Creativity and the Human Spirit at Play – An Interview with Gene Jimenez

Unlock the secrets of sustaining your creative dreams while balancing life’s practical demands in our riveting conversation with GENE Jimenez.

Discover how GENE’s journey, from the influence of a crafty mother and resourceful grandfather to pioneering digital coloring in comic books, offers invaluable lessons on the power of imagination and resilience. We explore the transformative potential of embracing uncertainty and failure as key elements in achieving creative success, offering a roadmap for anyone striving to turn their passion into a sustainable career.

GENE’s story isn’t just about personal triumphs; it’s a profound testament to the intertwining of heritage and creativity. Learn how his decade-long tenure as an adjunct professor at the University of Redlands and his Mesoamerican roots have shaped his teaching philosophy and creative process. Gene shares the wisdom imparted by mentors and ancestors alike, illustrating how cultural legacy and educational mentorship can profoundly influence one’s path. (Interview has been edited for readability.)

You’ve experienced so many things over the course of your career. The thread interwoven through everything seems to be creativity. That’s a big concept. What does that word mean to you?

Gene Jimenez: I’m very grateful for my entire career; this creative journey I’ve been on and continue to be on. I looked up creativity actually a few weeks ago in the dictionary. It really has to do with the imagination and bringing something forward that hasn’t been created before. Creativity can be a noun, a verb, an adjective, a bunch of different things. I think that in and of itself makes it incredibly powerful and weaving that throughout my life and throughout my my career, it really has been – it is a joy.

Sometimes I’m amazed at the things I’ve gotten to do, and at other times, I’m not that amazed, because it does take some. I have the scars to show it and I have the history of getting down there in the mud and failing and, and, and getting back up again and going at it again. That common thread I take a lot of pride in, but I’m also really humbled by it, because creativity also doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens with the support and help of others, the collaboration of people and the people that are authentically rooting for you. Sometimes, it takes some people that aren’t rooting for you and being willing to listen to them as well. It’s a beautiful blessing, and at the same time, it’s also a very humbling thing that when they think of you, they think of creativity.

Hero by GENE Jimenez

Take us on a short journey of how creativity has emerged throughout your life. Did your parents cultivate that creativity in you as a child?

Gene Jimenez: I’m the youngest of five, and I’m third generation Mesoamerican. I also come from a generation where we didn’t really learn Spanish as our primary or as even our secondary language, because a lot of it was thought of we don’t want the accent in order to get have a better shot at life and whatnot, and I appreciate that. Sometimes I wish I was fluent, but the youngest of five. I had two older brothers who were stud jocks. I was usually the not so much the odd man out, but wasn’t the first picked on the basketball team.

I got to spend a lot of time with my mom, and she is incredibly crafty and creative. My grandfather was also crafty and creative. He was a very self-made person. If he didn’t have it, he would make it. My mom was very much the same way. There was always some type of craft going on in the corner of our room. We had a big house and 10,000 things going on at the same time, but there’s always this little corner that she carved out that was either painting something or creating something or making something. It wasn’t that we couldn’t afford it, it just became a lot more fun to make it and to create it yourself, and then became this appreciation of it. That’s really where it instigated. Then there was just little moments growing up as a kid, being told not to draw in second grade and saying that’s not okay. Then by fourth grade, having one of your fellow classmates saying, no, you need to draw. You’re good at this. You need to keep doing it.

There’s little things like that along the way that helped me carve out my own little niche, aside from sports, aside from what my brothers and family were up to. It was great because a lot of them – my mother was very great and loved art and wanted me to have a really creative life, and at the same time, they knew well enough to step back at a certain point and say, “okay, go do what you’re going to do,” and having that freedom to go make it up. I was the first one to go away to college in my family. I was the youngest, but I went away. I was the first one to graduate. Having that family support, not knowing what’s coming next, but me out there making it up as I went along, really set me on a path of, okay, “make it up and create it yourself.” If you want it, you got to go make it up and figure out how to make it happen. That’s been my journey from that point.

Many people who are driven by creativity and exploring the arts as young people don’t actually pursue the educational component. Why did you choose to go the formal educational route as opposed to just exploring these things on your own?

Gene Jimenez: When I went to college I was under the assumption, like a lot of kids, that at the end, there would be a job waiting for me. It was like, these are where the good jobs are. I thought, well, I want to get one of those good jobs. However, going into a creative field like fine art and whatnot, there isn’t that. To live a creative life, you’re self-employed, or you’re doing it on your own. Otherwise you’re doing freelance and working for somebody else.

