If you’ve ever felt pressured to turn your whole creative life into a neat “brand,” you are absolutely not alone.
So many of us—artists, witches, multi-passionate shapeshifters—are quietly carrying the same fear:
Maybe my work is too inconsistent. Too weird. Too spiritual. Too messy.
Maybe who I really am will never fit inside an algorithm, a genre, or a marketing funnel.
We’re told to choose a niche, to be legible, to stay on message. We’re taught that the only way to be “successful” is to become easy to categorize and easy to consume.
But what if the parts of you that refuse to be categorized are not a problem?
What if they’re the very source of your power?
Over the last few years, my own practice has been wrestling with these questions. And in a recent conversation with my friend and collaborator Colin Frangicetto—artist, musician, and member of Circa Survive who also moves through personas like ADHD, SpaceCase, and ColinCosmic—we went deep into the tension between branding and chaos, legibility and vastness, identity and dissolution.
This episode of Your Art Is A Spell became a portal into a different way of thinking about creative life: not as something you must shrink and streamline, but as something you can let expand, fragment, and recombine on its own terms.
In the newest episode, we’re diving into:
How monikers and personas create brave space
Why Colin chooses different names for different projects, and how pseudonyms can act as masks, shields, and portals that let you explore art you “aren’t supposed” to make.The friction between audience, algorithm, and agency
Colin shares his playful animosity toward “the audience as marketing entity” and his lifelong irritation with genres, categories, and the ways our systems flatten people into consumable units.The courage to leave a known identity behind
What it actually feels like to walk away from a well-known name or band history, and why being recognized can become a creative net that keeps you stuck in survival mode.Fear of being forgotten and the relief of surrender
A vulnerable story about psychedelics, spirituality, annihilation, and how dissolving the fear of being forgotten opened the door to a more free, less obsessive relationship with art and legacy.ADHD art practice: collage, digital hoarding, and excavation
Colin talks about his “Inset” series—multi-layered digital collages made from screenshots and daily internet intake—and how he uses archive, abstraction, and intuitive excavation to find the image that already exists inside the chaos.Retrocausality, determinism, and trusting the subconscious
We explore the idea that time and creative decisions might not be as linear as we think, and how letting the subconscious drive can help you stop over-editing yourself into a narrow aesthetic box.Research mode, capitalism fatigue, and the struggle to release work
Input/output cycles, periods of deep experimentation, and the friction of trying to share art inside formal, capitalist structures that constantly ask you to be more “sellable.”Circa Survive’s hiatus, reunion, and live music as spiritual reset
Colin speaks about the band’s break, the mending of friendships, and how playing loud music in front of people who know it feels like the closest thing to church he’s ever experienced.Full-time artist life, grief, and carving out time for love
We talk about losing beloved animal companions, the grind of keeping yourself afloat as a full-time artist, and the desire for more space and stability to be with partners, friends, and other beings we care for.
At the core of this episode is a simple but radical invitation:
You do not have to become a perfectly polished, easily marketed version of yourself to make important art. You do not have to sacrifice your complexity, your weirdness, or your chaos on the altar of legibility.
You are allowed to be many things, under many names, moving through many worlds.
Just as artist residencies can act as portals that pull your practice out of survival mode, the refusal to flatten yourself into a brand can act as a spiritual and creative technology. It interrupts the story that says, “I must be simple to be seen” and replaces it with “My vastness is allowed to exist—even here, even now.”
This conversation is for you if:
You’ve ever felt “too multi-passionate” or “too inconsistent” for the internet.
You’ve been told to choose a niche and it makes your whole body tighten.
You’re curious about using personas, monikers, and alter-egos as artistic tools.
You’re wrestling with legacy, memory, and the fear of being forgotten.
You want practical, lived examples of artists navigating ADHD, capitalism, and creative freedom without pretending everything is neat or easy.
You can watch the full episode on YouTube (above) or listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.