What is the forbidden fruit of your art?

What do you seek to challenge that you were raised not to challenge?

What is yearning to be your subject but you cannot explicitly bring it out?

What topic seems off-limits yet you have so much to say?

What is calling to be shared but you don’t want to stir the pot?

What makes it forbidden? Is it fear of rejection, criticism, power, pity, scorn or being alone?

Find the reason. Make friends with it.

And then eat that forbidden fruit.

It may be a nibble at first. See how it tastes. And then when you’re ready, devour it.

Art seems like a natural release of the busy-ness of the city. You see it everywhere. In the way people dress. In the graffiti on park benches. In even the street performers who add to the cacophony of sounds on the streets. The city is alive, and it seems like inspiration hits you in the face everywhere you look. There is an urgency that propels artists to create right then and there before they lose that glint of an idea.

But what if art were to come from a seemingly less chaotic place like the suburbs? Can it?

In the city, art is a response to the constant flow and change of people and events. It may feel like the suburbs where obligations and schedules run a routine, Groundhog’s Day existence cannot create “good” art.

But what if art was the way to break out of those obligations, complacency and routine and instead, towards motion? What if it is what mobilizes us from a comfortable existence towards change? What if it was done for that purpose?