"Whatever art form you're working in, it's crucial to see it clearly, to feel it clearly, and not to worry about the results, or how someone else will see it"

Art across mediums begins with uncompromising attention. To “see it clearly” asks for a ruthless honesty about what stands before you: the subject, the craft, the limits and possibilities of the medium. For a painter, that’s the exact temperature of a shadow; for a musician, the weight of a pause; for a writer, the pressure a sentence puts on the next. Clarity strips away received ideas and fashionable gestures so the real thing can appear in its contours rather than in clichés.

To “feel it clearly” goes deeper than emoting. It means tuning your instrument, body, mind, and memory, so that sensation and emotion are neither exaggerated nor muffled. An actor meets the given circumstances without faking; a choreographer listens to the body’s intelligence; a poet enters the emotional weather without forcing thunder. Emotional accuracy is different from intensity; it’s the right note at the right time.

Freeing yourself from the results and from the imagined gaze of others protects this clarity. Outcome-thinking breeds mimicry, anxiety, and premature compromise. When attention splits between the work and its reception, both blur. Paradoxically, the work most likely to resonate is the work made without pandering, because authenticity carries its own frequency.

Process offers a way to live this out. Generate without self-surveillance; let curiosity, play, and disciplined observation lead. Then, in a separate phase, refine with craft and intelligence. Audience considerations can enter during revision without colonizing the first spark. This two-step preserves both freedom and rigor.

There’s also an ethical charge: to see and feel clearly is to refrain from exploiting easy sentiment or trendy outrage. It asks for courage, the courage to risk failure, to be simple when complexity flatters, to stay with a problem until its shape is unmistakable.

Clarity becomes a practice: showing up, looking longer, listening harder. Let the work look back at you. When it does, the need for external permission recedes, and the art begins to speak in its own unmistakable voice.