Robbyn Layne McGill is a teacher and workshop facilitator based in Amsterdam. Robbyn’s upcoming 6-week online TLA Network class, Kissing the Muse: A Messy, Magical, Art-Making Adventure, starts October 18.

Art feeds and enriches our souls in the same way food nourishes our bodies. Reading books, watching films, looking at paintings, and listening to music or poetry can elevate everyday reality to something sublime. But, because we are more than consumers, we also crave opportunities to contribute something of ourselves to the conversation. 

Unfortunately, we don’t find many opportunities to express ourselves without judgment, criticism, or comparison these days. Our society seems to have created a hierarchy around what constitutes a “worthy” contribution. So, only those who have gained the proper validation— through publication, professionalism, or fame—have “permission” to create. 

The rest of us are cut off from something we really need and therefore crave—the direct experience of our vital life force through uninhibited self-expression. To see and know ourselves through our own creativity, to play, like children, with materials, only for the joy of discovering who we are, what we like, what we don’t like—this truly feeds us. 

Images speak to us on a soul level. They bypass our rational, critical mind and allow us to feel whatever they evoke in us, intuitively. Unfortunately, that’s also how advertising works. So, it’s incredibly powerful to work with images—even if we identify more as writers who create literary images than visual artists.  We are all visually literate, and through collage, we can create our own language and meaning. 

When we learn to reappropriate the media and propaganda used to “sell” us who we are, we can turn it on its head. By cutting up glossy magazines and collaging commercially printed detritus, we change it into something else, not an externally directed expectation of who we should compare ourselves to or aspire to be, but our own reflection instead. 

Making collages, or “muse mirrors,” as I call them, is the core of my “kissing the muse” creative practice and course. “Who am I? “What do I really want, need, and value?” It’s so surprising how the answers bubble up easily through this practice.

Collage is accessible to everyone. You don’t need to know how to paint or draw to work visually. Different disciplines can inform each other, so my course also includes other expressive art modalities, like music, poetry, writing, and movement. It also brings in everyday modes of creative expression, like food and relationships, to stretch your definition of “creative practice.”

So, kissing the muse is an interdisciplinary, tangible, spiritual practice that puts us back in our bodies. When we’re making art simply to know ourselves, we’re connected to the moment, through our hands, mind, body, and spirit—cutting and pasting, touching and feeling, manipulating materials to make sense of our world, inner and outer. It’s so natural and human. We become collaborators with the ultimate reality: infinite, ceaselessly dynamic, swirling, potential. Through expressive art-making, we create intimacy and connection with ourselves, heal our hurt parts, and bring our inner light out to shine. And by doing this, we add our innate value as unique human beings to the world, which feeds us all.