Protecting Boredom: A Gateway for Creativity

An inner-view on co-creativity with Alexandra Morosco and Connor Ryan

Currach’s Last Wave, bronze sculpture by Alexandra Morosco

Welcome to inner-views, a seasonal series of conversations with artists, thought leaders, and practitioners whose work is featured in the Rumored Woman Book Series. These conversations explore the correspondence between our inner and outer worlds.

Morgan: Welcome, Alexandra, and Connor. I’m enjoying seeing your studio walls covered in art. Thanks for taking the time for this call and being willing to explore how your inner life informs your artistic creations and how those, in turn, influence your life.

I’ve been pondering the word creative lately, and it feels like a bit of a misnomer because it’s missing the prefix ‘co’ as in co-creative. My sense is every creative act is created in a relationship, either with another or with the element itself. In your case Alexandra, as a sculptor it’s with stone, and for you Connor, as an illustrator it’s with pen and page. For me, it's with words, with my characters, plus the added inspiration I find from my nightdreams, pulling tarot, songs, and poetry.

This inner-view acknowledges the invisible ‘co’ of the co-creative, collaborative acts. Let’s begin our conversation with Alexandra, offering a bit of the backstory on your sculpture, “Currach’s Last Wave” (photo above), since that inspired the cover illustration Connor drew for Return, Book Two of the Rumored Woman series (photo below).

Illustration for Return book cover by Connor Ryan

Alexandra: The little bronze sculpture arose from one of several images that were part of developing a larger commissioned piece in Ireland on one of the Aran islands, Inis Oirr, as a memorial to honor those who were lost at sea. The phrase, ‘I gcuimhne ar an dream uileag á through an fhattaige uainn,’ carved on the memorial is from the Irish poet, Mairtin O’Direain, and the direct translation is ‘In remembrance of all those who the sea took.’ which has a slightly different feeling than ”those who were lost at sea.” The memorial was for all those who the sea took, which was mostly fishermen.

For readers who want to learn more, there’s a moving twenty minute vimeo entitled, “The Story of ‘An Chloch’: A Fisherman’s Memorial” on Alexandra’s website.

Photo by Alexandra Morosco

So I worked with two brothers—both fishermen at different times in their lives, and both of them carried a lot of grief and a lot of loss from those that they had lost. Stepping into that conversation allowed me a doorway, a threshold to something that forever changed me as an artist and for what I'm doing now. I’d done commission work before, certainly, but I hadn't personally stepped into doing commissioned work that tied together grief work and storytelling, story sharing and healing, that partnered with creativity. My heart just completely broke open.

The process involved hearing the stories and witnessing the tears of some pretty tough guy fishermen, both older and younger. It meant working some days in sideways rain and winds off the North Atlantic and all the madness that happened in creating that massive memorial.

It changed my creative process—how I apply my creativity and how I release my creativity into the world.

Morgan: Say more, in what way?

Alexandra. I’ve come to see my work as storytelling in stone. Let me back up first. In Ireland, I was working beside Karin Sprague, who specializes in lettering for gravestones and memorials, and although I always respected that work, I always felt like that was for somebody else—that it wasn’t mine. I didn't own it. I didn't have a sense of how that could be something I would really tie into until I did this project in Ireland. That’s when I realized that the story sharing was embedded in creating an image and creating a sculpture—suddenly, it was my language. It wasn't a flat rock with letters on it. It was a sculpture that told a story.

Now, my work is about listening to someone's story and having them remember someone, or something, or an experience. It’s not necessarily tied to the grief of losing a person—maybe it's the most joyous celebration of their life, like a marriage. When I realized it was three-dimensional story sharing and storytelling, I got super excited, and the doors kept opening and opening until now—I just want to celebrate life and death and how grief is part of celebrating a life. So, now, I think of it all as one. I don't put them in separate boxes anymore.

It’s so important to me to remind myself that creativity is not strictly the act of creating art. It’s the process of living and how to hold still and have a creative response to anything, like cooking my dinner or the way I walk through the woods with my dog.

Morgan: Please give us a window into your creative process on that memorial.

Alexandra: There were about eighteen little thumbnail sketches, which is part of my process for arriving at an image to carve. I’m asking myself, how am I going to meet that image? How's that image going to meet me? Oftentimes, I do a lot of writing, a lot of journaling. I do some thinking. Sometimes, I do a lot of research. The little sketches—the dirty little thumbnails are nothing fancy, nothing epic. These aren’t drawings. They’re just little sketches where I can launch from. And it's a safe place because they don't have to be perfect. I can just kind of keep thinking.

Alexandra Morosco’s thumbnail sketches

Morgan: This is a perfect place to pause and invite Connor into the story. I recall seeing Connor’s thumbnails and thinking the image was perfect for the book cover.