By going into higher education, I figured out by the time I was a senior in college and I realized college really is about becoming a professional learner. At the end, they give you a receipt, and then you can go out and show that receipt to somebody and an employer’s going to go, “ah, that person can learn. I can teach that person.” There’s the jobs, there’s the positions, there’s the opportunities, but it isn’t about learning a trade, which is very different than going to college.

College has this other whole dynamic of social and you’re trying things out, you’re getting hurt, you’re having successes and wins and everything, but it’s all in a very enclosed environment. That prepared me for how to navigate the professional world and being able to talk to people, being able to relate to people, being able to learn something and ingest it, and then becoming a professional at it. That’s what I think college is.

I can tell you a number of people from my high school who were ready. They didn’t have to go to college. These kids were ready to go do that and they were ready to step into a professional field, and that’s great. I don’t think I had that and it took me a while, even coming out of college to learn how to navigate a professional world and at the same time navigate something that’s going to generate what I had in mind, the creativity as a professional, as somebody who’s respected and somebody who is seen as, hey, you want something creative done and you want results and whatnot.

I would hope it would be in that conversation and knowing that along the way, it’s not going to be a line of successes and zero failures. It’s like two steps forward, three steps, learning. That’s what I think college gives us too, again, it’s a closed environment. In those failures you can just get up and go and dust yourself off, go to class the next day. In life, a lot of people go, failure? I’m just going to head a different direction and that’s fine. Sometimes it’s not running from whatever happened. It’s actually going through it, ingesting it, feeling it, learning from it, and using that for what’s coming next.

Warriors by GENE Jimenez

Many of us who are creative want to spend all of our time creating what we have a vision to create – whether it’s visual arts, podcasting, designing, fashion, or music. And yet, there’s also this component of needing to actually make some money somehow. How did you navigate that early on in your career?

Gene Jimenez: I was very lucky. Like I said, I first started off in comic books and my brother and I opened our own studio. Then we got picked up by a fashion company and I became the creative director there. That led me to the dotcom thing and whatnot. All along the way, the great thing about creative and being willing to be creative versus there’s a difference and it’s a very fine line, but there’s a difference between scarcity and creativity.

Scarcity has your stomach turn sometimes; a lot of not knowing what’s coming next and you’re not sure if it’s going to work and whatnot; whereas the other is similar. For me, creativity should have you more on edge. I’ve always leaned into that versus shying away. There’s not a there’s not a direct line to it. There’s very much, okay, if I’m going to create what I want to create and no one’s created it before, there should be some – I don’t know if there should be, but if it was that easy, I’m quite certain somebody would’ve done it before.

It’s the unknowing and then leaning into that, that is I think the key that most people shy away from leaning into the unknown, leaning into a very not knowingness of what comes next. Who knows? The definition of creativity is imagination that hasn’t come to fruition yet. The unknown is you’re really scary to most people.

Tell us more about your comic book studio.

Gene Jimenez: At that time, it was ’92, ’93, and comic books were just starting to dabble in the digital age. Some companies had started hacking the same computer program that was coloring the Sunday funnies and that had a whopping 16 colors available to it. They went in and hacked the code to that and now they can get 256 colors, and that was cool. At the same time, here comes Adobe Photoshop and I just started coloring in that. At that time there was no internet. There was no social media or whatnot. You couldn’t go online and just YouTube how do you do this? It really was, make it up.

I actually wrote to Adobe on a couple occasions and got some great favorable letters back and said, “Hey, this is what I’m trying to do. I want to color this line art.” Our studio was actually built on coloring comic books and bringing Photoshop into comic books. We actually did a symposium. I was part of the 1995 San Diego Comic-Con color symposium on bringing digital coloring into the comic book world. Now, 99.9% of all comic books are colored digitally. It was one of those, make it up. Here’s something cool and it could be a great tool. I remember sitting in my very first studio, which was actually the edge of my bed and in my apartment, and trying to figure out, okay, if I can get this color to drop in here, that would be really, really great.

You have pioneers like Steve Ollif, who colored the very first digital comic Akira No. 8, who was a hero of mine. I actually got to do that symposium invited by Steve Ollif because he was like, “I have no idea what this Photoshop is. We’re just hacking the local newspapers version of The Sunday Funnies program, so let’s figure this out.” From then on you have a bunch of – entire industry was built on that, but it didn’t exist before. Sometimes when your imagination just starts running, you just go, okay, let’s do this. We had a very successful studio for several years.

