Cover image: Mia Funk at work on Portrait of Marie Darrieussecq. Bonus video with the artist talking about her creative process at the end of article.
What drives you to keep returning to the canvas each day?
When I’m painting, I like to think I’m trying to solve a problem and want to see something I haven’t seen before. It’s a kind of dance with my imagination, and I have to go along for the ride and see what emerges spontaneously without too much thinking or getting in the way of where my imagination is going. So, how do you create a different perspective on something you already know and show it in a new light? That search is always my starting point.
In a world filled with instant imagery, what value do you see in the deliberate pace of painting a portrait?
Yes, I feel it’s important to be able to breathe. Anyone can see that we’re moving from a society driven by language and the written word to one propelled by images, video, and a return to the oral tradition. The amount of data being stored is now doubling every two years. The dominance of multimedia platforms like YouTube and TikTok, as well as AI-driven storytelling, means that every day we are bombarded with thousands of moving images. The inundation of these images makes us, at once, visually more advanced than previous generations, while simultaneously diminishing our ability to truly see and exercise our imaginations. What do we do when every picture has already been imagined and can be viewed at the click of a mouse? And it all flows by faster than the eye can see? We’re drowning in data and starved of knowledge. Deliberative seeing and critical thinking are essential skills that we need to teach and hold onto. And I think long-form immersive paintings, as well as in-depth conversations like we do in the podcasts, are paths back to slower ways of seeing and more reflective ways of thinking.
Your portraits often convey a sense of interiority—almost like memory captured on canvas. What guides your decision on how much to reveal and how much to obscure in a portrait?
I think that interior quality is important. The paintings are really journeys to the interior, and I am fascinated by the interior landscape, our memories, and the dreaming mind. I am always trying to paint from the inside out.
Laurent Le Bon, President of Centre Pompidou, Fmr. President of Musée Picasso
What inspired you to start The Creative Process?
After years of helping to launch cultural centers, conferences, founding magazines, and making arts documentaries alongside my painting and storytelling, I decided to build The Creative Process back in 2016. It was launched as an exhibition at the Sorbonne, Panthéon-1 in Paris, and has travelled to other universities and venues. It’s designed to be a record of our time and, through the insights shared, we aim to inspire this and future generations on their creative journeys. I’ve found that students just starting out are hungry for this interdisciplinary, intergenerational knowledge.
The Creative Process was born out of a desire to celebrate progressive intellectual and artistic practices that inspire human resilience and unlock potential in young people, encouraging their empathic imagination and an open mindset. The platform promotes the humanities through art, literature, poetry, music, dance, film, podcasts, exhibitions, and conversations with well-known artists, writers, and creative thinkers. Through this kind of storytelling, we’ve celebrated culture, history, civic engagement, and shown the important legacy of the arts and humanities, how they provide spiritual and intellectual nourishment, and enrich our lives. At a time when universities are increasingly prioritizing STEM, we say that both the humanities and sciences are essential elements of a well-rounded education and promote happier, more engaged global citizens.
Those collective insights can help young people find their voices, become the artists, leaders, and inventors of tomorrow who will find the solutions to today’s problems. I’ve found students are hungry for this interdisciplinary, intergenerational knowledge and want to know how to get to where they want to go, and we’re here to help them achieve that.
And I feel fortunate to always be learning from so many talented and passionate people sharing their insights with us and with students because it makes me hopeful for the future to be surrounded by so many who have devoted their lives to projects that are larger than themselves.
Inaugural exhibition of The Creative Process, Sorbonne, Panthéon-1, Paris pictured with her painting L’Heure Bleu
You’ve turned dialogue itself into a form of art. How do you prepare to interview someone? What are you listening for that might not be in their words?
For me, it all begins with conversation. Very few things are created without some form of dialogue, collaboration, curiosity, and engagement with other people. In the beginning, I conducted the interviews on my own. Now I share this experience with students and professors who often join as co-hosts to add a different perspective. We also co-produce podcasts with Stanford University, professors, and leaders in their field. One of the missions of our project is One Generation Inspiring Another. So the knowledge sharing goes both ways.
