547 - Find the Creative Voice You're Holding Back with Claire Keane

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0:45It's not about falling asleep. It's more about comfort, calm, and the joy of a good story. If you're new, try episode 84, All Animal Edition. It's a delightful introduction to the village's gentle pace and whimsy. You can listen to stories from the village of nothing much wherever you get your podcasts. For the longest time in my creative journey, I felt like what I was making just was so surface level. It didn't really feel like me. It kind of felt like trends and things that were going on in the industry and the people around me. I didn't feel what I felt like I was supposed to feel, which was like, this is mine.

1:29This is what I want to say. This is who I am. Think that missing piece is your creative voice. I think it's actually normal and okay to feel like that at the start of your journey. You're just kind of getting into it, participating, learning the ropes and what have you. But if you're ready to have a sense, get a sense of your creative voice, this episode is for you because today we have Claire Keane, the illustrator and author of the new book, Who Are You? If you don't know Claire, I saw this book and I instantly wanted to have her on the show before I ever found out that she's kind of creative royalty.

2:10Her dad, Glenn Keane, worked on some of the biggest Disney movies from the 90s, Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, huge role there. And then Claire herself has worked on the Disney movies Enchanted, Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, and Frozen. And then her grandfather, Bill Keen, was the guy who created the comic, The Family Circus. So she has been surrounded by creativity her whole life. I had an absolute blast in this conversation. There's so many takeaways as she tells her story, insights, action items about figuring out who are you as a person, as an artist. That's the name of her children's book.

2:55But really, that's the theme that we explore. And there's some really, really powerful stuff here, including at the end, I'm going to come back and bring a creative call to adventure, something you can do with stuff from this episode. And we're calling it You're Holding Back, which came from something that Claire told me after we had the chat. And I'm going to bring a little bit of that back when this is all wrapped up. You're going to love this. And I hope to have Claire back on the show sometime. Without any further ado, here is Claire Kane.

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6:10That's a full year to build your wardrobe and love it. And you will now available in Canada too. Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last. Go to quince.com slash pep talk. All one word for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash pep talk. Cause this is your second time living in France, right? Yeah. Do you feel different this time? Do you feel like a different person this time around? Oh, 100 % different. Really? Well, this time I'm here with my two kids. And so I'm living Paris as a mom. The first time that I came, I was 16 years old and I was living Paris as a daughter and then as an art student and just discovering it.

7:00And I'm still discovering it, but I just want to show my kids everything. You're discovering it through them, kind of. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm always like, oh, this is where my friends and I used to go for a drink after school. And just kind of trying to show them all the things that I was so excited about growing up. Yeah, that makes sense. But it feels like home. Yeah, it does. Also, it helps that my parents and my brother and his family also live here, although they're moving back in a few months. But it really has made the transition feel all the more solid. Yeah. It seems like – I wanted to talk about your latest Substack post called Love Yourself.

7:58feels kind of connected to the book that you have coming out too. But knowing a little bit about where you are right now and what you've been through, it seems like that time between being in France the first time and the time being there now, it seems like a lot happened in between those two things. That's why I asked, like, do you feel like a different person coming there? Cause you've been kind of on a journey. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, yeah. So when I moved from Paris to California in my twenties, I moved with my, um, ex-husband, my boyfriend at the time who ended up becoming my husband, who then became my ex-husband, um, and father to my kids.

8:45That's the story. That's the beginning of it.

8:51But it was, yeah, I moved back to California just thinking that it was going to be like, oh, it's just going to be good for my career just to kind of get a head start on my career because I knew that my dad had a lot of connections in Los Angeles and he was working on Tangled at the time. and so I was like oh that would just be a dream to be able to work on a on a fairy tale and so then Disney movie for people that aren't putting it together tangled oh yeah yeah yeah and so I um I was able to work on that after college and that really just it was such an amazing way to start my my life in in the working world just surrounded by really inspiring people and getting to work with my dad and working on Tangle I mean it was it was honestly like it was one when it was just talking about knowing yourself it that was such a motivator for me or like a conduit for me to understand myself better.

10:02Um, working on that movie. Yeah. Yeah. Somehow I didn't know who the character of Rapunzel was. So I, I wanted to go home and see how she could be a real person. And, and so I took this sketchbook home with me and I, I decided to just document everything I was during the day and kind of translate it into Rapunzel world. And that, that moment was a chance for me to really discover, oh, oh, I'm really kind of just laying around at home, like not doing anything, but I'm actually doing things. I'm like, I'm putting clothes away, which really didn't happen very often. But when I would do it, I was singing while I was doing it.