How did you make your dream work financially?

Gene Jimenez: Well into my 30s, money was a big drive for me, that financial stability which had me have a lot of success early in my career. I was flying back and forth to New York for my dotcom position. I was head of one of the biggest street brands in LA. I was working with people like Eminem and Janet Jackson and all these creatives that is very high profile, and the financial security that came along with that was great.

There was always that nagging thing in the back of my head was, are you happy? This is when I had to get really in touch with my why; why was that voice calling me? Two, does this money make me happy? When I sat down with myself and said, the money is not really important, and unfortunately it is important in our society – in the Western civilization it’s like everything’s driven by money. That doesn’t mean money makes you happy. It means money as you survive and have you live. It was a great lesson in the class I taught at school. It’s like, look, find your why first and then find a way to finance that why.

A lot of my graphic design work financed my creative fine art, which is that’s how it works a lot of times. Andy Warhol was a great example of that; incredible graphic designer. Shepard Fairey currently is a fantastic example and one of my heroes. He’s a great graphic designer and that translates into street art. He uses that to finance a lot of stuff that has incredible messaging right now. Having my graphic design when I got paid for financed my fine art and financed my – and I have a fantastic wife who is very loving and very supportive, and I have people around me that are also incredibly supportive that would come to my shows or do come to my shows, or I say, “Hey, I have this thing going on come on over,” and they’re there.

One by GENE Jimenez

Those are the people that are gold to me, whether they’re family or just people you meet along the way. You have people that become your tribe, and I think that’s more important than money because there’s times when I said, “Hey, I need somebody for this,” and it has zero financing. Sometimes they’re not going to make anything back from it, but yet they’ll invest in me because I’ve invested in them or just because they love me. I think that’s important. All of a sudden, they’re part of my why now. I have a group of people, family, friends and whatnot that are my why.

One of my artist statements as an artist in my fine arts is the human spirit at play. My human spirit in my vision doesn’t play with itself. You have to find playmates. You have to find your little tribe that you play with. I’m constantly discovering people along my journey that are that; who’s going to go play this with me or go play that with me. Sometimes it’s financial, but most of the time it’s just really playing. You find somebody to play with, and then being a professional about it and having something; sometimes it’s a spouse, sometimes it’s 9:00 to 5:00, sometimes it’s an online thing or whatever it is, but that supplements your fine art until your fine art can supplement everything else.

I love this idea of – obviously you talked about finding your tribe but finding somebody to play with. That’s such a unique way of, I guess, for me seeing it because oftentimes it’s in the world that we’re living in. It’s like, well, I’m looking for somebody to collaborate with in order to grow my brand, in order to grow whatever thing that I’m doing, where you’re saying, oh, what if we just had this playful connection that we’re playing together? Yeah, that’s really fun.

You spent almost 10 years teaching as an adjunct professor at the University of Redlands, where you went for your bachelor’s. What was that like going back there years later and investing in students?

Gene Jimenez: It was an honor to be asked back. At the time, and I’m not sure she’s still there right now because they may have had a changeover, but Penny McElroy was my first design teacher and she invited me back. She called me up and said, “Hey, you’ve had this really cool design career going on. Would you be interested in teaching a course?” I said, “Sure, this is great.” At the time, I was a creative director and design director for Fox Sports PLTB online. I was really busy with that, but once I got into teaching, it really opened up for me. Now, when I first went – again, no one in my family had gone to college. I think my oldest brother and sister went to JCs and that was great, but nobody had went to a four year. I’d gone away and here I am, and now I’m starting into this design fine art program. I’m thinking, okay, I’m going to get there and they’re going to have all these answers for me, and those are going to be the answers I’m going to use to get a great job. I remember being frustrated for four years at Penny McElroy because she gave me zero answers. She taught me a lot of credible techniques and technical stuff, but as far as answers to being a designer and artist and whatnot, she just kept asking questions. I think that’s a beautiful trait and a beautiful way of teaching.

Another mentor who came in, I think it was my junior year who I believe is still there as well, and he was still there when I went back to teach was Raul Acero, who is one of the world’s most fantastic sculptures. He taught me that ceremony can be part of creativity. I was in his raccoon ceramics class, but he actually brought a sacredness to the whole creative process for me. When asked to come back, I knew what I wanted to do because I had had a lot of great experience in self-development and meeting my new wife, and at that point I was ready to share a lot of these great insights and everything.

