Creative authenticity
How to develop a personal point of view (for writers, painters, YouTubers, and other creators)
Welcome to Greensborough Drive! I’m Anne and I write about creativity, philosophy, psychology, and more as I figure out how to live a good life in my fifties. You can learn more about me here. Thanks for visiting.
How can you develop your own creatively authentic style, whether you’re an artist, a writer, a YouTuber, or anyone else driven to create and share?
Here’s what I learned over ten years of developing my skills and style as an abstract acrylic artist, with Picasso as a more successful (!!!) and well-known example. While I’m writing here about painting, these elements support creative authenticity in writing and other domains too (like producing YouTube videos). I plan to use them to develop my point of view as a writer here on Substack, as a YouTuber, and as a creator on other venues and in other domains.
Developing your creatively authentic point of view is not necessarily going to support you in achieving 10,000+ subscribers or achieving meaningful monetization. What it will do, however, is ensure that you feel fully confident in sharing and promoting what you create. You will have more determination to succeed if you are producing writing, video, or visual art that feels personally valuable and uniquely yours. You will be less likely to let rejection turn you away from your work.
Five foundations of creative authenticity
1. Apprenticeship & imitation
When people start writing a Substack newsletter, or producing videos for YouTube, or doing other creative work for sharing online, they often focus on quickly achieving a sizeable audience and an ability to monetize. They don’t always take time to develop their skills and their point of view or to study what makes other creators’ work excellent and engaging.
Many creators want to skip past the part where they painstakingly develop the skills and discrimination they need to produce good work.1 In the apprenticeship and imitation phase, you may work through tutorials, take courses, and analyze the work of your favorite artists, writers, or video creators. This takes time and deliberate practice. Maybe you don’t need to do 10,000 hours of work, but you shouldn’t expect that as soon as you launch your first newsletter you will know how to craft writing that appeals to anyone at all, even your mom.
Is copying other people’s styles and structures a cheat? I don’t think so. It’s a way to build a foundation for your future creative achievements, not a way to do creatively authentic work when you’re just starting out. By attempting to reproduce someone’s style and the key elements that make their work excellent, you learn new skills. You learn what you do and do not like. You see how your version of something that has succeeded for someone else resonates with potential readers, viewers, or listeners. You develop an ability to evaluate your own work, and see where it could be improved.
imitation is not cheating
Some successful YouTubers suggest to new YouTubers that they should find videos that have “outperformed” (meaning they have far more views than the channel has subscribers) and then use such videos as the basis for their videos. They suggest mimicking the thumbnails, titles, and possibly even some of the content with slight variations. At first I thought this was terrible: “People should be creating their own unique work!” And then I realized starting with such apprenticeship and imitation was very similar to how I had learned to paint.
I spent years working through painting tutorials, from books and from YouTube and elsewhere. First I learned to create small representational paintings from Learn to Paint in Acrylics with 50 Small Paintings. I bought books on abstract acrylic painting and worked through countless paintings created by other people, in styles and color palettes that weren’t my own. Later, I learned to paint in the style of two of my favorite abstract painters, KR Moehr and Adele Sypesteyn by following their online tutorials. It felt frustrating to be producing paintings in other people’s styles, using their techniques. But it gave me a solid foundation for later creating my own style and point of view.
Who do you admire in your domain of creation?
What elements make their work engaging and excellent?
2. Transformative reinterpretation
If you are to express authenticity in your creations, you must go beyond merely reproducing what others have done. Your work will be inspired by your influences, but you will bring something new. You will uniquely contribute by transforming and reinterpreting what has come before you.
Picasso’s masterpiece Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (shown above), arguably the first cubist painting in history, was inspired by Henri Matisse’s Le Bonheur de vivre (The Joy Of Life), shown below. Every creator is influenced by those that came before them, but the best ones go beyond what they learned and contribute something creatively new.
Matisse’s fauvism—the use of bright colors, thick paint, and sensual images—was the basis for Picasso’s cubist paintings such as Les Demoiselles. Picasso took the sensual elements, the abstraction from reality, and the warm colors but then moved forward to make them his own, by experimenting with further abstracting human shapes into geometric forms.
What elements from your favorite creators do you want to use in your work?
How do you want to modify or expand upon them?
3. Personal provenance
Provenance means the beginning of something’s existence or its origin. You are the origin of your creative work. I’m not sure this is the right word for this aspect of creative authenticity; what do you think?
abstract art informed by mountain landscapes & an impatient personality
When my abstract painting began to evolve into the style it has now, I noted that my favorite paintings always had these elements:
Mostly earth tones, including forest greens, sky blues, tree trunk brown.
Angled horizons, suggesting mountain landscapes.
Visible brushstrokes, with movement and energy.
Layers of color and texture, creating subtle variations on the canvas.
These elements derived from my history and my temperament. The earth tones and angled horizons reflected my child- and teenhood in Colorado, growing up within driving distance of the Rocky Mountains, where I would spent my summers and winters hiking and skiing. I didn’t consciously add these to my paintings. They emerged as though from my subconscious visual memories.
The visible brushstrokes reflected my impatience in painting, where I would work quickly and with great energy, without solid plans for what might emerge. The layers of color and texture as well reflected my intuitive painting style in which I worked to bring an artwork to beauty and completion over time, without a plan, but with inspiration from the painters I had already learned from.
african influences in picasso’s art
Picasso brought African influences into his art. In the late 19th century as a result of imperialism, thousands of African art objects had made their way to Europe. They were not actually considered art by the majority of people and did not have value as art pieces. Picasso, however, found the aesthetics of African art to be a major source of inspiration, with its religious and ritual overtones, and with its flattened angles and distorted head shapes. You can see in Les Demoiselles faces that look like African masks.

