Further Into The Water
June 21, 2025
There’s a point in every creative journey when the familiar stops being enough.
At first, we stay close to shore. It’s where we learn to use our tools, where we gain confidence, where we begin to shape something that resembles our voice. There’s nothing wrong with this part—it’s necessary. But eventually, if you're paying attention, you'll start to feel a subtle shift. The gestures you once relied on feel stale. The ideas you once circled with excitement begin to dull in your hands. What used to feel bold now feels careful. Predictable.
That’s the moment when the water calls you further in.
To really hit upon something great in an artwork—not just polished or well-executed, but truly resonant—you have to be willing to go beyond what you know. Past your habits. Past your comfort. Into the uncertain, unmarked terrain that asks more from you than you've ever given before.
It’s a quiet, sometimes terrifying threshold. Because out there, nothing is guaranteed. There’s no audience clapping. No mentor to validate your direction. You’re no longer making things the way you know how—you’re trying to make something you've never made, by doing things you've never done. And that means risk. That means discomfort. It means you might fail, and fail deeply.
But this is where art starts to come alive.
You have to let go of the parts of you that want control. You have to be willing to follow instincts that don’t make immediate sense. Sometimes the path leads through confusion, through work that feels awkward or ugly or wrong. But if you keep going, if you stay open, you begin to sense something else—a pulse beneath the surface. A thread you’ve never touched before. A kind of truth that only reveals itself when everything polished has been stripped away.
This is the territory of real creative growth, and no map exists for it. Each artist has to find their own way through. But one thing is certain: you won’t find greatness if you keep circling the same waters. You have to be braver than that. You have to surrender your reliance on what has worked before, and move toward what doesn’t yet have a name.
It’s like swimming out where you can no longer touch the bottom. Your legs no longer anchored, your breath not quite steady. But then—suddenly—you catch a new current. One that carries you somewhere unexpected. Somewhere real.
And maybe that’s the point. Not to create something that simply “works,” but to create something that moves—something that changes you in the process. Because if it changes you, there’s a good chance it might change someone else too.
So go further. Even when it’s uncomfortable. Especially when it’s uncomfortable. That’s where the next version of your art is waiting.
Not at the edge.
But deeper in.
The Christopher Mudgett archive collection is the only one in the world to present the artist’s up-to-date painted, sculpted, engraved and illustrated œuvre and a precise record—through sketches, studies, drafts, notebooks, photos, books, films and documents—of the creative process.

© 2025 MUDGETT ARCHIVE