10:56So I'm like, okay, that's a sketch. Or me drawing Rapunzel, drawing it in bed, and then realizing, oh, okay, that's me drawing Rapunzel, who's drawing herself in bed. And it's just like this way of starting to kind of go deeper into the character of Rapunzel ended up taking me deeper into my knowledge of myself in that little comic that you're talking about, Know Yourself. or I didn't even know if it I would call it a comic it's just some sort of post um yeah I think it's kind of like a comic yeah yeah yeah I think of it that way yeah I I talk about like how I I was waking up in the middle of the night with these with these panic attacks which I didn't know at the time were panic attacks and you'd wake up screaming I'd wake up screaming yeah have you ever had that i don't know if i've had that i've i've had waking up crying a few times have you ever had that i have had that where i have tears on my pillow yeah yeah i find that fascinating it's just yeah that whole subconscious world um and what that means to us and so i ended up going to see a hypnotherapist so I could understand a little bit about what was going on in my subconscious that was only coming out at night, but not coming out during the day.

12:35Because during the day, you didn't relate to that. You said that you didn't feel like an anxious person. You didn't feel like you were having panic or anything like that. And then you would wake up with these screaming episodes and you were trying to figure out what was going on there. And you know, what's really funny is I really didn't understand that until I started drawing the comic. Like I was like, Oh yeah. I was trying to illustrate how, how unanxious I was. So I'm like drawing myself in this messy whirlwind of a mess, which is my life. Um, and it was even More so when I was in my 20s. But while I was doing it, I had all these different examples.

13:21I had one of like me leaving the house with the door open and my daughter was like, hey, wait, I was like, we just get clear. These are not examples of somebody who is not anxious. Like none of this looks like somebody is actually looks like somebody who is anxious, who has anxiety, who is just literally overwhelmed. And that came through as I was drawing that little post on Substack, which I think is, I'm just so thankful for having this gift of being able to draw and storytelling because it's a way of getting to know myself better than have I not had it. Yeah. So I love all this. I want to dive a little bit deeper into it.

14:12The thing that comes to mind for me that's been on my mind a lot lately is this thing you hear actors say sometimes, like really great actors. I've heard them say in interviews a bunch of times like that every role that they got kind of came to them at the right time. And it was allowing them to work out things that were happening in their real life. and I often think I don't feel like being an illustrator is anything like the glamour of being an actor but or the acclaim or whatever but I often think that these two roles are very very similar so you know in the same way like yeah do you know what I mean oh yeah 100 % I've always just taken my my work very much like an actor like oh I'm really going to get into the the role of the character and like live in it in my drawings yeah um my dad is an animator and he would always um refer to himself as an actor with a pencil oh really I didn't know that yeah and for people that don't know maybe just mention who your dad is and we'll we might get to this later, but you've, you've talked about him a couple of times.

15:32So maybe just tease that a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. My dad is a, is a, or he was at Disney. He's a, an animator, Glenn Keane, and he designed Ariel and the beast. And he's a little bit of a legend. Let's just say that. Yes. Okay. Well, technically he is a legend. He is a legend. Disney gave him that title. Oh, really? Yeah. he's a legend yeah um that that makes sense i but i didn't know he said that and but i feel like that i didn't it didn't really occur to me for a long time i think i started thinking about it when my kids pointed out that when i'm drawing a character that i'm often making the face that i'm drawing yeah do you do that oh yeah all the time yeah yeah i'm doing it subconsciously i don't even realize I'm doing it, but I'm like trying to, there's some kind of subconscious thing that I'm trying to emote this text or whatever it is.

16:33Yeah. And, and there's something about the pose of like having to feel it in my body in order to draw it. Um, there's something, there's something about that, some sort of, um, embodied embodiment of the character while I'm doing it. But I like this thing of, for me, this was a kind of important shift in my creative work. For a long time, I think there was just a lot of anxiety about trying to make it, trying to be good enough, trying to get jobs, trying to succeed at the jobs I was getting and all that sort of thing. And then eventually I started to see it, even the commercial stuff as a more personal thing.

17:17Like I was saying with these actors, like trying to see that I'm really drawn to this idea of, I've heard researchers call it questing where you're seeing your outside external journey as intimately connected to your inner, inner journey. and that that's kind of a that's about as spiritual as i get these days um i try not to over spiritualize stuff because i'm very like drawn to the symbolic and i can really fantasize in there so i try not to go i try not to go off the deep end but i like that vision of kind of a spiritual life of what i'm going through has a connection to who i need to become or or what i'm who you know who I want to be um and so I'm curious if you have anything else to say about like yeah um Tangled in particular um well just exactly what you said like I just Tangled in particular was was very much that just because I was able to kind of live through the the eyes of this character Rapunzel and kind of just the main, the main struggle was trying to make her relatable to, to an audience.

