I saw first watched this today, after Alex Leech from the U.K. shared it on Facebook and said he was watching this guy's video late into the night. This performance/video blew my fucking mind. I'm not even going to promote this post. It you're meant to find it, you'll find it. "Hi Ren" by Ren.
If you like it, check out these videos next...
Therapist reacts to "Hi Ren" video (The therapist cries before the end of the video, her reaction video is about 35 minutes long, but definitely worth watching if you're a actively creative person of any kind, or have struggled with depression/psychological issues at some point)
Ren has a bunch more work to check out. If you like these, keep digging...
It's been two days since I clicked on a Facebook post to watch "Hi Ren" for the first time. I didn't know what I was seeing. Instrumental? No, he's singing weird sounds... "Oh shit, there's lyrics..." This video changed me. It's as simple as that. I told Alex Leech, whose post I saw this video in, "some pieces make say, 'that's cool,' and make me want to go create something amazing. This is the second kind."
I've been looking for a new direction for my Sharpie art, I want to stop doing my take on classic rock star or BMX photos, and I want to draw pictures that say something. Yeah, making a living and actually having a place ot live would be nice, too. But I can live this crazy street life a while longer, if I'm doing some seriously cool work, drawings, writing, blogging, whatever.
After watching Hi Ren several times, and several of his other videos, I've finished one new drawing, a totally different idea. I started writing poetry again, which I stopped doing in late 2008, when I lost all my creative work, including 165 unpublished poems that no one else had ever seen. That was ten years worth, the best creative work I've done. Part of the new poem, called "You're not doing it right," is in the first new drawing. I'm now working on a second new drawing, another completely new direction. We'll see how it comes out.
The big things I got from being exposed to Ren's work is 1) Tackle the hard subjects, go deep, don't be afraid of going into the really deep ideas I've held back from writing and drawing. Go deep, dig into the meaning of life stuff, the things I had in the back of my head, but didn't write or try to draw. And 2) Be honest. "Brutally honest," seems cliche', but that's when the good stuff comes out, or comes through us, creatively.
I was already really prolific writing and drawing before this video sparked me in new directions. But now I'm twice as amped to dig into new themes, go deeper, and see what comes of it. That's what I got out of a video by a guy half my age, who had the courage to make one of the most incredible pieces I've ever seen on video.
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