Creative Resilience Week 3: Imagining like a Visionary
What you dare to see when you stop looking
Welcome to week 3 of SEE YOU’s 31 Days of Creative Resilience, where we gently tend to our creativity during the month of January ❄️ To unlock the full list of daily prompts for each week, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.
Catching up on past prompts? Check out Week 1’s “Documenting like a Voyager” and Week 2’s “Experimenting like a Shapeshifter.”
Looking for other ways to tend to your creativity this winter? You might enjoy my seasonal companion zine Winter Practice, full of prompts and rituals for January-March 2026.
Week 3: Imagining like a Visionary
Joan Miró’s art found me during one of the nastiest colds of my life.
In 2017 my partner E and I went on our first international vacation together. We visited three countries across Europe in the span of a week, a fatal planning error that I am now wise enough to know is too tiring for a highly sensitive person like myself. As if this energetic miscalculation was not enough, we partied our hearts out at our friends’ wedding before our trip and went out clubbing our first night in Barcelona (please keep in mind I was 25, lol).
By the time we got to the sunny island of Mallorca, my body was shutting down and my sinuses were completely blocked. E picked up an assortment of cold medicine from the pharmacy and I took a sleeping pill that knocked me out for fourteen hours. Very little beach time was had during our stay, but I didn’t want to leave the island without seeing Joan Miró’s museum, Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró.
The museum was on the same street as our Airbnb, so we walked over on our last morning in Mallorca. Though the exhibits were closed, I immediately felt connected to Miró’s spirit just from roaming the outdoor sculpture garden and peeking into his former studio still filled with sketches and paints. I felt a great intentionality and expression behind his marks combined with his selective bold use of primary colors. I could make up stories about Miró’s symbols and figures, or simply understand them as fragments of his heart and spirit. His work looked like pretty or primitive pictures, but I could see entire worlds.
Miró’s art didn’t cure me of my cold (I was beholden to decongestants for the entire rest of the trip, unfortunately!) But being in that pained bodily state allowed me to better see his art, to realize the image beyond the visible. And it makes sense, because the man created from a place of distress too.
Miró’s most famous series of paintings, The Constellations, were created during the onset of World War II. While much anxiety and distress swirled his external world, he retreated into himself to excavate what was there.
“I felt a deep desire to escape. I closed myself within myself purposely. The night, music, and the stars began to play a major role in suggesting my paintings.”
- Miró on the process of creating The Constellations
Miró to me represents a true Visionary, an artist who was focused on capturing and distilling conceptual treasures from within. The man could’ve cared less about the aesthetics of his time—at one point he claimed he wanted to “assassinate painting” altogether! Even his name represents the archetype: in Catalan, “miro” roughly translates to “I see”, while in Korean “miro” means maze.
I see the maze. What’s more visionary than that?
Miró taught me that sometimes we see most clearly when our capabilities are compromised. When we're forced to look past the surface of things, that’s when we get a glimpse of the world within.
Before we dive into this week’s prompts, I want to clarify that I never want you to think there is a right or wrong way for you to do these exercises. That’s especially true this week, where the focus is to follow the course of your instincts without questioning the goodness of the result.
Trust that whatever comes out on the page represents something true within you, as you are right now. And if you still worry that you need to make art “the right way”, channel Miró’s spirit of “assassinating painting”!
Prompt for January 18
Create your own constellation a la Miró.
To get started, create twelve dots scattered throughout the page. Start connecting them with marks—straight lines, curved lines, symbols, and shapes. Add any and all symbols you love to doodle. This is your sky!
Have a plethora of art supplies and want to add color? Try adding a textured gradient background on the page using wet-on-wet watercolor before you begin your lines. Use two or three bold paint or crayon shades to fill in some of the shapes you’ve created on the page.