Everyone is an artist. Author of Qreative Evolution, Louis Henry Mitchell, explains how this is a truth throughout his new book and teaches others how to find their creativity and embrace it. As author of a book made for all and creative director of character design at Sesame Workshop for Sesame Street where he created the first ever Muppet on the autism spectrum, Mitchell brings inclusivity to the forefront of his work. With a podcast for all creative disciplines that teaches others how to be an artists coming soon, Mitchell is bringing us even more to look forward to and learn from. To discover more about Louis Henry Mitchell and his new book, read on.

Where are you based?
I’m based in New York City. Specifically, Rego Park, NY, in Queens.

Congratulations on your new book “Qreative Evolution”! What inspired you to write a book about harnessing creativity?
Thank you so much. What inspired me was how early in my career many of my fellow artists would see my work and ask me about how I learned to do certain things and what the thinking was behind my approaches. When they heard how much of my heart and devotion I bring to my work it seemed to inspire them. They started asking me for advice and guidance and eventually suggested that I teach and write a book about this. It was how others were asking me for more information about how I create that inspired me to make these thoughts and ideas available as a book.

Can you tell us a little about what we can expect from this book? Why is the word creative spelled with a Q in the book’s title?
First, I spell creative with a “Q” as a reminder to “question everything”. Questions are launchpads. They generate what I call “creative gravity” to pull you in the direction of your calling, even when you don’t know what that calling is yet. Your questions will reveal, step by step, where you are headed is you cultivate the right questions based on what is revealed to you in your own heart. Readers can expect suggestions and guidance from what I’ve learned throughout my life that seems to be of great help to the people I share my stories with, and the lessons I learned through them.

“Qreative Evolution” is best categorized as a self-help book. What do you hope readers gain from this book?
Beyond self-help, I hope people will discover self-fulfillment. It’s wonderful to help ourselves, but it’s in fulfillment that we find out more about who we are and why we are here. Fulfillment doesn’t mean satisfied in Qreative Evolution. It means embracing what we discover within ourselves to accomplish and as we accomplish them, we discover more from the growth of those accomplishments. A core part of my book is that we are all works-in-progress for our entire lives. We never land and we are never finished from the day we are born until our last breath. So, the pressure is off of us trying to “master” anything or become an “expert”. Because of the astounding endowment of creative potential in each and every one of us, we can learn and grow for the entire length of our lives.

The core principle of this book is your belief that ‘everyone is an artist’. Can you expand on this idea and your reasoning as to why it's so important everyone has the chance to express their own creativity?
The main thing I want people to discover is that everyone is an artists, no matter what your line of work is. We are all creating our lives moment by moment, whether we realize this or not. So, Qreative Evolution is in many ways a guidebook toward assisting everyone to be intentional about the choices and thoughts they live by. This way they can influence the outcomes more in their favor and not just wait to see what’s going to happen from day to day. I meet so many people from all over the world and it is staggering how one tremendous common denominator is how so many wonder what will happen from one day to the next. We can’t completely control life but we can influence it by our thoughts and actions and actually create our lives as we follow the revelations of our hearts for our own lives.

Your book discusses six ‘Evolutionary Trusts’. Can you tell us a little bit about these trusts and what they mean to you?
Symbolically, I see us all creating our lives aligned with the Biblical structure of the six days of creation. It’s simply an anchor to extract and cultivate a structure for a vision of the substance of my life. I explain in the book how the idea of “playing a role”, like being a great employee, may feel a bit contrived when real challenges arise. But embracing it as being “entrusted with it” brings a new level of accountability and personal investment that might not otherwise be there. I can accept the role of being a dad, or I can embrace it as a trust and live in it from deeper within. I use being a dad because this is what I experienced when I became a father. Before my son was born I was reading and studying about how to be a dad. It was like preparing for a role. But when I first laid eyes on my son the moment he was born, all the practical studying was instantly subordinated by the deepest love and desire to rise to the occasion. No longer practical, but devotional. It was less about what I had learned before his birth and more about what I would be learning that could only come from the experience of giving my all to this little gift I’ve been entrusted with. So, obviously, embracing a trust is extremely important to me. When I enhance it with the word, “evolutionary”, it’s elevated all the more. Evolving into a father from where I never was before, is true evolution. I am no longer the same and have evolved into a new and higher state. So, each trust, as I describe them in the book, helps the reader to think in evolutionary ways they may never have thought of before. My hope is that more and more people will discover things in each evolutionary trust, structed as the 6 chapters of the book, that they have never encountered before. It’s been my experience as I have shared them, that not only have people expressed never having heard these things before, but some people have collapsed in tears at the revelations they encountered from what I shared. I am always so shocked no matter how many times this happens, and it is quite often.