I think the skill of interviewing is important, but so is the art of listening as a life skill. I prefer the word conversation. The capacity to receive and to learn from what is in front of you, that’s the way you make connections with people. That’s how you get inspired, and listening is a very important part of the learning process.
We interviewed the portrait artist Jonathan Yeo together, and he said he thinks of each painting as a record of the evolving relationship between artist and sitter. Do you view your portraits as records of evolving relationships?
I am interested in the relationship between the artist and the subject, as well as the viewer and what goes on in their imagination. I try to take this further by immersing myself in the person’s body of work and life. I try to weave what I have learned about their creative process into the painting. It might be things they’ve said, motifs, symbols, or themes from their work. I did two portraits of Hilary Mantel, one with Thomas Cromwell, and a double portrait of George Saunders, and an artwork inspired by his collection, Tenth of December. Close readers of their works can find echoes of their writing woven into those portraits. After interviewing Paul Auster, I did a polyptych portrait inspired by his novel 4 3 2 1.
Marie Darrieussecq spoke to me of dreams and landscapes: “Take dreams, wild animals, and stars. These three things have something in common: they exist. Another common point: we forget them. Dreams exist in us. Wild animals exist beside us. We forget them because it would be chaotic if we thought about them. There are 20,000 lions and 5,000 tigers left on the planet. When the last elephant has disappeared, we will miss it. The Tasmanian tiger is already missed. We do not yet know how metaphysically desolate a planet without wild animals will feel to us.” And so I painted a double image of her, Marie and her double, with a white tiger in a kind of landscape reminiscent of her novel White.
At work on Portrait of Marie Darrieussecq
To your question, they are also literally evolving relationships where we’re now friends and we have gone on to collaborate on projects, such as the illustrations I’ve done and the short film I made of Etgar Keret’s stories. They come back as guest editors of The Creative Process Arts & Literary Journal, and I’ve also presented my art and stories at their events, so that is something interesting about our project, which goes beyond traditional journalism.
How do you think your subjects experience seeing themselves through your eyes—through your interpretation? Has anyone ever reacted in a surprising way?
Hilary Mantel said of her portrait, “It’s so intriguing, strange and ghostly, I really like it. It seems a very good account of what goes on during the creative process. When I worked with the stage production [of Wolf Hall] I had to work hard to remember the characters would be visible in the middle distance. My natural range is just as you paint it: a table top away. I see every breath and every blink. What a strange set of illusions we work with.”
In our interview, she told me, “Dreams are very important to me. I have good recall of them and I record them, and I know I am in a good place to write when my dreams become big and transpersonal.” And so, I tried to capture her preoccupation with dreams in the painting and included a ghostly, almost transparent Thomas Cromwell, the subject of her trilogy Wolf Hall.
Portraiture is ancient; podcasting is new media. What challenges and opportunities arise when you move between these media, and how do their differences shape what you hope to reveal about your guests? Why do you choose to paint some of the guests from your podcast?
The kind of conversations we have really harken back to radio broadcasting, so I think of it as a return to old media in a new light. I was just naturally drawn to make their portraits or art inspired by their work and our conversations. The way the interviews and artworks are in dialogue in exhibitions of The Creative Process and my environmental paintings is that they include projections, and an immersive soundscape experience with interview recordings and music. The soundscapes give the images weight and bring guests from different disciplines together, and we have hundreds of hours of recordings, so each visit to the exhibition provides a different aesthetic and educational experience. You can hear a soundscape about the arts here and an environmental one here.
Your portraits often reveal a sense of inner life. How do you decide what to reveal and what to obscure?
I want to paint from the inside out, not the outside in. To give an impression and share what I feel, almost the afterburn of experience, and it’s why I’m drawn to transparencies.
How has your visual perception influenced your artistic choices, particularly in capturing phenomena like floaters?