One by One by GENE Jimenez

Going back it was like, okay, I got to figure out 9,000 questions to ask, and then of those questions, figure out how to ask each of those five different ways. It became a beautiful game and my students who I’m still in contact with to this day, some are 10, 12 years out at this point, but I’m watching their kids grow and they’re sharing with me their lives and whatnot. The feeling that you’ve had an impact by just asking them simple questions and having those questions become part of their creative process, was a great part of my journey.

I do hope I get to go back someday to a higher education university or something because I still feel like there’s a lot more teaching left to me. Towards the end, I’d probably say about the last four years, the number one question my kids were asking me was I want to be a professional designer, I want to be an artist, what do I charge? It was interesting because my canned answer became, well, you charge what you’re worth. You got to figure out your why, getting connected, getting committed to it, and having all that, but figuring out what you’re worth, and that’s what you charge and you don’t apologize for that.

In my last year of teaching, I actually sat down and did the math and this goes back to the financial part. I was actually teaching for gas money. Adjunct professors at that time – still don’t get paid a ton and there’s not a lot of what some would think is a great college professor career at the adjunct level. I petitioned for a full-time position, and the university at the time just wasn’t organized enough and they were going through too many changes to create another position. I was on three presidential committees helping the university get their creative online computer set up, online classes. I taught in the MBA program online, which is one of their first offerings online education. Then they had an influx of in students, so I was actually an advisor for 40 students, plus four, three full-time classes teaching and still working for gas money. I thought, you know what? I can’t say this to my students and not be living it and that’s when I had to leave. They didn’t ask me to leave. I left because I didn’t want to be a hypocrite in what I was telling my students and not living that life.

One of the things you referenced earlier in our conversation was the influence of your Mesoamerican heritage. How has your heritage influenced your work as an artist and sound healer?

Gene Jimenez: So, Mesoamerican is simply a person who is majority from Hispanic or Latin American or Southern Latin American heritage. I am 64% DNA native to the Americas. My DNA is authentically everything from Patagonian which is my primary DNA section to the Andes, to Peru, to Guatemala, and then I have 12% Mayan. I have Ellucian, which is a very north top Alaskans. I have North Woods, and then I have Sonoran Desert. I have all these DNA within me and it’s funny because let’s say if you go back, I think it’s 50 years, it took over 4,400 people for you to be here. That’s a lot of ancestors. That’s a lot of DNA and primarily energy that generates you.

For me to disclaim or to not be a part of that world, it seems like I’m missing out on most of my life. Now I grew up in Southern California big family and went to private Catholic schools, went through 12, and a lot of big families there, not a ton of historical ancient culture practices or traditions. I mean, we made our own traditions living in Southern California, like you can go to the beach on Christmas. It’s awesome. There wasn’t a lot of that going on. We had taste of it but we didn’t have a ton of it.

It wasn’t until later in life, about my mid 30s that I really started diving into, okay, I’m darker than most of the kids that I looked back at my high school pictures and my grade school pictures, and I was a dark kid in the class, and what is that about? That’s when I started diving into what my DNA was. Then through self-development and meditation did I actually meet my great-grandmother, and that opened up my entire different world. My great grandmother passed away about, I think 16 years before I was born, but in a meditation there she was and it wasn’t like this, oh, thing. It was very much like, hey, we’ve been waiting for you. Let’s go. It was a very Hispanic grandmother type thing.

Lakota Fancy by GENE Jimenez

That meditation as I’m sitting there talking to you is very much that type of encounter. That woke me up to like, I’m supposed to be doing something and I’m neglecting an entire side of myself. I dove into it and it’s been life changing, life altering, life affirming that I’m supposed to be in a creative field. My ancestors are very creative people; primarily seeing where my great grandparents came in 1909, walking from Durango, Mexico to Southern California, that’s 2200 miles on foot. They arrived with the baby in their arms. That is something where you look at that and you’re like, okay, and me being mad that there’s so much traffic today or there’s these things that we consume ourselves with on a day-to-day basis. Their life was different, and if they had to go through that, I can endure winning in line for anything.

Coming through where they were, they were in Durango, Mexico, which is the cross-cultural sections of the Nahuatl people, which is the original people of Mexico; you’ll hear a lot of Hispanics or whatnot talk about the ancient Nahuatl and the Toltecs. Durango is across. It’s like that apex center where the Nahuatl, the Toltecs, and then the holishio people from the South, which are the creative shamans in creativity comes from. That’s that cross section and these two people came from there.

