In the creative industry, being able to articulate yourself is absolutely vital in being productive and staying engaged with your peers. The trouble is, although communication on surface level is done through written and spoken word – really, in a creative working environment it also relies on a wealth of general and granular artistic understanding as well.
This can be achieved through a series of ways; education, conversation, and pastime participation. Ideally, you want a bit of all of them.
Having formal training in specific formats allows you to appreciate colleagues’ compositions and understand the difficulties in asking for seemingly simple or mundane changes in pieces of work. Conversation allows you to stay on top of emerging trends, art styles, and artists. Practising different mediums in your spare time means you gain a hands-on perspective that some others simply may not have, and your own unique experience with that specific practice will also inform your artistic direction in other practices.
Although we live in an era where it is perfectly okay to be a specialist artisan who homes in on their craft, it makes you inaccessible to many people if you become too specific – keeping an eye on other artistic mediums helps you stay accessible and open to broader levels of discussion than you might otherwise be.
Keeping yourself open to different mediums and art practices has other advantages too: You gain the ability to use your creative energy in a broad range of different art styles, avoiding certain creative blocks due to the flexibility of creative communication you have on hand. You become more of an asset to your team if you have an understanding of disciplines which may go beyond your job title or specialisation, and you can bring new perspectives or techniques that may challenge traditional practices in certain processes your peers may rely on. Oftentimes, innovation is born on these new takes.
Historically, the most influential and successful artists in the world have been those recognised as ‘the universal man’, or ‘Uomo Universale’. The greatest example of this is embodied in Da Vinci; a cartographer, painter, composer, sculptor, architect, scientist; quite frankly an endless list of disciplines. Today this is something young creatives should strive to achieve – gain a broad understanding and strong skill level in a variety of related disciplines to open yourself to the widest range of discourse you possibly can. You don’t need to know everything about any topic, just enough to start a conversation – and who knows where that may lead.