I suffer from myopia, and there was a period when I would see large sunspots. I still get these kinds of floaters, so these are motifs that come into my paintings. The style is also literally the way I see the world. I have a few different ways when I do portraits, sometimes it’s a bit more solid. But in terms of my oil paintings, I use semi-transparent washes inspired by some of the techniques I learned before I transitioned entirely to oil paint. I learned watercolor, which is dependent on washes, and I learned the old fresco technique as well, which gives off a kind of powdery light and lightness that’s not traditionally associated with oils. So some of these techniques I bring over into the technique of oil painting that may perhaps make it a little bit interesting, different, and surreal sometimes.
Do you approach painting well-known creatives differently than lesser-known voices? What remains consistent, and what changes?
When I am painting a portrait, I don’t think about their notability, but I try to absorb their body of work and life, and reflect on the things that have been important to them throughout their life. I want to paint more everyday heroes, like teachers and people behind the scenes, that I call the “invisible arts.” Something that John Steinbeck said in reference to teachers is “I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.” But also editors, librarians, producers, all these behind-the-scenes people who really help make things happen and nurture projects should be celebrated.
In your series The Audience, why did you invert the traditional viewer-subject relationship? How does this series relate to your podcast work and your responsibility to both historical and contemporary audiences?
I did not set out to create an inversion with the Audience paintings, which may feature over twenty people in one painting, where the people who would normally be on stage are now in the audience. First, I absolutely love painting faces. Faces tell stories. They allow you to discover a person. I think we’re our most fascinating when we are unaware of ourselves, when we are focused on something outside of ourselves. That’s why children and non-human animals are so endlessly captivating; they are just who they are. They are not presenting a mask to the world. The more famous a person becomes, the harder it is to capture these moments. One thing all these artists share is focus and a respect for the artists they’ve learned from and they’ve collaborated with. In the dark, with their faces illuminated, in the audience, I feel we can get an honest glimpse of who they are as artists before the veil of fame obscures the scene.
The Audience – 30th Anniversary of the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival
Some of your works echo past artistic movements or cultural icons. How do these references dialogue with the past and present?
Well, they are such fun to paint, but also a great challenge. It began by doing portraits in Ireland and for the Dublin Writers Museum, and then I painted musicians, and a commission for the 30th Anniversary of the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival. And I’ve since done even larger multi-panel portraits for The Creative Process. It’s fun and a challenge to bring all these great artists together in a painting so that they are in a kind of dialogue. It becomes a puzzle for viewers to name who each one was and find the threads of connection between each person in the painting.
In Memory of Water, you blend human forms with seascape. Do you see memory as intertwined with our connection to the world? What role does water play in your art and personal life?
I’ve always been inspired by the sea. I think we all are. It’s where we come from. It’s where the oceans meet and cool the Earth. When we’re out in nature, we feel more connected to who we are. All the colors and sounds and rhythms remind us this is what it is to be alive. This is where I want to be. This is who I am.
I’m interested in relationships. I think about sea level rise. Our warming oceans, humans’ relationship with nature. The beauty and fragility of this planet we call home. Some of those paintings are people balanced on a platform, floating in the sea. I see those paintings also as a metaphor for this stage of human life. We’re all connected. And so precariously balanced, and what we do in one place can affect those on the other side of the world.
The Island
How does your art intersect with your advocacy for the environment?
My paintings of nature are not all about climate change, but in order to take action, we must first make people care. When you understand that the Earth doesn’t belong to us, but in fact we belong to the Earth, when we can feel that awe and reverence for the beauty and wonder of the natural world, I try to communicate that through my work and the exhibitions that all feature immersive surround sound experience of conversations with climate scientists, leading environmentalists, activists, educators, politicians, and change makers working to make a meaningful difference. I aim for conscious engagement, and their message adds weight to the artworks themselves. At the beginning of collaborating with every student who takes part in our project, I ask them about their reflections on the environment and to affirm their commitment to this planet we call home.