I’m extremely humbled by that, that they would make that journey to have me be in the position I am in today. Along that journey comes a lot of different influences of traditions and whatnot. It actually opened up my world to ceremony and to the sacred sound ceremonies and what it means to heal people or to provide therapy for people through sound. You think a lot of the ceremonies around a campfire from the ancient times a long time ago, most of it had music, shaman drums and flutes. You go to Maori, you have the haveutes and all these ancient instruments. I’m always the kind of guy that goes, why? Why did they have that? Why couldn’t they just tell stories? Why were they singing? Why did they always have to have music?

It turns out the music actually, the sounds and frequencies of those actually influence and help whatever the ceremony is for. Somebody could be looking for an awakening or healing something and whatnot. Depending on what’s going on in the ceremony depends on what type of music is being played for them, and we’ll get into the sound science part of it. The frequencies that are actually being generated by native instruments physically affect our bodies given that our entire reality is made up of sound frequency.

Those instruments are attuned to our natural body sounds and it’s almost like tuning us back to who we originally are at our optimal best when somebody’s playing a Shandra or a flute or something like that. I was excited and on this journey of discovering, connecting the ancient wisdoms of the past with the new technology that institutions like the Mayo Clinic and John Hopkins and all them are doing studies on to rediscover this ancient wisdom. Why is sound such a prolific thing? It’s like for the past 120,000 years, sound was the only medicine.

We’ve only had big pharma for the past 80 years, and look where that has taken us. Beyond that there’s only one medicine that the Egyptian used, and they wrote it in their hieroglyphics, and that was sound, and that’s it. They had an instrument they told us how to make, and they said they got that medicine from six generations before them; and it’s sound. That’s it. There was no any other thing that actually generated the healing properties, because it’s what we are. It’s who we are. Our bodies are meant to heal each other. If we’re all frequency sound, we can heal ourselves with frequency sound.

At what point did you decide that you wanted to make sound healing something you offered to others through your life? 

Gene Jimenez: It was beautiful synchronicity. I got invited to a sound bath, and I’m like, wow, that felt great. This is so good. Then going to bed a couple hours later, I was like, that was that and okay, that was done. Then I got invited to another one a few months later, and I had already started doing breath work with my wife, who is a master breath work practitioner. I noticed in the breath work session, I’m having these incredible meditations and visualizations and whatnot. Now I’m in this sound bath, and I’m like, oh, I feel great again. This is really wonderful.

Then waking up the next morning, I was bothered that I wasn’t still feeling that way and then it could be, why? How come I can’t feel like that on my own? What’s going on there? I just started digging in. Within two to three weeks of that is when my grandmother came to me in a meditation and I’m like, okay, what do you want? What do you want? I’m buying a flute that I heard someone playing a sound bath in. I’m not sure what you want as I’m holding my new flute because I just wanted to be a part of that. I’m thinking oh, the sound bath, I should really start going to flute. It’s a native instrument to me and I always wanted to play something.

Then I’d probably say about a month and a half after my grandmother first came, and she’d come because when were doing weekly meditations, but she showed up the third time with a friend of mine who had passed away about four years before. He was a beautiful shaman. He went on a trip and their group was picnicking somewhere, and the military thought they were somebody else and open fired on him. Now, before he had left. He gave me one of his totems and said, “When I come back, we’re supposed to work together.” I was so excited because at the time I was doing live painting to music and everything, but I was always tracks to have a shaman playing around me while I was painting. It was going to be very cool. He never came back, and now he’s sitting next to grandma in my meditation, handing me one of his instruments.

It clicked to me, I’m supposed to be doing this. I’m supposed to be part of this sound world. Then I also was into very much the question. I want it to last more than the hour. I dove into it as I figured how do you get that feeling to last. It turns out for the past 20 years, the Mayo Clinic, John Hopkins, the Sound Institute in Austria, they’ve all been doing deep dive studies on sound and its effect on the body. You have incredible – it’s probably one of the most explosive medical professions out there right now. We’re discovering so much about, first of all, our physiology, who we are as human beings, our species, and pretty much the existence of the entire universe is all sound.

