What Travel Does to Your Creative Work

You’re listening to Tide and Light. Episode Three. I got home from a trip last spring and within about four days I made the best painting I’d made in almost a year. I want to be careful how I say this, because it sounds like bragging, and it isn’t. It wasn’t a good painting because I’d suddenly gotten better at painting. I hadn’t. I’d been gone eleven days.

You don’t get better at watercolor in eleven days, especially not eleven days where I painted maybe four times and badly. But I came home, and I sat down at my kitchen table with the same paints I’d had the whole time, the same brushes, the same cheap pad of paper. And something came out of me that hadn’t been there before I left. I remember sitting there afterward just sort of staring at it, a little confused, the way you’d be confused if you opened your mouth and a language you’d never studied came out. It didn’t feel like mine, exactly. It felt like something had passed through me on the way home and left it there.

I’ve been trying to understand that for a long time now. Because it isn’t a one-time thing. It happens almost every trip. I leave a little stuck, a little flat, making the same three things I always make. You know the feeling, probably, even if it isn’t painting for you. That low hum of going through the motions, where the work is fine, technically fine, and completely without a pulse.

And I come back and the work has changed, and I didn’t change it on purpose. So that’s what I want to talk about today. Not travel exactly, and not art exactly, but the strange thing that happens in the space between them. I’m Lily Mae. And if you came here for the travel and you’ve been wondering when I’d talk about the painting, this is the episode where the two halves of this show finally shake hands. Okay, so the first thing I had to let go of was the romantic version of it.

The romantic version is that you go somewhere beautiful, and the beauty fills you up, and then it pours back out as art. You see the turquoise water and the light on the cliffs and your soul is so moved that you make a masterpiece. I really wanted that to be true. It is not true. I have stood in front of some of the most beautiful places I will ever see in my life and felt absolutely nothing I could put on paper. The beauty doesn’t transfer like that.

If anything, the most beautiful places are the hardest to paint, because they’re already finished. There’s nothing for you to do. The postcard already exists, and you’re just copying it, and you can feel how dead it is while your hand is moving. So it isn’t the beauty. Whatever travel does to my work, it isn’t that it shows me pretty things. I have a phone full of pretty things and they’ve never once helped.

I used to come home and scroll back through all of it, expecting the photos to hand me back the feeling, and they never did. They were just flat little rectangles of somewhere I’d been. The thing I was after had never been in the photo to begin with. What I think it actually does is stranger and harder to talk about, and it has to do with how you see when nothing is familiar. Here’s what I mean. When you’re home, you don’t really look at anything.

You can’t. Your brain won’t let you, and honestly it’s protecting you. If you actually saw your own kitchen every morning, in full, every detail of it, you’d never get anything done. So your mind builds a little shortcut. It stops seeing the kitchen and just sees the idea of the kitchen. Cup, counter, window, done.

You’re not looking, you’re recognizing, which is faster and almost completely blind. And we do that with nearly everything. The drive to work, the faces of the people we love most, the trees on our own street. We replaced seeing them a long time ago with just knowing they’re there. But you can’t do that somewhere new. You don’t have the shortcuts yet.

You haven’t been there long enough to stop looking, so for a little while, you actually see. You see the specific blue of the door, not just door. You see the way the old paint is peeling in long curls and the rust running down underneath it in a stain shaped like a country that doesn’t exist. You see that the handle is worn pale on one side and not the other, because for fifty years people have only ever opened it with their right hand. You see the little chalk mark someone made and forgot about. You notice that the light comes in sideways here, low and gold, because you’re closer to the water than you’ve ever lived.

You notice that the air smells like salt and diesel and something frying that you can’t name yet, and that the smell is part of the place the same way the color is. You’re not recognizing anymore, because there’s nothing to recognize. You’re just taking it in, raw, the way you did when you were a kid and everything was new and enormous. I think that’s why the days right after you arrive somewhere feel so long, in a good way. A single afternoon can hold what a whole week holds at home, because you’re actually present for all of it instead of skating over the surface on your shortcuts. And I think that’s the thing.

I think that’s most of it. Travel doesn’t give me beautiful things to paint. It gives me my eyes back for a little while. It knocks out the shortcuts, and for a week or two I’m looking at the world the way a painter is supposed to look at it all the time and almost never can. There’s a thing they tell you in art school, that you should draw what you see and not what you know. And it sounds simple, and it is one of the hardest things in the world, because what you know is constantly shoving itself in front of what you see.

You know a hand has five fingers, so you draw five sausages instead of looking at the actual hand in front of you. You know the sky is blue, so you paint it blue, even when the sky over the water at that hour is closer to a pale green you’d never believe if someone described it to you. Travel is the only thing I’ve found that reliably gets what I know out of the way long enough to let me see what’s actually there. When everything is unfamiliar, you have nothing to fall back on but your own two eyes. And the strangest part is that the effect doesn’t end when the trip does. That’s the part I really wanted to talk about.

