Why Art, Novels, Photography and Journals Belong Together

Some things catch your attention.

Others refuse to give it back.

A texture in the bark of a tree.

Light breaking across water.

A photograph you can already see before you’ve taken it.

A sentence that arrives and needs to be written down.

A moment between two people that becomes the beginning of an entire scene.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because the more Luminous Luxe expands, the more obvious something becomes to me.

I never wanted to choose one way of creating.

I could have just been an artist.

I could have just been an author.

I could have kept photography somewhere else. Writing somewhere else. Journals somewhere else again.

But I never wanted a creative life that required me to cut pieces of myself away just so it could be easier to define.

I wanted the best of all of it.

So I took it.

Creativity Doesn’t Always Choose One Language

There is something fascinating about the moment before something becomes something.

Before the canvas.

Before the photograph.

Before the page.

Before the chapter.

You notice.

That comes first.

Sometimes I see texture and immediately begin thinking about paint. The depth. The movement. What would happen if I dragged a palette knife through it differently, changed the scale, pushed one colour against another.

Sometimes I see something and reach for my camera.

Sometimes it becomes a sentence.

Sometimes it follows me around until I realise it belongs somewhere entirely different.

That is one of the things I love most about creating.

The fascination comes first.

The form follows.

The Same Eye Sees All of It

There is a moment in the chapter of The Artist I’m writing now where Severin is walking beside the lake with Rhett.

She stops at a tree.

Not because anything dramatic has happened.

Because she sees it.

The exposed roots. Deep ridges of bark. Small stones caught between them. Moss growing through the narrow spaces.

Rhett sees the tree.

Then Severin begins showing him what she sees.

The texture.

The shapes.

The way everything has formed together.

And suddenly he looks again.

I loved writing that moment because I know it.

The same eye that notices texture for a painting notices an image worth photographing.

It notices the way somebody looks at somebody else for half a second too long.

It notices the detail that makes a fictional room feel inhabited.

It catches a thought and thinks, I need to write that down.

Different mediums.

The same creative world.

They all begin with the same instinct:

Look at this.

I Never Wanted to Choose

There can be an expectation that creativity should become singular.

Choose the thing.

Become known for the thing.

Stay inside the thing.

But that was never the life I wanted to create.

I love standing in front of a canvas with paint on my hands.

I love disappearing into a novel and realising hours have passed.

I love taking photographs.

I love creating journals and watching words become physical objects someone can hold in her hands.

And I love that one doesn’t have to compete with another.

One can feed another.

A photograph can hold a place.

A painting can hold texture.

A journal can hold a thought.

A novel can hold an entire world.

Why would I want less of that?

One Creative World

Luminous Luxe was never built by deciding what belonged together.

It was built by following what I couldn’t stop creating.

That is why an original painting can sit beside a novel.

Why photography belongs beside journals.

Why words belong beside texture and colour.

Why The Artist feels completely at home inside the same world as the artwork that existed before I ever began writing Severin and Rhett.

They aren’t separate versions of creativity that somehow ended up beneath the same name.

They are different expressions of the same appetite.

To notice.

To feel.

To create.

To take something that caught my attention and give it somewhere to live.

Sometimes I know immediately what form it will take.

Sometimes I don’t.

And perhaps that is part of the pleasure.

Something catches my attention.

I follow it.

And I get to find out what it becomes.

Art. Photography. Journals. Novels.

I never wanted to choose between them.

I wanted the whole creative world.

And that is exactly what Luminous Luxe became.