First and foremost, my art is a medium for expressing and communicating ideas, insights, or concepts. So basically, pretty much everything I’m interested in naturally flows into my artwork pieces. This happens consciously and/or unconsciously. My subconscious mind has always had a big influence on my work, just as it has in the case of every other artist I’d say. So, I’m going to share with you, what I’ve learned along my journey of following my passion to become an artist.
Refusing to stop daydreaming
As a child I was always mesmerized by stories which I read in books or watched in movies and anime. Especially fantasy books and anime – where the protagonist shows an incredible development in skills and personality – this caught my interest and became the main content of my daydreams. And by the way, I always was a dreamer, which also was clear to everybody in my environment. My mind often wandered off to daydreams before I even realized and this made me forget my current surroundings. So, for example – Once, I was strolling across the soccer field during training, staring into the clouds, while everybody else was focused on the training. A classmate tried talking to me and after a short break of the conversation she realized with a smile that my mind wandered off again. Within my family, my older siblings always had to help me with getting back my backpack or jacket, which I tended to forget in school or the bus from day to day because of my head being in the cloud so much.
Obviously, being like this, I have always had a great imagination, which got trained and fueled by all the fantasy stories, that I loved so much.
Facing the negative impact of the society on a child’s creative wisdom
As a child, I didn’t think about things as possible or not possible. But as I grew up in this society, dominated by science and narrow-minded people, I got told over and over again, what is possible and what not. I even started adopting all these limiting points of view (which usually generate negative belief systems) just like children tend to do, trusting that the grown ups know what’s best.
Nevertheless, I always felt the longing inside of me, a passion within me to achieve something big with my talent for art, even if it’s just for myself. Just like the protagonists of the movies, I wanted to develop into something much bigger, beyond the limit of what was considered ‘possible’.
Years passed, as I went through school. Sadly, at that time, my family told me that my dream to become an artist was impossible. At a certain point, many other hopes seemed to fade slowly. However, I never stopped dreaming and I repeatedly kept telling myself that one day I’ll make it.
It was quite demotivating to me as a child, to never get to hear somebody telling me “you can do this, you can make it, it is possible, just be consistent in your work and have patience.”
This brought me to a huge conclusion about a common negative impact of a society – this is one of the major problems of today’s society in fact. All of us are exposed to cultural and educational systems as kids, which impose limiting beliefs, often discouraging originality and freethinking, degrading a child’s creativity and inner spiritual wisdom – something like this happens to everyone in one way or another. But, it is up to us to rise above that and to have the courage to risk it, to embark on the adventure of following ones passion.
The early moments of enlightenment
During this childhood phase, I managed to produce moments of profound insights for myself, over and over again. Today I know what helped me the most back then, was my daydreaming and all the meditative and soulful drawings that I did over the years.
I remember watching an anime movie, in which the people are able to use “Chakra” in order to do unbelievable things, every person had their own unique abilities. The idea of Chakra in the world of anime is derived from the human chakra system of energy fields and teachings on the highest form of energy such as ‘Chi’ coming from Buddhism, or ‘Prana’ from Hinduism. While watching these movies, I always thought “yeah, if I lived in this world, where this type of chakra exist, I would do all the training and hard work to get better, because then I’d know that there are no limits.”
And then it struck me… my first moment of enlightenment came…
I suddenly became aware of what I was actually thinking. In every story, every protagonist, doesn’t know that there are no limits and that they can evolve in such a way. In the same way, in this life, no one can actually know if something is possible until they try it. I then realized that, so far, I was making excuses for myself to not try to follow my dreams.
I learned then that I had to stop listening to the people around me. I decided to believe in the things I wanted to believe in, and I started following my passion.
The Spiritual Awakening
After a while I started to realize that the science we’re taught at school, which everybody believes in, isn’t an absolute truth, as many might seem to think. Every scientific law was figured out by a single mind, which came from an abstract idea, forming a thesis and then seeking for a way to prove it right.
So actually, every single step in evolution always started with a thought. An abstract idea that isn’t tangible.
For me, this was proof that people are fooling them-selves, handling a model of thoughts and ideas as something definite, something that will never change and is determined by the outer world.
To get to this point, it wasn’t just a quick insight I had. It was a long term process which happened over the years.
Since then, I decided to delete the word “impossible” from my personal dictionary, to revive all my hopes and visions. I decided that I had to go out there and share them with all the people who may have doubts or aren’t yet able to believe in the things they want to and to follow their dreams.
On this journey, through my art and my reflections on all my work pieces – I want to share my insights with the world, with the hope that they will help inspire, motivate, encourage someone to believe in themselves when no one else does Especially for those longing and striving to actualize their own big visions. Doing so, I know that I myself will continue learning, improving and evolving along the way, professionally as well as spiritually.
Willi Schlese 