For the love of art! Our weekly creative curation from TheTechMargin: A sneak peek into "Topographies," the new series by Christopher O'Connor, artist and co-founder of AICharmLab.
What happens when you burn your maps and walk into the wilderness of your own making?
For months, I've been living inside a question that refuses to be answered with words. It demanded paint, canvas, and the courage to fail beautifully. The result is Topographies of the Mind—a collection born not from planning, but from the violent tenderness of letting go.
Topography No.6, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 inch
No references pinned to studio walls. No careful grids to guide my hand. No voice that whispers you're not ready yet. Just the raw conversation between imagination and pigment, between the trembling hand and the blank canvas.
The Moment Everything Changed
There's an instant when control dissolves—when your grip loosens and something else takes over. Suddenly you realize you've been painting with your fists clenched, holding your breath, trying to force beauty instead of allowing it to emerge.
When I finally exhaled and trusted the current instead of fighting it, the paintings began to paint themselves. Energy flooded in like water through a broken dam.
This is what abundance feels like: not having more, but needing less. Less certainty. Less safety. Less of the small, careful self that colors inside the lines.
The Authority of Your Own Vision
Every mark you make carries a frequency that no borrowed image can match. An electricity runs through work born from your own dreams, shadows, and midnight revelations. It's the difference between singing someone else's song and finding your voice in the dark.
Your imagination knows things your rational mind has never learned. It speaks in symbols that make perfect sense until you try to explain them. It reveals landscapes that exist nowhere but in that quiet space inside you, where a feeling becomes an image and an image becomes something real.
Topography No.4, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 inch
Maps of the Unmappable
Topos means place. But what kind of place exists only when you stop looking for it? What geography emerges when you abandon the compass of expectation and let intuition be your North Star?
These paintings feel like discoveries mixed with invention—part archaeology, part spontaneous creation. Some forms emerge as if I'm simply uncovering what was already there, while others seem to invent themselves in real time, appearing without warning or precedent. They explore the very human experience of self-doubt versus trust and the concrete reality of discovering what you're actually capable of when you get out of your own way.
The Revolution of Turning Inward
We are drowning in a culture of endless reference, infinite scrolling through what others have imagined, until we forget we have inner worlds worth exploring. The most radical act you can commit is to trust your hands and make something from the raw material of your own aliveness.
This isn't about rejecting influence or pretending you exist in a vacuum. It's about remembering that you are not a curator of other people's visions—you are an original source. The spring doesn't apologize for the water it offers. The mountain doesn't ask permission to cast its shadow.
When you stop apologizing for your vision, when you stop asking if it's good enough, worthy enough, important enough—that's when the real work begins. That's when you discover that creativity isn't something you have or don't have. It's something you are.
Topography No.10, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 inch
The Paradox of Creation
I've learned that creation is less about making something and more about becoming a conduit for what already wants to exist. Each painting in this series taught me that I am not the author of these images but their translator and first witness.
There's a paradox at the heart of this work: the more I disappeared as the one "in charge," the more present I became as the one experiencing. When my ego stepped aside—the part that needed to prove something, control something, achieve something—what remained was pure receptivity—a kind of listening with paint.
I began to understand that every mark on canvas is both an act and a response, a call and an answer simultaneously. The painting speaks as I paint it. It tells me what it needs, where it wants to go, and what colors it's hungry for. My role became less about imposing my will and more about staying awake to the conversation.
This is what surprised me most: the paintings that emerged from this surrender felt more "mine" than anything I had ever forced into being.
When I stopped trying to make "good" paintings and started making honest ones, I found my actual voice—not the voice I thought I should have, but the one that had been waiting beneath all push and expectation.
This is what all authentic creation requires: the courage to become nobody in the service of letting something be born. To dissolve the boundary between maker and made, between self and expression, until there is only the act itself—pure, immediate, alive.
In these topographies, I found a different relationship to the mystery of making. And in that relationship, something essential shifted: I stopped being someone who paints and became someone through whom painting happens.
My new work will be on view in September at the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. Come by for the opening reception on September 4th from 5-7.
It's a creative laboratory—a rebel's playground. The tools are evolving, and the world is changing. And fear? Fear's just friction before transformation. Ask any caterpillar!
1. What initially attracted you to writing as a form of creative expression?
I’m not sure. I loved reading and writing as a child - finding my way into new worlds. This grew out of sometimes needing to inhabit a different world than the one I found myself in. I was also drawn to creating them and expressing myself in poems (I loved Shel Silverstein) and stories. This continued throughout my life. Writing was a salve, a way of understanding myself and the world, transmuting pain, and capturing and inviting people into dreams and worlds.
2. If you could give your younger self one piece of learned wisdom from your future self, what would it be?
I struggle with this question because the past version of myself needed to go through what she went through for me to become who I am today. More than anything, I’d thank her for her courage, tell her it’s going to get easier and better, that I love her, and to keep going, she’s got this.
3. What is your preferred strategy for overcoming creative blocks?
Action. If energy is stuck, moving my body shifts the energy. If I feel blocked, then I show up to the page, and tell myself it can be shit, it doesn’t have to be good, even if I only write one sentence it’s fine. Journaling also moves the block. It shows me how I’m getting in my way, brings me closer to understanding what’s going on, activates compassion, and meanwhile, I’m writing (the cure is in the medicine).
4. Has the process of writing your book, Welcome to The Creative Club, shifted your creative process and, in what way(s)?
Writing Welcome to The Creative Club revealed the power and importance of routine for creativity. I used to push back against a schedule. It felt limiting and tight, but creating a project, especially a big one like writing a book, requires commitment and routine. It created evidence that having a creative rhythm and routine is needed - quieting my inner rebel and helping me design new schedules for myself that support my creative practices and art.
Conversations on Creativity with Pia Mailhot-Leichter
Join us for this powerful conversation about making life your biggest art project and becoming the creative director of your own life.
