everyone is an artist

a 2 hour creative workshop in songwriting

Blue Bucket Of Gold is a free weekly newsletter from me, the musician Catrin Vincent. If you pay, I also offer long-form content, like interviews with your favourite artists, new music and songwriting prompts. This newsletter is a passion project; a deep-dive into the human psyche from someone whose life was transformed by discovering how art can heal. It started as a way to digest my favourite music, then turned into a vehicle for change, a beautiful way to understand myself and the world through writing. Please feel free to share and support in any way you can. Thank you for reading.

Hello dear reader.

Guided by the belief that “everyone is an artist”, I’m creating a warm, non-intimidating space where creativity is for everyone, not just creatives in the industry.

It’ll be monthly and online, with a group of max 10 songwriters.

The first one will be Wednesday, 2nd July, 6-8pm

- click on the link to get your tickets!

This live zoom workshop runs as two 40-minute sessions with a 40-minute break in between. You’ll join a small, supportive group of fellow writers and:

• Bring a work-in-progress or unfinished song

• Receive a creative challenge to push it forward

• Use the 40 minute break to develop or revise your piece

• Share your work in the second half for open discussion & feedback

Whether you’re just starting out or deep into a project, you’ll leave with fresh insight, a stronger song, and a reminder of why we write at all.

My ethos is this: everyone is an artist. And I’m not alone in this - the sentiment originates from German artist Joseph Beuys, who even used the beautiful term ‘freedom being’. He argued creativity is essential to being human.

I agree. I truly believe that creativity is a human right. And I believe we live in a society that discourages people from trying not because we are bad, or un-creative, or untalented, but because creativity inherently goes hand in hand with freedom. So if most people are discouraged, most are placated. That’s useful, right? Instead of governments outright banning art, like most have attempted to and some still do, and ours still does in more subtle ways now, we instead become our own internal police. Then nobody has to do anything. We take away our own freedom.

I believe that judgement is in no way useful, and I truly believe that ‘being an artist’ is merely cultivating the ability to ignore judgement. Fundamentally, the role of art is to question; question why we’re here, question how things are currently done, and question what the function of others’ judgement is. Making art, to me, is essentially synonymous to a kind of ‘seeing’.

So, what is the function of others’ judgement? People might feel righteous in their judgement of artists, or people expressing themselves, but really, if we dig deeper, all judgement is some kind of mirror. Subconsciously, people might just want to stop you from doing something they wish they also had the guts to do. Try. Create. Put themselves out there. Have the self-humility to ‘fail’, and learn from that ‘failure’ in order to finally produce something they’re proud of over a number of years.

And even if our worst fears are confirmed and we do indeed suck, we have to face the cringe of sucking first in order to put ourselves out there, so we can get enough practice and real-life experience to reach the beautiful part, that ‘aha’ moment where we find our voice, sound, or idea. Sometimes, public feedback can be brutal, soul-destroying and deter us from ever trying again. And that’s why we band together in small groups, or bands, or clubs to test out ideas, workshop things and get feedback from more supportive environments.

Ultimately, I think embarrassment and shame is a right of passage for any budding artist, and the more we can ignore external validation, the more we can hear what our inner-voice is desperate to express.

Throughout my findings as a teacher and workshop facilitator, I’ve discovered:

• we feel safer in groups

• we write to be witnessed

• we can’t get good without feedback from someone a) supportive, b) knowledgable and c) with good intentions

And if you sign up to my workshop, you get all three.

And for those of you that do sign up, I thought I’d suggest a songwriting prompt prior to the workshop!

I’ve been thinking a lot about accessibility to creativity, and how we can navigate not quite possessing enough free time to express ourselves, especially during difficult economic times when we’re picking up extra evening shifts, extra jobs, desperate to stay afloat. Creativity takes a backseat, when creativity is exactly what we should turn to as emotional release, a way to connect and to process the world around us, and the circumstances we find ourselves in.

So for this exercise, I thought back to when I begrudgingly shuffled onto the overground each morning for a dead-end office job, and I saw Roger Robinson’s poem featured:

And if I speak of Paradise,
then I'm speaking of my grandmother
who told me to carry it always
on my person, concealed, so
no one else would know but me.
That way they can't steal it, she'd say.
And if life puts you under pressure,
trace its ridges in your pocket,
smell its piney scent on your handkerchief,
hum its anthem under your breath.
And if your stresses are sustained and daily,
get yourself to an empty room - be it hotel,
hostel or hovel - find a lamp
and empty your paradise onto a desk:
your white sands, green hills and fresh fish.
Shine the lamp on it like the fresh hope
of morning, and keep staring at it till you sleep.

- Roger Robinson, 2019

I vividly remember reading this poem and visualising someone sat at a desk after a long hard day of work, every single day, with just enough energy to write one haiku, hoping to vocalise something they couldn’t at their job, or with the people they knew at the time, or in polite society. And eventually, those haikus grew to a mountain of words, and their half hour a day before bed of creation grew into an undeniable book of poetry.

Whether that was Roger Robinson’s intention or not, or the image he also saw when writing his poem, I took his piece of art and turned it into a motor for my own imagination. And that’s the point; energy. When a poem gives you an image, you know it’s good - and a piece of art becomes a transference of energy from one stranger to another, a piercing of connection. Does that make sense?

So my songwriting prompt to you is this:

If you don’t feel you have time - collect.

I promise you that you have your own portable paradise, even in life’s worst moments. Like pretty rocks we pick up at the beach, I want you to make a conscious intention this week to ‘notice’ more.

To notice the shiny rocks in the form of words. It can be on your commute to work, or after, it can be in the shower, it can be on a brisk walk through a dodgy part of town, or during a hike out in beautiful, beautiful nature. I want you to notice just one thing a day, one word, or a sentence, or a fragment of a stranger’s conversation; something small and seemingly innocuous that upon further introspection contains great meaning, like a ring fallen through the cracks of train-tracks (who did it belong to?), or a floor of snails after rain, or a human waiting at the same spot every day you never noticed before (why?).

For ‘in the particular is contained the universal’ - James Joyce.

Mine so far:

See you on the 2nd!