You’re also a creative director for character design at the non-profit called Sesame Workshop. What inspired you to get into creative direction and character design specifically for the children’s show “Sesame Street"?
When I was a child, I enjoyed watching The Muppets on a show called The Ed Sullivan Show. They appeared on the show regularly and when I heard Mr. Sullivan announce that they were coming on I did a running slide in front of the TV. After the Muppet performance, this tall, slender, bearded man would come out to shake Ed Sullivan’s hand, but I didn’t care about him because I didn’t know who he was at the time. But one day after the Muppet segment, that same man came out and this time he had the puppet I just saw on his hand. The man was Jim Henson and the puppet was Kermit, not yet a frog, but unmistakably Kermit. I was stunned to learn that a person was back there doing that. I was only 6 years old at the time. But that’s the moment everything turned on for me! It seems from that moment on I was somehow aspiring to be part of that world. When I saw the very first airing of Sesame Street, I didn’t know what I was watching. But I stayed with it and found that it was Jim Henson behind the puppets on that show, too. Not too long after that I was glued to the TV when the Muppet Show arrived and then Fraggle Rock afterwards. I didn’t realize I was being prepared to be “entrusted” with becoming the Creative Director of Character Design for that very show I watched back them. I also learned a lot about character design and how all the cartoons I watched as a kid, and the movies and comic books I indulged in that featured various characters was also preparing me to become a character designer. Opportunities started showing up where I could reach out to show my work toward being an artist and, one day, I was inspired to reach out to The Jim Henson Company to see if they could use my work. That’s when I finally met a man named Jim Mahon who gave me my first freelance job for a Sesame Street product and they eventually invited me to join fulltime. Creative direction is really just about cultivating a creative vision for the project at hand and, because of the vast experiences I was privileged to have, I could oversee all creative aspects of virtually any creative project that came my way.

You helped design Sesame Street’s first ever Muppet who’s on the autism spectrum. Why was getting this representation out there for children so important to you?
My dear friend, Rachel Lunden-Carter, who was an intern at Sesame Workshop when I gave a presentation to the interns, reached out to me and eventually invited me to work with children on the Autism spectrum. She has been working with them for years and thought I would be good with them. I was very nervous, but she reassured me that it would be good for them and for me, too. I didn’t know that Sesame Workshop had been developing an autism initiative for many years at that point. When I was approached to design Julia, I realized the serendipitous opportunity that was taking place. Sesame didn’t know I had been volunteering at a school for children on the spectrum and I didn’t know they were developing an initiative for them. It was meant to be and I am beyond grateful. Working with those children taught me so much and helped me to understand how they just did things differently and the children I worked with just meant the world to me. Being privileged to design Julia gave me a chance to celebrate and contribute to these wonderful children and their families in the most unique way with more impact than I could have ever imagined.

Can you tell us a bit about Julia?
Julia is a little girl who is on the autism spectrum and is a very good artist. She uses a tablet for some of her communication and she has a little stuffed bunny named Fluffster. This is the very basic description of her, but she holds a very deep and dear place in my heart. I based her on one of the children I worked with at The Eden II School on Staten Island; not what the little girl looked like but how she made me feel when we worked together. I saw how brilliant she was and, at the same time, very sure about what she liked and didn’t like. The clarity was refreshing. When I designed Julia, I wanted to tell a bit of her story just from her features, which is definitely a part of character design. The moment you see a character the story has begun and there is an opportunity to subliminally reveal parts of them through how they look. Her nose is a slight diamond shape because to me she is a “diamond in the rough”. The unusual angle of her eyes shows she is thinking differently. But using human hair texture for her, rather than yarn or ostrich feathers or some other puppet material, makes her look more like a real little girl so she is easier to connect with. She was never going to look into the camera and welcome the viewers. So, I wanted to give her that human trait for instant connection. It is among the most wonderful experiences when I meet people and they find out I designed Julia. They either are on the spectrum, have family members on it or know someone who is and they show immense gratitude for my part in bringing her to Sesame Street.