Connor: I’ll go back to why we have the shared imagery in the first place. I was house and dog-sitting for Alexandra. She had this amazing, very grounding stone home to be in that winter. I was making fires and sleeping by the fire and drawing on her drafting table in her living room. Just being a kind of a hermit for that week. I felt very unsure of what my next steps as a creative person were going to be or where I was going to go. I’d been working construction and knew I didn't want to keep doing that long-term, but I didn't know where to go next. I was also in kind of a rough patch in my relationship at the time, and yeah, just feeling like I didn't have a direction or internal grounding in me. So, having that cozy, earthy, external experience as the actual environment that I was living and working in at the time was important—it offered me grounding.

Morgan: I love hearing how the outer elemental world of stone and fire offered grounding. Not to mention sharing the space with Toga, her Tibetan Mastiff.

Alexandra: Yeah, I was in a pinch. I had to fly to California for major shoulder surgery because all good sculptors wind up one-armed over time, and I needed dog care. Thankfully, Connor said yes. I knew it was very dubious to have a young, handsome man stay alone in a little stone cottage. I thought—he's gonna want to wander off, so I gave him an artistic challenge besides feeding and walking the dog and not letting him bark too much. I tasked Connor to do one creative act every day, to make it as long as possible, to stay focused, and to take this opportunity to stay in this little cottage and work away creatively.

I also showed him my thumbnails from the memorial project. I really loved some of the original concepts that weren't chosen by the client and wanted to create some smaller pieces, like a six-by-six tile in clay and cast it in bronze. When I asked you if you’d like to play with drawing some images, you agreed.

Connor: Yeah, Alexandra and I spoke during that week as she recovered from shoulder surgery, and I showed her the thumbnail sketches I’d been doing. I also honestly still enjoy those sketches. I think more for the grounded feeling that they have than the final imagery. I think that some of that energy was lost when it became tightened up and into a final piece for the book cover.

Alexandra: Sometimes, with those rough sketches, there's a little juicy bit of energy in them, and as the artist, I like them more than the one my client might choose. There’s this feeling that they're missing out on the really cool one, so I tend to hold onto them for a future project.

It was one of Connor's sketches that took that leap when he extended the drawing beyond the frame of the thumbnail, and then when you saw it, Morgan, you took it to this whole other philosophical, metaphorical level of breaking the frame, which I absolutely adored and appreciated.

This conversation has been fabulous because it’s reminding me I never took the next step on Connor's drawing. You did. I got so wrapped up in my shoulder healing and completing the backlog of commissioned work and everything else life demands. So you've inspired me to jump back into that—it's the perfect thing to do in the cold months of winter.

Morgan: I hear the cycle of inspiration continuing. Sometimes, we simply need to appreciate the time delays when it needs to lay dormant.

Alexandra: There’s something I’ve been thinking about since you posed the question “where does the inspiration come from?” I think sometimes it’s in the stillness, in silence. Connor mentioned how he liked being in a place of hiving off, finding a very quiet place to work. I was thinking this is why monastics, or why people go on retreat, why people need a particular place, or studio, or room, or closet. It doesn't matter what it is, but it has to be that someplace that we can feel unscrutinized, uncalled to, undistracted. Where the only thing beckoning is not the outside world but the inner language of what we want, what needs to bubble up from a deep and really vulnerable place.

I’ve also been thinking about the importance of listening to what is going to come—that listening is not always found in silence. It's listening to the personal inner language, to a spiritual Other. Morgan, you mentioned a co-creating process. It’s listening to the greater community, or a communal listening of what is being said out there, whilst we're still listening to our own thing, our own voice, and to me, that listening sometimes comes in stillness, like silence, but very often during the artistic process, it involves a different form of listening.

In that context, it comes from listening and actually being in a state of creating, actually sketching, actually carving, but sometimes it's driving down the road behind the wheel.

I might have a creative thought or image I want to explore, but it often takes twenty minutes or so of chatter before it arises. I'm so curious to hear what Connor says about this twenty minutes of unpacking time—enough to get rid of the chatter to hear that creative voice coming forth.

Connor: I would agree wholeheartedly. I want to say that just boredom is essential to my inspiration, not being pulled by something I need to do, or having other distractions competing for my attention, or looking to be entertained, or not needing to cater to a checklist or all of those things.

Once I can let go of all that and sit somewhere or live in a space that allows for that, my creativity kicks in. I find my most creative times are when I can actually follow that thread, wherever it comes from. Like you were saying—sitting, getting through, just waiting out all of the other calls, and the needs of life to do something that isn't just sitting and being bored for a second, and not just moving on to the next thing that I need to do throughout the day.