Because if it were just about being somewhere new, the good work would happen on the trip, and it mostly doesn’t. The good work happens after I get home. I’ll come back to my same apartment, my same plants, my same view I’ve seen a thousand times. And for a week or so, I see it. I see my own kitchen the way I saw that peeling blue door. The shortcuts haven’t grown back yet.

My eyes are still turned all the way up from being somewhere that forced them open. And so the best painting I made last spring wasn’t of anywhere exotic. It was of the light coming through my own front window onto a chipped white bowl with two limes in it. A bowl I’d walked past every single day for two years and never once seen. I only saw it because I’d just come back from somewhere that taught me how to look again, and I caught my own home in the few days before it went invisible to me again. And I notice now that I can almost feel the window closing.

Day three or four after a trip, the bowl is still glowing. Day ten, it’s just a bowl again. The limes are gone, I’ve put something else there, and I walk past it the way I walked past it for two years. The shortcuts grow back, quietly, like grass coming up through a path you stopped using. That’s the gift, I think. Not the trip.

The little while afterward, when home becomes strange enough to see. The trip is just what loans you the strange eyes. What you do with them once you’re back is the part that’s actually yours. There’s another piece of this too, and it’s about constraint, which I did not expect to ever care about. When I travel, I bring almost nothing. A small tin of paints, half the colors I own at home.

One brush, sometimes two. A little pad of paper, nothing precious, nothing I’d be afraid to ruin. And at home I have everything. I have the full range of colors, the good paper, the brushes for every situation, the whole setup. And I make worse work at home, with all of it, than I do on a beach with eight colors and one brush. For the longest time that made no sense to me.

You’d think more options would mean more freedom. But it’s the opposite. When you have every color, you spend the whole time deciding. You mix and second-guess and reach for the exact right green, and somewhere in all that deciding the thing you actually saw slips away. When you have eight colors, you can’t get it right. You can only get it close.

And getting it close, fast, before the feeling leaves, turns out to be the entire thing. The limitation does the choosing for you, so all that’s left is the looking and the hand. Travel forces that on me every time, and I keep trying to bring it home and I keep failing, because at home I can’t make myself leave the good supplies in the drawer. The constraint has to be real or it doesn’t work. So now I almost think of the small travel kit as the point, and the trip as the excuse to use it. And then there’s the thing I bring home that isn’t in my luggage at all.

This is the part I keep coming back to. It isn’t the photos, and it isn’t even the paintings I made there, which are usually pretty rough. It’s a kind of permission. When you’ve spent two weeks somewhere where you don’t know the rules, you get used to being a beginner again. You order the wrong thing, you take the wrong bus, you say the word wrong and someone gently corrects you, and none of it is a catastrophe. You’re allowed to be bad at things, because of course you are, you just got here.

And you carry a little of that home. For a while after a trip, I’m gentler with my own bad work. I let myself make the ugly painting without flinching, the way I’d let myself fumble the language in a place where no one expected me to know it. At home, between trips, I forget that I’m allowed to be a beginner. I get tight and careful and I make safe, dead little paintings I already know how to make. Travel knocks that loose.

It reminds me that the whole point was never to be good. It was to be awake. I told you at the start I’d be honest, so here’s the honest caveat. This is not a reason to travel. I want to be really clear about that, because I can hear how it might land. I’m not saying buy a plane ticket to fix your creative block.

That’s the envy version of this, and I don’t want to make anything. You do not have to go anywhere to get your eyes back. You can get most of it by walking a different way home, or sitting somewhere in your own town you’ve never sat, or just trying to draw the thing in front of you instead of the idea of the thing. The trip is just the most violent version of a switch you can flip in much smaller ways. It’s the loudest way to become a beginner again, but it’s not the only way, and it’s not even close to the kindest one to your life or your wallet or the places you’d be flying to. I mostly just travel because I love it.

The better work is a side effect, and I’d be suspicious of anyone, including me, who tried to sell it as the reason. So if there’s something to take from this, it’s small, the way these things always are. The next time you come home from anywhere, even somewhere ordinary, even just a long drive, give yourself the few days right after where your eyes are still open. Make the thing, write the thing, look hard at your own kitchen before it goes invisible again. That window is short, and it closes, and the shortcuts always grow back. But for a little while after you’ve been somewhere, you can see your own life the way a stranger would, and there’s something in that worth catching while it lasts.

I don’t travel to make better art. But I always come home making better art. I’m still figuring out exactly why. Next time, I want to stay inside the painting itself. Because there’s a difference between seeing a place and actually observing it, and the thing that taught me that difference was sitting in front of one scene for two hours trying to put it on paper and realizing I had never once looked at it before. That’s where we’re going next.

I’m Lily Mae. This was Tide and Light. Go home and look at your kitchen before it disappears. I’ll see you next time.