Your work feels like it’s in conversation with time—moments suspended, layered, or blurred. How much of your creative process is intuitive versus deliberate?
I’m very interested in the nature of time and the boundaries of our individual selves. I think that most of my paintings are about transitions and possibilities. Like the moment in cinema when one scene fades into the next. And I’m looking for the transcendent in the everyday. It’s kind of a way of looking, the way we see in our dreams and memories. I remember Kierkegaard said, “The self rests transparently on the spirit that gives it rise.” And how can we hold on to this sense of becoming? It’s like the idea of suspended time. There’s something about the passage of time in your mind, because in our memory, all time happens at once. Yesterday lives alongside 20 years ago, next to our dreams or memories of the future.
Garden of Remembrance – Blue
Some of your paintings have an almost referential quality; for instance, Garden of Remembrance echoes Monet’s Water Lilies.
The subject of the waterlilies is similar because they both come from nature. I want the scenes to be instantly recognizable. Monet painted water very thinly and was interested in the play of light. I want to paint from the inside out and express the impression of how water makes me feel. For the surfaces, I use broad, flat, luminous color fields, light powdery blue, celandon, pink, foggy yellow, and they are painted in thick impastos built up through the addition of Carrera marble powder to give the physicality of water. It’s less about external light and more about inner life and memory. Each of my Garden of Remembrance paintings are really two paintings in one. The first layer I paint is a completely realized painting of what lies beneath the surface, the underwater flora and submerged forms seem to flicker just below, creating a palimpsest effect. An Earth scientist told me that the Okavango wetlands in Botswana are where humans originally came from. So, for me, the paintings are about memory and water, where life first began.
You’ve lived and worked in multiple countries. How has cultural displacement—or cultural layering—influenced your view of language, image, and identity?
I think it’s definitely expanded my empathetic imagination. There is more than one way of seeing the world. When you have more than one language, when you’ve known more than one country, it makes you appreciate our smallness in the vast human story. The arts are ways of connecting us with each other and the arc of human history. I feel lucky that we celebrate so many disciplines, and through The Creative Process, we have contributors from over 70 countries. I don’t have a fixed sense of identity. I feel like we’re all in flux, and I hope that as I live in other countries that I will continue to learn and grow.
Manuela Lucá-Dazio, Exec. Director, Pritzker Architecture Prize
Fmr. Exec. Director, Venice Biennale, Dept. of Visual Arts & Architecture
You’ve created platforms that mentor and amplify other artists and students. What kind of mentorship did you wish for as a young artist?
I think of this project as a way is a way of continuing my education. I wish I had been taught more about the environment and civic engagement when I was growing up. I grew up surrounded by artists of all kinds. I had less exposure to the sciences, so that is something that I’m excited to learn about today. To those who feel daunted by exploring other fields, I think as long as you remain curious, there are no boundaries. The skills you learn in one field can give you insights into other disciplines.
Midway through each episode, you pause the conversation to let a student’s reflection slip in. I’ve always been interested in that pause, because it seems to punctuate the temporal fabric of the conversation, introducing a reflective voice that feels as if it comes from a different time and place.
The student interludes just came about naturally. Since I was responding to the conversations through artworks, I felt it was important that students had a space for reflection to share how it had inspired their own creative process. Knowledge is important, but what’s more important is what you do with that knowledge, for that is really what you have contributed to society and our understanding of the world.
Building on that, I’m curious about The Creative Process’s use of other media—the literary journal, exhibitions, and artwork. What continuity do you hope to create between these mediums and the podcast conversations?
Yes, all the iterations of the project are in conversation. I see them as a creative ecosystem and community. The exhibitions and journals give an immersive audiovisual experience and are fed by the podcasts and conversations that are the core of our project.
What do you hope younger creatives inherit from your work—not just in terms of content, but in the way you move through the world?
I want to challenge conventional thinking and look for insights into the human experience, so my work tries to delve deep into themes of existence, consciousness, and the intricate connections that bind us all. I want to encourage people to be fearless and discover new things about the world and themselves.