That's when I actually find something that I can follow, and I think it just gets easier from there. When I can follow that, and I’ve opened that space, it becomes very consuming, and I don't want to stop. I have a bit of resentment, anger, or annoyance when I have to be pulled out of that or I have to go do something else.

That thread generally opens after sitting without it and trying to just be unproductive and bored, by just letting those other things go and not just finding the next thing to do.

Morgan: Since you’ve had the experience of waiting through the boredom, do you operate from a sense of faith that it will visit you again because you've had it before, or fear it won't come back? How do you relate to that waiting period?

Connor: I personally have zero faith that it will come back. I don’t need faith in it. I’m utterly convinced that it will. It's just a matter of time and opening that space. I think there’s a big difference, though, between when I’ve waded through the boredom, the first habitual thoughts that are the easy things to draw—versus wading through the boredom to find the vulnerability. It's like a comfort zone that I get through and then more things open that have a bit more substance. Sometimes, it takes longer, and sometimes, I get impatient in just the waiting part, and then I go to those easy things that are more habitual.

But it's not a question for me of whether it will happen again or not. That isn't a concern or a fear. I only wonder if I can get this to happen in a timely manner. Yeah, the bigger struggle is having it happen on command when I need it to happen.

Morgan: Alexandra, what’s your take on wading through the boredom?

Alexandra: Connor’s causing me to think differently about boredom. My first reaction is, how could I ever be bored? We’ve never met (boredom and I) because I’ve always equated boredom with the feeling that I don’t have anything I want to do. But if I consider the question—where do I catch myself being bored in the process of creativity, it’s when I’m doing things by rote, when I’m simply going through the process, and it’s not juicy anymore.

Connor: There needs to be a degree of difference in the process and approach than just more replication.

Morgan: Say more about what you mean by boredom.

Connor: For me, being bored is a good thing. It’s more about letting go of all the things that I have to do and simply existing, quietly looking and staring at something, and following where those thoughts are leading me, whether or not they are related to art. I find it often comes back around. So, I let myself wade through the boredom. I see it as a gateway to my creativity.

Alexandra: If I could choose a word, it’s spacious—for my mind to expand and open, allowing for an inner activity vs. outer activity and not being driven by the to-do list, the puppeteering.

Morgan: I’m curious about the roots of the word boredom. I looked it up, and it originates with the word bore, to drill a hole in something, to cut through the under layers, like the way you had to bore a hole in that giant stone to carve the wave. Maybe this is where our vulnerability lies, in allowing for the boredom, and moving through it until our creativity can breathe and arise.

Connor: Many folks think of boredom as wanting to go do something but not knowing what to do. It’s more like feeling antsy and not knowing what to do to scratch that itch. They want some other stimulation that’s going to scratch it.

Alexandra: That’s the key question—what am I hungry for—what do I want to do or create?

Connor: Yeah, and being okay with it if the answer is “I don’t know.”

Alexandra: I have to give myself permission to be in that big white space.

Connor: That’s why I see boredom as a positive thing. Sometimes, when I’m bored, I do chores. Something I don’t have to think about while I’m doing it. I start getting in through the white space, the boring starts to happen, it naturally reveals the next thing that I want to do creatively. I give myself a chance to think about it while I’m doing something else.

Morgan: This reminds me of the thumbnails and the permission or freedom you give yourself to be messy and to just sketch. Connor, let's return to that part of your creative process.

Connor Ryan’s thumbnail sketches

Connor: Before Alexandra left, we talked about her criteria and what was important to her. I had a list of elements that I could combine, including as many of them that were really working together. I think because I had such clear imagery of Alexandra's to go off of and a clear overall direction, once I started doing those thumbnails, a natural path arose to follow that felt open-ended, so I mostly played with the compositional part of the imagery.

What was helpful in those sketches was thinking about it being smaller, so it had to be a little bit simpler and lend itself to being made with clay, or wax, or something moldable. Knowing the materials beforehand meant it couldn’t necessarily convey a ton of detail, so the imagery had to fit those parameters and look nice compositionally. Those were the original intentions behind that imagery, and I think that’s where a lot of the energy came from.

Connor Ryan’s thumbnail sketches

Later, when you selected one of the thumbnails as the image for the cover, I had to draw it out larger, making it more of an ink illustration. That's where a lot of it changed because I was trying to make it work at a bigger scale, with a different medium, and it needed more detail.

Morgan: Alexandra, what’s it like to interact with a piece that began as yours after you’ve offered these parameters and your thumbnails and have it come back to you in a different, unexpected way.

Alexandra: It was super fun and very rewarding to throw out ideas and not feel like I’m playing ball or frisbee alone. I can practice throwing all day long, but having someone else out there receiving, playing catch with, that has a whole different dynamic energy, right?

