The Crayon Van Manifesto

More about The Crayon Van Manifesto

I’ve always lived with this velocity—this sense that art isn’t a career or a pastime, but something you do in between everything else.
In the early hours before coffee.
Late at night when the world finally shuts up.
Whenever life looks the other way for five minutes.

I’ve learned to squeeze creativity out of the seams of the day the way some people squeeze toothpaste from an empty tube. You get good at it. You get fast. You improvise. And somewhere behind you, death keeps nudging you forward, reminding you that the door is coming, and that every scrap of creation is a happy accident snatched back from oblivion.

I used to think dead-end jobs were the solution. Work just enough to fund the habit. Pay for the basics. Keep the wolves away. Buy yourself a pocket of silence so you can make things without having to sell your soul at the bargain bin of the universe.

But time shrank.
And as the time shrank, the creativity—strangely—intensified.

I started doing what I call instant art:
throw it at the wall, call it art, don’t apologize.
Take the moment and wring it dry.

The image above is a good example—except it’s a lie told by a truth.
It’s AI, but the AI is imitating a real moment:
me, splattering molten crayons in the back of my company van on my break, trying to turn ten minutes of stolen time into a universe.

The real art, I’m realizing, isn’t the splatter.
It’s the refusal to stop making it.