’s not really about art. It’s about what happens when you try to live without it. The doodle in the margin of a boring meeting. The flowers planted in twice the quantity you need. The soup improved on a Tuesday for no particular reason.
Creativity isn’t reserved for people with studios and commissions. It’s the thing that keeps us alive inside, the insistence of our own nature pushing through whatever we’ve piled on top of it.
What I’ve come to believe, through my own practice, is that when we take that impulse seriously, when we stop treating it as a luxury and start treating it as information, something shifts. The work gets braver. The choices get more specific. You stop asking “Is this appropriate?” and start asking “Is this true for me at this moment?”
What this means in practice
When I’m deep in a design, I’m not in silence. I’m listening to music, but not casually. I’m drawn to musicians who have that same quality I look for in the masters: the ones whose peers aspire to them, whose work carries a creative conviction that outlasts the moment it arrived in. RAYE and Hans Zimmer recording together is exactly that. Two worlds, completely distinct, made more vivid by the tension between them, which is, come to think of it, exactly what I’m trying to do with every pattern I make.
The medium changes. The courage is the same.
A place to start
If any of this resonates, if you recognise that fire Cameron describes, however buried it currently feels, I’d gently point you toward The Artist’s Way. It’s available new, and in most secondhand book markets too. It has a way of finding the people who need it.
And if creativity, design, or the philosophy behind this kind of work is something you’d like to explore further, I’d love to continue the conversation. You’ll find me on Instagram at @danielegaube, come and say hello.