And so, to continue with that metaphor, I remember one of my early painting instructors, who had a very strong influence on my life when I started out. I'm a sculptor now, but I started out painting and drawing in my early college years. One thing that he’d say when I got stuck compositionally was, “Whenever you throw something, make sure there's someone there to catch it.” Like, if you have a line, where's it going to land? Who's catching it? If you're coming down here, what's catching it over there compositionally on the page, the paper, the sculpture, whatever it is. And I always loved that.

It's way better to play ball if someone's there catching it. So, I adore the co-creative process. Not all artists do. I have many friends and colleagues that the last thing in the world they want to do is work on commission because they don't want to have those conversations back and forth when half of your ideas wind up on the floor. It's this incredible editing process, and there's an essential need for the release of ego.

I can be really passionate about the ideas I love, that I find zingy, that I have, like, wow, there's this creative yumminess here. I want this to be heard, and it's important. I think in collaborations, it's really important that your co-creator, co-collaborator, understands it's not about my ideas being better or being more important, but how this particular part of this concept has a lot of energy for me, so let’s explore why. I think that's a great way to come to it when you're working together.

The question I always return to is —why? Why am I doing this? What's the true end goal? The end goal in creating memorials is to remember someone. It’s to celebrate someone and to have my client look at that and feel that they were a part of creating it, that they created part of that sculptural story from their remembering and sharing their remembering. I listen for the stuff that’s super juicy for them because that's the way they’ll recognize it as theirs, not just something they found in a catalog.

Plus, there’s meeting the ultimate criteria, which is for us as artists, that I’m really excited about bringing this work into the world and sharing it, and showing it to people, and that it's worthy. So, if the process and the purpose meet, then we’re in—we’ve won.

Morgan: I’m sitting here thinking how enjoyable it is to engage with both of you about your inner lives. I’m loving this—the purpose and the process have totally merged for me. I could do this all day.

Connor: It becomes a lot easier when I’m excited to work on a project. Then, the problem-solving is enjoyable versus a giant drag. When there's something else behind it as well that I’m satisfied with throughout the whole process versus just shooting for an end goal. If the purpose and the process aren’t meeting for me, I have to ask myself what I can do to bring myself into it.

Morgan: It's an interesting, energetic dance that gives me the energy to keep going and to complete it.

Let’s take a moment before we wrap and sense if there’s something more you’d like to offer, something that hasn't been said, or something that’s arisen?

Alexandra: I’d like to come back to the very original imagery. There is a wave and a vessel. The wave is life. The wave is the water, but it's also an animal. In the original sketch, it is actually a whale tail that’s very animal-like. I think of the vessel as us, as individuals. We're out at sea, kind of up against that animal of life, which makes us very vulnerable. The currach is a little tiny boat in a vast, very cold, North Atlantic sea. Very vulnerable.

I'm posing a question of how might we honor that vulnerability as we realize, wow, this is the sea I'm in. How do we stay vulnerable and find what we need for support in that sea?

Connor: I think protecting the time to be bored and then allowing myself to go with the flow, that’s what I need for that vulnerability to emerge, for the tiny boat to not get sunk by the big sea. For me, boredom is really important because that’s where I find my vulnerability. Even though it's fragile and can be lost, I know it’ll resurface when it's given the space. That's the part that is very reassuring. It rarely comes out when I'm not holding space for it, actively trying to calm the sea.

And that doesn't necessarily have to be sitting down somewhere. I do find that driving is one of those times when I’m forced to be much more open to things, and I’m not distracting myself as much, and my thoughts and creative juices start flowing more.

Morgan: Creative juices in LA traffic.

Alexandra: At the very least, the space between LA and Whidbey Island. There's a lot of room there. I’ve had my fair share of pulling over to the side of the road and writing on tiny scraps of paper during those long drives down to LA.

Morgan: The long drive of boredom—something to protect. For me, it’s not so much driving as long beach walks or showers. I totally waste too much water while my thoughts are flowing in the shower.

Connor: (smirks) You’re in the wave.

Alexandra: Yeah, re-immersed. I like this idea that the creative mission is to evoke an emotion, whether it's writing, or drawing, or music, whatever that is—we’re creating something that evokes emotion. And that is usually either remembering something, or calling something up, witnessing something, or bringing it forward. The viewer, or listener, or reader will be kind of jogged into that moment. So memory becomes perennial in itself.

Morgan: Hmm, what if the emotion that the art is created with, infused with, lingers and continues to ripple out?

Thank you both for engaging with me and letting us tread lightly on these mysterious ties between your inner and outer lives.

Readers, to see more of their work you’ll find them here:

• Alexandra Morosco, MoroscoFineArts.com

• Connor Ryan, IslandLadArt.instagram.com.