Sesame Street’s future is currently in jeopardy with HBO not planning on making any new episodes. In your opinion, why is it important we keep this show on air for kids? What are kids able to learn from watching this show?
In the beginning, Sesame Street was primarily about underserved preschoolers learning their numbers and letters. It quickly evolved into sharing life lessons and, really, was always about different people from all walks of life coming together and working toward a friendly and welcoming community. We are still doing this and being very responsive to many of the issues that children become aware of, even though they may be more serious and adult issues, like ractial justice or disaster relief. The way the world is now, it is virtually impossible to keep even horrific new items from children because media is everywhere at all times. So, when children see something they don’t understand or that might frighten them, Sesame Street tries to provide content and tools to help parents and caregivers explain and comfort their children. But, we also continue to provide educational content while making the kids laugh along with their favorite Sesame Street Muppet friends. This show is a family heirloom passed down from generation to generation. It is a trust that those of us who “work” there cherish and take very seriously while still enjoying it tremendously.

Do you think Sesame Street will find a new home?
Netflix has been officially announced as our new distributor and we are very excited about this.

What is some advice you might give to someone doubting the value of the products of their creativity?
Advice is something sacred that I have to earn to give. I have to learn about someone’s joys and challenges, their dreams and fears before I’m worthy to give them actual advice… advice is not something to take lightly when the opportunity comes up to give it. But when I wrote Qreative Evolution, I shared what I did and how I overcame so very many obstacles that are often common to so many. And, because I embrace our human condition, I found that my stories and the lessons revealed and explained through them relate to so many. It’s comforting, especially with the most challenging things I share, to find how other resonate with them. I understand and have experienced doubt and still do in certain situations. But I also read Qreative Evolution, myself, to remind me of the many things I’ve overcome and how, when people come together to help each other, we can overcome so many things. So, my sincere advice is to encourage people to get Qreative Evolution for themselves, and those who they feel it can help, and see how it can uniquely inspire them and help them discover how to overcome their doubts.

What can we look forward to seeing from you next?
Qreative Evolution is the foundation to the next chapter of my life (pun intended). I am developing a podcast that I also plan to evolve into a unique art school that is more about how to be an artist than how to create art. It will be much more accessible and reach across all art forms, which I only learned as I shared my concepts with various artists who assumed it would be a school for their particular creative discipline. That was very encouraging and it revealed the universality of what I am preparing to teach, much like the very concepts within Qreative Evolution resonate with so very many.

It has been a rough few years, and we expect at least four more. How have you been staying positive?
I equate watching and listening to strong, positive messages and content to eating healthy meals. When you eat well and take care of your body, you will be stronger and able to fend off many of the illnesses that can travel around from person to person or, even, from community to community. I haven’t caught a cold of the flu in so long I cannot remember that last year I was really sick. Well, the way I refrain from eating junk food is the same way I refrain from watching too much news, which is curated to be sensational and shows more of the bad news than the good. I “feed” my mind with the strongest and most positive content and this builds up my thought patterns to travel in more positive and productive ways. This way, when something negative or worrisome comes my way, my response is generally a positive one or one that empowers me to focus on being creative rather than destructive.

During the pandemic, I became woefully depressed, and I did not recognize myself. I felt useless and was exceedingly grateful to be part of Sesame Workshop so I could use it as my validation. But as time went on, I realized this wasn’t right. I shouldn’t see validation from anything external. I should discover it from within myself. So, I stopped to really contemplate deeply; why was I still alive… why have so many died, including people I knew, but I was still here? This was not taking anything away from loved ones and the people who we lost during the panedmic….it was just a call to action for me. I AM still here. So, I must make the most of my being here. That’s when I took initiative over my health and lost weight, started teaching online independent studies to learn more about how to teach for my school, and that’s also when I prepared my book proposal for Qreative Evolution. It was a choice to change my way of thinking from destructive to creative. And I never stopped. I still start each day, as I practice my drawing before starting my work, listening to profoundly positive messages and content and build up my thought patterns toward positive productivity, I’m not ignoring the bad news; I just remain aware of what’s going on and continue to produce the work I believe will contribute to a better life for myself and anyone else I may influence toward the same.

What is your motto in life?
“THE NAYSAYERS DO NOT GET A VOTE!”

To learn more about Louis Henry Mitchell, please check out the links below:
My author website is the conduit to the various areas where people can find out more about me:
www.qreativeevolution.com
LinkedIn

Louis Henry Mitchell - Creativity is for Everyone