On the Gap Between Vision and Skill: Olive & Ink December 2025
This letter was originally sent to Olive & Ink subscribers in December 2025. Olive & Ink is our monthly Snail Mail Club—handwritten letters, original art prints, and creative writing delivered to mailboxes around the world. Want to receive future envelopes? Subscribe.
Dear Creative,
There's a moment early in our creative journey when the work in your head far outshines the work in your hands. You know what you want to make, you can feel it, but your technical ability hasn't caught up. It's an uncomfortable gap, one that often makes us question whether we're meant for this at all. But that gap is actually a gift. A compass. It reveals what matters to you, what you aspire toward, and where your taste lies. And as you learn, practice, and experiment, you slowly begin to close it. And then, with time, something surprising happens: you surpass the gap entirely. You look back at old work you once cherished and realize it's... fine. Maybe even mediocre. That realization is so exciting because it's proof of growth. You've surpassed the gap.
Amidst the New Years resolutions that will soon (and inevitably) flood your socials, I'd like to offer one more: to actively seek out a new gap. Surround yourself with work that challenges your taste, ignites your curiosity, and makes you want to become a better creative. While at first, that's mostly technical skill, maybe now your gap is around the business of craft: your finances, your time management, your marketing, your capacity to hold all of your ideas at once. Growth expands outward.
This month's artwork, Le Théâtre by Jenny Lloyd, embodies this evolution beautifully. Built from fragments of vintage imagery, zine scraps, and borrowed ephemera, it captures the way our influences shape us, and how, with time, we shape them back. What begins as imitation becomes something entirely our own. Its cool-toned layers reveal memories colliding: scenes from a sapphic relationship, glimpses of tenderness and complexity, a collage of what we take in and what we create from it.
The accompanying writing, Notes on Growing by Segher ter Braak, explores growth from the perspective of a plant. The way we stretch toward light, collapse, regrow, twist, harden, soften, and continue anyway. It captures our inevitable process of becoming: finding our gaps, falling through them, and climbing back up. Resilience is an essential tool that rewires us, and allows us the privilege of seeing our form morph over time.
Together, these pieces remind us that growth is layered, contradictory, and sometimes painful. But it is also generous. Here's to widening the gap, closing it, surpassing it, and then beginning again with curiosity and courage.
Warmly,
Britt Broadwood
What else was in this month's envelope:
🎨 Print: Le Théâtre by Jenny Lloyd
A collage built from vintage imagery, zine scraps, and borrowed ephemera. A meditation on how our influences shape us, and how we shape them back.
✍️ Writing: Notes on Growing by Segher ter Braak
Growth explored from the perspective of a plant—stretching toward light, collapsing, regrowing, and continuing anyway.
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