Your most authentic work will reflect the unique experiences you’ve lived and the unique influences that have caught your attention.
What aspects of your life do you want to express through your creative work?
Find your favorite personal creations (writing, art, videos). What elements of your history or your temperament are already reflected there? How can you strengthen those elements in future creations?
4. Boundaries & constraint
Once I had learned to paint representationally (though never very well) I proceeded to paint abstract pieces, which was always my intention. But limited only in that it be abstract, I painted anything I felt like. I would do an abstract ocean landscape one day, with watercolor-like washes, and then a painting of abstract flowers the next with bold and visible brushstrokes. My paintings didn’t show any one style. They didn’t look like they came from one creator.
Facing an artistic crisis, I decided to establish a series of steps I would take for each painting, and limit myself to one style of painting, so that (I hoped) my point of view as an abstract artist could emerge. I chose the steps based on one painting that I felt was the best I had produced. It had received a curator’s recognition on an art site and even before that I knew that it was one of my very best works. It had all the elements of my emerging style in it: the suggestion of a mountain landscape, mostly neutral earth tones with some brighter colors for interest, many layers of texture and color, and an intuitive energy generated by creating it without any particular plan.

In his book Trust the Process, Artist and writer Shaun McNiff says:
Within the visual arts I find that focusing on a series of creations furthers the process of emanation. Images emerge from one another and build upon their predecessors. One thing grows out of another, and the individual pieces are generated by the overall energy of the series.
This is true not just in visual works but also for writing too. Constraining yourself to only producing a series of work that conforms to certain constraints paradoxically allows for more creativity and authenticity. Establishing boundaries for your work concentrates your creative power. On Substack, writers who say “I’m going to do 100 days of poems about items in my kitchen”2 will likely produce better, more authentic, more engaging output than those who think, “I’ll just write whatever I’m inspired to write, whenever I want.”
In his blue period, Picasso painted only with blues and blue-greens, warming up the palette in limited ways. The paintings expressed deep, melancholic emotions.
What series of work might you create?
What constraints and boundaries will you put on it to force you to find a deeper well of authenticity and creativity?
5. Repetition
Having addressed the first four foundational elements of creative authenticity, you now have a set of skills developed through apprenticeship, a way of transformatively reinterpreting your artistic influences, an understanding of how your unique history and personality can express itself, and a set of constraints on the work you will do in the near future. It’s time to get to work!
This is where you establish a rhythm of creation and consistency in your output. There is no schedule that will suit everyone. If you force yourself to produce too much too quickly you will likely become discouraged that you are creating what seems to you like junk. If you create too slowly and hold yourself to overly high standards before sharing, you will fail to progress in your skills and you will not learn what resonates with readers or viewers. You will miss out on the serendipity of creating something amazing through bringing work to completion again and again.
Personally, I am not into slow productivity and doing less, as recommended by so many self help gurus. I prefer quantity creativity instead. I suspect that we cannot plan our masterpieces. They arrive when they are ready. Our job is just to keep giving them an opportunity and channel for making their way into the world.
Picasso created 100 to 200 paintings during his Blue Period from 1901 to 1904, or maybe even more, depending on what counts. Several paintings that he completed during this time are considered masterpieces. By limiting himself by color palette and the emotional theme of melancholia, then repeating this many many times, he laid the foundation for creating original art that was authentic to him and creatively great.
What cadence of creation suits you?
How can you create enough to allow your best work an avenue while not overdoing it?
This week’s quote
Each of us finds our personal basis for exercising creative expression. What works for me may not apply to you, and discoveries made in oil painting may not translate to wood sculpture. The magic of expression emerges from the individual crucibles of personal experimentation. Hours, days, weeks, and sometimes months and years of frustrating work may be generating a realignment of elements, which gather together at a decisive moment, or in a fertile period, to generate a succession of new creations.
Shaun McNiff, Trust the Process: An Artist’s Guide to Letting Go
How will you develop creative authenticity?
I realized in writing this that in two of my creative areas—writing my newsletter here and creating and publishing YouTube videos—I need to go back to step one, apprenticeship and imitation. I haven’t spent enough time learning from successful writers and YouTubers yet.
Where are you in the development of your creative authenticity? What steps can you take to strengthen it?
If you’re on a creative journey, I’d love to hear about it! Leave a comment or send me a message.
Anne Zelenka is a painter, writer, technology startup refugee, and PhD statistician. She lives in Highlands Ranch, Colorado with her mother, adult daughter, four cats, and two dogs.
I speak from experience, as I’ve recently started a YouTube channel. I find myself wanting immediate virality and a quick path to monetization. I’m working on slowing down and putting effort into cultivating my authenticity as a YouTuber instead.
Check out The 100 Things Project for some inspiration around completing work in a series limited by constraints and boundaries.
This was such a beautiful and informative article, Anne! I love the sentence: "Constraining yourself to only producing a series of work that conforms to certain constraints paradoxically allows for more creativity and authenticity." It's a recent discovery for me and something I've been trying to do with my writing in the last few weeks. I used to fear that, if I set some boundaries for my writing, I would stop getting ideas for my articles. Instead, the very opposite is happening! I'm hit with way more ideas than before! Great read. I enjoyed reading about your painting process and experimentation, too.