18:40Like she's the character that was in her tower, locked away in her tower. And so like, how do we make that like somebody that we could actually be relating to? And so that, that made sense. And so that was that, but, but I think that being able to recognize that everything that you're going through, whether that be work stuff or like things that are happening in life, that there's an actual reason why you're going through it. Like it's such a gift to be able to see it as meaningful. When I was in the middle of my divorce, it was kind of this sudden and kind of traumatic moment and and i was having a really hard time accepting it and um have you have you ever been to uh this cafe called gratitude cafe in los angeles i don't know i don't i don't think so tell me about it well so gratitude there's one in the bay area and they have a few in los angeles Anyway, so I go to this cafe.

19:56I'm like, like drowning my sorrows in like matcha latte or something. And this is during the divorce or. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I've always been a pretty like optimistic person. But at this point I was just like, there's no future. Like, like nothing, nothing means anything like nihilistic. And this at the cafe, they have this thing where the waiters come and they ask you a question. And you can respond to them or you can just like keep it for yourself. It's so hippie and so Los Angeles. Yeah.

20:41But it was life changing because the question that day was, what do you believe in? and I just like well I I mean I know what I want to believe in like do I believe in God I don't know I mean I I grew up really religious and um have since kind of gone away from that and but I want to believe wait do I want to believe in God I don't I don't even know if I want to Do I? I know it. I want to believe that things are going to work out. I want to believe that my life has meaning. And so then I just sat there and I like really, really thought to the very end of it and thought about all the times that I believed that.

21:37That my life, what I was going through had meaning and thinking about this moment. Okay, if I think about my life as having meaning right now, then I search for the meaning and I find that meaning. And if I don't, if I decide that life doesn't have meaning, then everything I'm going through right now is just happenstance and, you know, just get through it. And there is no meaning. And so then I realize, oh, this is just a choice. this is a choice that I can make like that my life has meaning and everything that I'm doing has some sort of meaning to where I'm supposed to be and and the greater good of at least my life hopefully the world too but um and that just turned everything around and and I haven't looked back like oh no it's a choice I can choose to have meaning or I can choose to not have meaning And that was very much also kind of like hearkening back to that know yourself post that when I went in that hypnotherapy session, I'm like recounting it for people who haven't seen it.

22:51But so I come across my grandmother who had passed away in the signotherapy session. And and I'm like trying to see why I'm having these like. Nocturnal panic attacks. And she just kind of says, oh, don't worry so much. I'm like, God, what kind of advice is that? I didn't think about that. That's a great, great idea. Really? that's what my subconscious has to say to me um and so profound yeah profound and but then i am in front of this really dark scary forest and i feel the fear and anxiety and and so then i take her advice and i take one foot in front of the other and go through the the forest and as I do all of the shadows just illuminate and I realize inside the shadows are these gorgeous jewels and the forest is filled with jewels but only visible as I walk through it and um and so when I that day at a gratitude cafe when they were asking about what I believe in it I went back to that image like no I want to believe in those jewels I do believe in those jewels in the darkness that that's very powerful and uh thanks for sharing that it's like I really loved it I also was thinking that this waiter is asking you that question and then you're doing all of this stuff in your head and they're like, and are you going to order anything?

24:47Sorry, I just triggered an existential crisis. It's amazing. And I remember just sitting at, like I ended up finishing the meal, thinking about it throughout the whole meal, ended up going to my car and sitting at, in my, at the driving, at the steering wheel just like, wait a second, just sitting in the, in the parking lot for maybe like an hour and a half thinking about this and coming to this conclusion very logically. And I'm not a very logical person, but this was very much like, if you do this, this, this, this, there it is. I love that. It also reminds me of, uh, in your post, the know yourself post, which we'll put in the show notes.

25:35You're telling this story of kind of being, by the way, no judgment, I'm a very messy person. I'm super ADHD, very chaotic. So I very much relate, but you show like this very like messy studio and life and all this, and you're kind of oblivious to all this stuff happening. Then you're having these episodes at night where you're waking up screaming. Then you go to the hypnotherapist and you're trying to work out what's going on there. You see that giant dark forest and decide to walk in it and you see all these shining gems. And it really reminds me of, I don't know how, if you're in touch with like Jungian psychology, but that's one of the, that lines up right with what he says about the shadow is where the gold is like you have to go in there and and i think it's perfectly illustrated by what you said around um you get to choose to walk in there and look for that stuff or not and i think i totally i totally relate to it's for me it's kind of a way of thinking about life as a story and seeing that these conflicts that are in my path i can choose to try to avoid them or if i if i engage in kind of a story lens, I can assume that this conflict is there to change me in the way that I need to be changed.