Virginia Moscetti reflects on her experience participating in The Creative Process:
I joined The Creative Process at a time when I felt deeply disillusioned with the current state of the humanities. Under pressure to justify their existence in economic terms, disciplines like literature and philosophy were being reduced to “soft-skill” factories – valuable only insofar as they could be folded back into the university’s career-preparation narrative. Even philosophy, my home discipline, seemed to be retreating into rigid conventions, drawing rigid lines around what counts as philosophical practice in an effort to package its “unique identity” as a marketable commodity.
Working on The Creative Process made clear just how limiting – and ultimately self-defeating – that framing is. Economics may be the language of kings and markets, but it cannot measure the value of the humanities: the ability to ask better questions, imagine alternative futures, and foster dialogue across differences. Again and again, I saw how philosophical, literary, and scientific insights could come together to confront today’s global crises, from climate change to political polarization. I realized that the humanities have a vital role to play – but only if we resist the impulse to reduce them to tools of economic utility and instead recognize their ability to help us shape and understand the world we’re in.
At the same time, The Creative Process showed me that when the humanities are broken down into marketable units, they don’t just lose their richness – they splinter into academic silos. Restoring their vitality, I realized, depends on breaking those barriers: allowing dialogue to move freely across different disciplines, generations, and mediums. After all, as the individuals I helped interview demonstrate, “Big questions” about freedom, justice, and moral responsibility can flourish just as vividly in public forums as they do in traditional lecture halls. Netflix dramas and portrait art can raise ethical questions that rival those contained in philosophical treatises. So, why do we try so hard to curtail the creative potential that comes from interdisciplinary thought? Why limit ourselves to a single, narrow corridor of scholarly views when the present state of our world so clearly demands we marshal all our creative and intellectual resources?
Thinking through these questions reinvigorated my commitment to a more public-facing, interdisciplinary future for the humanities. In an era of overlapping crises, we need forms of inquiry that transcend boundaries and reach the widest possible community of thinkers, artists, and citizens. While I’m excited to further that vision through my PhD studies, I also know that, at the end of the day, that work begins with dialogue. It begins with The Creative Process.
Wow, that’s very thoughtful and kind of you to say. That’s beautifully expressed and what our project aims to accomplish.
What haven’t you made yet that you still long to make? Is there a medium or subject that’s been calling to you, quietly waiting?
I’ve long wanted to take my environmental paintings to the next level. I’m now working on large-scale panoramic nature paintings. I want to convey that sense of wonder and remember that we live in a miracle that we are a part of, and that we have the ability to either nurture or destroy it. I would like to communicate some of that beauty and fragility, but on a more monumental scale than I have before. To say in one painting what I would normally say in a whole exhibition. I am writing another book, since writing is my first love. The podcasts still take up so much of my time, but I feel honored to learn from so many talented people and have the opportunity to share that knowledge with others.
Mia Funk is an artist, podcast host, writer, and creative educator. She founded The Creative Process, an international initiative encompassing a podcast, traveling exhibition, and educational initiative. Her varied work sees her leading workshops and mentoring students around creativity, critical thinking, environmental ethics, arts and humanities disciplines. Her art appears in public collections, including the U.S. Library of Congress and the Museum of Literature (Ireland). She has received awards and honors, including the Prix de Peinture from the Salon d’Automne and has exhibited in the Grand Palais. As a writer and interviewer, she has contributed to national publications and co-authored Jazz and Literature (Routledge). She’s served on the National Advisory Council of the American Writers Museum and the European Conference for the Humanities. She is the driving force behind The Creative Process podcast, platform, and journal.
Virginia Moscetti is an incoming PhD student in philosophy at Northwestern University. She holds an MSc from the London School of Economics and a BA, awarded with Highest Honors, from Swarthmore College. Beyond her work with The Creative Process, she co-edits “Current Events in Public Philosophy” for the American Philosophical Association’s blog.
