Emotion

“What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises—no matter the mood! Mood's a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It's not for fighting.”

― Frank Herbert, Dune

Traditionally, artists harness emotion to create work — a work of art embodies an artist’s heart and soul. However, this process of creation is just an adverse state of tension.

Working with emotion is precarious, as it amplifies magnitude, expectation, and pressure. It develops an unhelpful relationship between mood and work, that ultimately manifests in a reliance on mood for productivity.

On a development level, it restricts ideation (the ability to generate divergent variations of a concept), due to a fixation on the initial concept. It is also common to develop ‘concept attachment’, a form of idea infatuation where an artist is unable to view their work objectively.

This is where detachment is purposeful. Detachment leads to the best creative work. Work free from ego, fear of judgement or failure.

Detachment sets the stage for creativity.