27:00Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that I, I find that, uh, really profound that whole. Yeah. And take the, take the wisdom that all of these events that happen in our lives, take the wisdom and use it for something meaningful because, because you believe that there's something meaningful in it. Yeah. I love that. It also reminds me a little bit of Tangled, of her having to really like liberate herself out of this scenario and it being, going into the dark woods and everything feeling very, very overwhelming and scary. And then really finding life there. There's a lot of parallels. Yeah, there are. It's interesting.

27:46There are. And also at the very end where she recognizes herself within her art and realizing that she had been drawing herself within all of these murals that she had painted. There's so many layers upon layers upon layers. Do you feel like having gone through that, if you think back to when you were in France the first time to when you're there now and you've gone through all of this stuff that really seems like it nearly broke you do you feel like what do you feel like you gained from that experience what do you feel like you've brought into where you are now from all that as an artist and as a person even hmm that's such a big answer like to put it to put it into something cohesive that I could say I would say something about resilience I feel like uh I think the most difficult part was packing all those boxes the 15 years in my house and and doing it alone like that's something that I would have normally had my ex-husband like doing with me and bills and stuff like that or like building furniture like those type of things in that little in those sketches I put like putting up the Christmas lights for me that was like such a huge thing being able to put up the Christmas lights by myself I was like oh oh my gosh, I am a free woman.

29:32Like I am capable. Um, uh, so that, uh, something about, something about being able to find my own, uh, my own strength, despite feeling so weak. And then creatively, I felt so inspired during that time. Like, inspired in a way that I hadn't been before. Like everything up till then had been like four specific projects. Suddenly I was inspired for my, for my life and wanted to start making something much more personal. And, And it's actually been a while that I've been wanting to start doing like a graphic memoir. And it wasn't until just the Know Yourself post, it came out of nowhere. I was actually writing a different post about traditional medium and the undo button and stuff like that, which I'm still trying to figure out how to write.

30:50But I was writing it and then I was just doing a little side blurb about my, what do you call those? The book plates that I was signing that I had written Know Yourself. I was like, oh, and I'm going to be signing these Know Yourself book plates. And I just, as soon as I typed out Know Yourself, I'm like, why? why why know yourself like what is it about this idea that does tie into who are you my latest book that makes me that just fascinates me to no end like what is it and that's when when I started thinking about oh it was when I went to the hypnotherapist which really was because of the the panic attacks which I didn't really know were panic attacks and uh and so I thought that it was just gonna take like two days of sketching and then two weeks later I was like doing all these drawings and and not sleeping and like I don't know why I'm doing this but I love it I love it and I miss it like I want to have another project that like pulls me like that it sounds like uh that journey gave you identity, helped you know yourself both as a person and what you were capable of and that you were a full person.

32:20And then also identity as a creative person where your authorship was kind of born. I think in my, in my path, and it seems to be the case for a lot of creative people, the thing that pulls you into the kind of art that you want to make, a lot of it's like aesthetic or the scene or your, the surface of it's just cool. And you just, you know, rich and you want to be part of that. You want to be that kind of thing. And then hopefully at some point you go through something that gives you something to say where it's not, where like, I've even seen people get frustrated where they lose. They're like, I'm just not passionate about drawing anymore.

33:06I just want to write or whatever it is. And I always think, well, you've built this skill of drawing. Let that be a skill and then have the passion be like, I want to say something. And then use that skill. It seems like that's kind of what happened. Do you feel like there was any other way to unlock that other than going through this stuff? Or was it just that?

33:36I, I don't think, I think so, but I don't think I would have ever dared to go through it. Right. Like, I think had I, um, well, it's getting like really personal, but like, feel free to share whatever you want, but you know, also you don't have to spill everything if you don't. Just thinking about it because it was so much about the divorce. And I think that had I had I made the decision to.

34:08To get out of the marriage prior to it blowing up. I think I could have ended up going through some sort of similar journey, but I don't think that I was strong enough. I don't think that I had the wherewithal. The wherewithal, like, I mean, as soon as I would have been faced with putting up the Christmas lights by myself, I would have been like, no, I'm out. Like, let's stay together. That's so funny. Like, oh, you love me? No, I just need somebody to put these damn Christmas lights up. Exactly. That's so funny.

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