☼ A Creative Life ☼

Home on wheels

Quite often when I think about creative living, I think about the people I know in my life that make a living off of being creatives. You know, photographers, artists, writers etc. and how they pay their way in life by creating. In some way I guess I am dreaming of the same outcome for my life. To make money from the stuff I do in my spare time. I have made some money from my passions but I am a long way away from being fully self sufficient and able to pay my way from the art that I put out alone.

To many this is what it means to live a creative life. But its not necessarily the case for everyone. Most of us write, photograph or make art for the sheer love of it. Finding ways along the journey to fund their passions and to fuel their desires. Which means this situation is not a one size fits all approach.

I do live a creative life for sure. Even if my passions are not paying my way for now, I definitely feel as though as I get to create a lot and can live a life in which I am free to dream and make things happen should I wish to do so.

Here’s a little story on how I have lived creatively recently that didn’t involve selling my art to others.

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Van Conversion

I’ve been working on the tools in some capacity for a good few years now which means I have been lucky to gain skills and experience that allow me to convert and build a van which my partner and I have used this summer to explore Canada. We built this van in depths of winter when the average temperatures rested at around -5 and some days thick and heavy blankets of snow meant working outside were difficult.

We had bought this van in Vancouver which was about 700 km away from Nelson, which is in the Selkirks in British Columbia. The journey to get this van was already an arduous and strung out affair and tested our resolve to find a van that wasn’t a rust bucket and had reliability. Ahead we went and purchased this empty shell of a vehicle, a Ford E 150 panel van.

We lacked tools to start the conversion so those had to be bought first. After we made several trips to the lumber yard. Before you look at converting a van, check the price of lumber to see if you’d be happy to part with a small fortune to build out your van. Once those minor things were ironed out we set out to build our van, eventually.

We had given notice to move out on our small rental in the mountains and had one month from the buying of the van to us moving out and heading to the east coast of Canada. So the timing was tight and we needed to move on this build. I don’t really like hanging around so it suited me.

Building out a van can be tiring and cumbersome - nothing is square meaning you have to bend, plane and scribe all woods to weird angles and shapes. A nice challenge but something that would be much faster if it was all at beautifully square.

Having to build a sub frame came first. We had little time to plan and so we barely measured or got the bearings of our van before we had the old cabinets ripped out and had the van ready for insulating. In retrospect, should have definitely measured the van '“properly” first and used software to properly sketch up the build - but fuck it. We didn’t.

We used metal screws to drill into the frame of the van into which we then attached baton. This would eventually form the cladding of our van and would be a place for us to screw cupboards, cabinets and various other things into.

As we built this van together we could already taste the feeling of hitting the road and I think this is where the feeling of creativity hit me. We made something from nothing. I know the van living thing is old news now but still we made a thing that would take us to do many more things.

As the van build neared its natural end, the days were getting longer and a semblance of spring began to creep over southern British Columbia. Being outside and putting on the finishing touches was no longer absolute torture. It was actually enjoyable to be outside for once.

Once we had wrapped up the build, which all in took around four weeks, meant we could hit the road. We ended up driving 5000 km across the continent to go and surf waves on the east coast of Canada, in Nova Scotia.

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I think that, what I am trying to say is, that living creatively doesn’t mean to make money from your creative outlet. To me it means to live a colourful life, filled with adventure, attempts at many different things and also to be able to move about and experiment. Granted I don’t have very much to my name but that can change in an instant. I choose to be transient. With that comes a plethora of ups and downs. To me at least this way of life is the best possible attempt at living creatively.

Thanks for reading along, always.

Steve