Jesse Freeman: On Creativity
Marianna
Do you have habits you’ve built for yourself to foster creativity?
Jesse
A lot of input! I usually watch a new film a day (currently on the films of Luis García Berlanga), read about two books a week (just finished Ernesto Sabato and now reading on Corporate Capitalism), and am always listening to new-old music (right now the folk music of Odessa and Bessie Jones and the ECM records of the bandoneon player Dino Saluzzi) the more challenging the better. And from there a lot of practice equally distributed through my mediums with whatever idea is most appealing at the moment.
Marianna
Where do you think ideas come from?
Jesse
Definitely from all the input combined with life experiences and problems. It is all in there somewhere, then it is just seeing what comes to the strength of the medium I am working in and expressing it.
Marianna
What does creativity mean to you?
Jesse
Freedom and harmony. The former because creativity has given me a voice to reach people that I hadn’t had before and the latter as it is taking a lot of disparate elements and making them work for something new on various layers.
Marianna
When do your best ideas hit you?
Jesse
All the time, it is being in tune with the nuances of the everyday. For instance, right now from the dexterity displayed by Art Tatum on this record I have, playing to the two squares of light that fall on my laptop every time the wind picks up revealing two holes in the awning above… is not only beautiful it inspires something.
Marianna
How would you describe your creative process?
Jesse
Relating. It is a process of relating everything and building on top of it for one seamless expression.
Marianna
So many creatives are pivoting and finding ways to adjust their creative process during the quarantine. How have you been channeling your creativity during this time?
Jesse
More or less doing what I always do, just now I have no alternative as quarantine is in place. I discovered that I will make for a great old man one day haha. I handle solitude just fine.
Marianna
How have you been creating in the current cultural climate?
Jesse
I really have been putting out work that I hadn’t released before, yet it is speaking directly to right now. Systematic racism has shaped so much of my life that it is nothing topical, so through this act of showing older work that still is speaking to the times underlies that this has been the reality of our existence, is nothing new, and will continue unless there is some real acknowledgment and structural change. While the actual work I am making right now in participating in the protests and photographing I will use for something much larger in scope down the line.
Marianna
What unexpected turns did your life take to lead you to become who you are today?
Jesse
It was definitely at age 20. Working a grave shift job and attending community college during the day studying Administration of Justice. Started seeing all the flaws and hopelessness in the system and being the only black kid in the program clearly saw the semantics they use to hide it all. And at the same time heard from back home about my older cousin being unarmed and murdered by the police in 2005… it all compounded. I had a chance to go to Japan and took it. Developed a curiosity for classic literature and film…met a great friend in Alani Cruz who gave me a film camera, I took up ikebana, made a short film, and progressed from there.
Marianna
What creative projects are you most proud of?
Jesse
The ones I have yet to start!
Marianna
What do you think is something that the most creative people in the world have in common?
Jesse
Curiosity. As we are becoming more connected and integrated…curiosity is the only thing we have to separate ourselves and the residual expression is what you see from creatives.
Marianna
Why do you think people get stuck on problems?
Jesse
For the reasons they are doing it. If you are doing it because you think other people will like it…you will likely become stuck after the novelty fades. If you do it for yourself above all that pressure is gone. Photography for example is relatively easy to start in, you share some photos and you are a photographer, but the expectations come. Collage for example is a medium I started working in around 2013 and after having made about 200 started showing them in 2019. But it was the thinking that a medium offers that say what you are.
What I mean is for collage, I started seeing the textures of random printed media and could in my mind make the connections before I start cutting. Just as I can walk my dogs and just look and imagine photos either in 50mm or 28mm frame lines, the flattening effects inherent to the medium revealing correlations that may not have existed, and what the exposures on different films will look like.
I can reflect on today and break it down structurally into a mise-en-scène for a short film and find some symbolism and a supportive style to say something true, or look at a garden and see an ikebana arrangement structured in shin-soe-hikae-jushi (the Japanese system that ikebana is based on) and conceive it mentally.
To a large extent, it is the thinking that makes one an artist in their respective medium that people don’t get to develop because they have proclaimed themselves to be something without having really created within it for a long enough period to think in it… and subsequently, get stuck. Our accelerated culture doesn’t allow time for development and stress results with the ease of accessibility to platforms.
Marianna
What advice would you offer those struggling with creative blocks?
Jesse
Don’t force anything. But also try to verse yourself in more mediums so if you are stuck in one, you can go to another and you will eventually come back refreshed with momentum. If not, don’t force it and submerge yourself in the work of others…and not what’s current or what peers are doing on Instagram but back to the basics. If it is filmmaking go back and watch Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera for example it is pure visual expression in showing rather than saying, in photography go back and look hard at Eugène Atget, or in ikebana those basic (we call them) nagire or moribana style arrangements…all of this tends to reveal subtleties that we have forgotten or missed.
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About Jesse Freeman:
Jesse Freeman is a visual artist and writer based in Tokyo. His mediums include photography, filmmaking, collage, and ikebana under the Sogetsu school.
Jesse fell in love with literature after moving to Japan in 2006, which carried him into films, once he understood auteur theory. Seeing film as a director’s novel, the pen his camera, and actors his characters, Jesse came to understand that style and prose come from overall shot style and composition.
This brought about his expression in his four preferred mediums.
With photography, Jesse mostly does film in black and white. With filmmaking, Jesse has written and directed 12 short films, holding his screenings in Tokyo. His films usually arise out of his own problems or curiosities, playing more to aesthetic theories of films while featuring persons of color. With ikebana, Jesse has been studying under the Sogetsu school for 10 years. With collage, he started creating a half-decade ago using materials in recycling bins as a much more direct form of expression.
In addition to his work in these four mediums, Jesse writes art reviews, essays, and film scripts.