How and why I Wrote Paint.
The creative process of Paint was unlike anything I’d ever done.
Hert dropped in February of 2020 and the next month the whole world stopped. All the hype that I was riding to catapult me into stardom seemed to have been unplugged. I felt like everything had gone to waste, all that effort and sacrifice, just for the entire world to change instantly. I predicted a lot of the things that would eventually come of the world in my book but I never imagined that it would arrive so soon. The year 2084 seemed far enough to not have to deal with the repercussions of my predictions.
You can be a Number One Best Seller but no one cares when the world is ending.
At the start of quarantine, I didn’t want to write. I began to slip into a funk and depression as many people did. I fell into the laziness of watching every show I’d been meaning to get into. Or catching up on books that I kept putting off. Eventually, I fell into the quicksand of content and couldn’t find any motivation to write anything, let alone do anything. I went ghost on social media because I felt disingenuous self-promoting while people were losing everything and there was so much uncertainty.
Finally, I told myself to snap out of it. I watched the movie, “In a Relationship” which stars Emma Roberts that sparked a poem. I had felt an inspiration for the first time in months. But I still wanted to stay away from a full-fledged concept, I just wanted to write. So, I began to do so. It wasn’t until a friend asked me to write his story of a first love that I rekindled my love for writing. The excellence in that poem showed me that I still had it.
I began to spread the seed of the idea of Paint to my brothers: it’s the natural progress of grief, after hurt comes pain. The pain never goes away, you just learn to live with it day by day.
My brother and I created the front cover of Paint in less than 30 minutes from concept to reality. I had the vision to go off of now. But I still had no skeleton for a concept yet. Write about pain… that’s so broad and undefined.
Then I started thinking about how artists that I look up to all have certain mindsets and mantras they spread to the public.
Kanye West: “If you’re a fan of Kanye West, you’re a fan of yourself.”
Kobe Bryant: “The Mamba Mentality is to constantly try to be the best version of yourself.”
Russ: “Get out of your [own] way.”
Nipsey Hussle: “The marathon continues.”
They leave a mentality that etches their philosophy into the minds of the public so they live forever.
The mission of a creative is to leave behind a mentality. That’s the true legacy that you leave behind. It allows people to encapsulate who you are and become like you. That’s true influence. I feel as though, a lot of artists coming up still haven’t necessarily found themselves creatively so they emulate people they look up to. For Hert, I was attempting to not only be a poet like William Shakespeare but a philosopher much like George Orwell or Aldous Huxley while creating my own spin on their ideas. I was still writing the book through my lens, relationships, ideas, and the things I’ve been through which makes it unique to me.
Paint was a mess of a process, much like the metaphor for the front cover. A splattering of concepts that I wasn’t sure how I was going to tie together into a beautiful masterpiece. But I didn’t allow myself to stop writing. I wrote hundreds of concepts, lines, and poems just trying to hone in on an idea. Most of which didn’t make the final cut.
Paint was supposed to be what Forever Alone became. A short book that I would release for free on the anniversary of Hert as a thank you to the people that supported me. But my brother convinced me otherwise, that it was meant to be more than that and should have its own world.
The end of Hert ends on a metaphor that a man must treat the world as a canvas rather than focusing their entire life on just women or a woman. That is when you truly step into a realm of being a man of creation and craft that makes you stand apart. The natural continuation of the storyline was a book about pain with the context of artistry.
However, because life changed so radically, I was living in Hollywood, I’d lost touch with certain family members, friends stopped speaking to me or publicly supporting me… I began to feel (forever) alone.
In Greek, nostalgia means, “the pain from an old wound.”
It takes us to a place where we’d ache to go again.
To a place where we know we are loved.
The longing for nostalgia to when times were better; all of that continued to creep within the psyche of my mind. That’s when I had discovered the theme of the entire book and I finally had something to run with. As we become adults, we all tend to wish we could travel back in time to moments that were simpler. When we miss the people that used to be around us or the situations we were in. More often than not we tend to romanticize the past and forget about the bad stuff we were going through at the time.
We look at memories through a colorful lens.
As a creative, I didn’t want to pigeonhole myself into just being a writer that does heartbreak poetry. I challenged myself to write about subjects like memories that were directly from my childhood, take stories from photographs of me as a child, and talk about the deep-rooted issues that I feel on a daily basis. It was gruesome. There were times when I wanted to give up. I couldn’t find ways to make things work and wanted to quit the concept altogether. I felt I was so broken that I couldn’t ever be happy so my entire existence (and art) had to be sad. How could I write happy when I wasn’t genuinely happy? How would I find that amusement for life, that wonder I had as a child? It’s almost as if I hadn’t smiled since my childhood. I was stuck as the gray cement blocks were tied to my feet. I was drowning in depression that I didn’t even know how to save myself from.
I took it back to the drawing board. I wrote with no rules. I just vented. I started writing about things I wouldn’t dare touch on for the sake of family or friend drama. But at the same time, I didn’t want to let the fear of backlash stop me from writing how I truly feel. It certainly didn’t stop me from writing Hert and that was purposeful. I had been living with these thoughts that were against the narrative, scared of being alone. Then, I stopped caring. I figured that these so-called people don’t even like me anyway, who cares what they think.
Never care for the opinion of sheep that are being shepherded by (social) media into invisible fences that constrict their minds.
I had discovered my easel to paint my world the way I want it to be. A world where my brush penned words that created imagery. That’s when I became free. All of a sudden, I became happy. There was my answer.
The answers were in the colors.
After that, the writing began to flow seamlessly. Letting go allowed me to finish the book.
I started putting my inner child first and allowing him to discover the wonder of creating without care.
I started to embody the life of an artist which is nothing more than staying a child inside.
As life progresses, we tend to allow reality to sculpt us whichever way they please, to be confined by one label, or a career path. This restricts our ability to believe in the magic of life.
We become unhappy and start living in a blue reality. That’s no way to live.
We all deserve joy, but it’s not easy. Nothing that’s ever worth cherishing is simply obtained.
A true renaissance man fears nothing and allows himself to follow his soul’s desire.
To live without the constrictions of a frame. To settle is to die early.
Most artists don’t fear death which is why they tend to live forever.
I’ve found happiness within my artistry, but like pain, I’ve learned to live with the blue while deciding to paint with a different color.
Thank you.
Paint: Drowning in Colors is out now.
Love,
Erik De La Cruz.