Everything is a frequency. You take an atom, you open it up in the books, there’ll be two balls there, two illustrated orbs. You do that in real life. You open that up, there’ll be two vibrating elements there. They’re just frequencies. At our very rock bottom core, we are frequency. Knowing that when you actually can tune your frequency tune yourself back to your original frequency without everything from close to music, family to emotions, to your work, you drive in, drive back from work, all the 5G and everything else, we are just part of nature. Being in far and in tune with nature and that frequency has us centered. You feel a lot better walking through a forest than you do walking through downtown Manhattan, and I’ve worked there and it’s a great place to work. I love it and the people are awesome. It’s wonderful. Give me an hour in the forest, it will give me a lot more healing time with myself, my mind and everything from parasympathetic nervous system to your vagus nerve to your overall mentality. All of that is frequency, that sound therapy via sound bass done correctly. Targeting various parts of whether it be your chakras, whether it be your nervous systems and whatnot with native instruments is incredibly powerful.

Now I had my why. I went and found, and I’m just finishing up a mastery class in the sound science with the shift network and I’m incredibly excited for this, actually, I want to say remembered field that exists. There’s only one thing in the world that obliterates cancers tumors. It’s sound. That alone should have us going, okay, it can do that when nothing else can do that. Not even surgeries can cut it out, but there’s always still something possibly left. Sound obliterating and actually having those cells go away or be turned back into human cells, that’s something to note. Personally I think sound therapy will reenter the medical field within the next seven to 10 years.

What are your favorite instruments to integrate into your sound bath experiences?

Gene Jimenez: I think my favorite thing playing right now is the native flute, because there’s a soulfulness about it for myself. There’s different types. There’s a Mayan flute. There’s a native wooden flute. The Mayan flute is made primarily out of clay, but the various instruments I’ve taught myself to play all these. Once I started I was just like, well, I don’t know who to find. I don’t know who plays these things. This is where it’s like, oh, now we have YouTube, and so I’ve done a lot of great searching on YouTube and how to play or how people do play these things. Finding a good instrument is great. A lot of the sound bath practitioners are great.

Now I’ll say this any work you do for self-healing, for rejuvenation and for self-care, I think is great. Be conscious about what is your intention going in. If it’s just to feel good – and unfortunately we live in a very image oriented society, so a lot of people are very image like, oh, well that’s the best looking person out there and they look like a next model and I should go and do their sound baths and hey, great, I think that’s wonderful. Having someone that knows the science behind it and is actually generating frequencies from a science level, it looks the same. It sounds the same, but it’s very different because what the science will be doing is working with you several weeks afterwards versus people doing just a concert or a performance. Your body’s going to go, oh yeah, this is sound. Your subconscious is going to go, okay, we’re not there anymore. Now, time to keep doing what we’re doing in life. Once your subconscious knows this is scientific sounds, then it keeps playing with it. It keeps going with it. It keeps attuning to those frequencies.

I think the various instruments that I play and that I’ve discovered along the way from the sensula, which is a Japanese thumb piano thing to the handpan, the didgeridoo, all these are not only beautiful and fun to play, but then to understand the medical and the therapeutic benefits that they could be for people is fantastic. Tibetan bowls, you start there. You have migrated from the monks in Tibet. Turns out playing a Tibetan bowl for no less than six minutes ups your blood oxygen level over 12%.

Why is that important? Because any healing in the body requires blood oxygen level. Depending on how high your blood oxygen level is depends on how quickly you’re going to heal or if you’re going to heal at all. To increase the blood availability oxygen 12%, that’s a big deal. That’s just as good, if not better than being in an oxygen chamber, and this is just the Tibetan bowls. You have things like the didgeridoo, which is probably the oldest instrument in the world, the gongs, the shaman drums and then the native flutes, all those instruments with the bowls are the primary instruments.

Then you have things like a monochord, which is more of a still harp or a hand pan which actually hits frequencies that are really attuned to just relaxing the parasympathetic nervous system. It just has your frequencies in your body go because it doesn’t have those molecules, your frequency that’s going on in your body. It doesn’t have to calculate anything. It actually just gets to relax and be what it naturally is, and that’s part of nature.

Van Der Schaeppers by GENE Jimenez

Is there a connection for you between your fine art and the sound therapy part of your life? Do those overlap in your mind or do you keep those separate? 

Gene Jimenez: I think it’s funny, because somebody just asked recently how do you get into your groove with your creative process? When they asked me that, I realized it’s the same whether I’m making fine art or whether I’m making music, and it really is quieting my own mind. We don’t do that a lot as a society. We’re actually conditioned and trained to just be – especially with social media and everything, it’s like conditioned to always be on, to always be calculating something to figuring out your next move. We don’t tell kids – not every second, but kids hear us every second. Now we’re adults and now we’re calculating every next second.

When I allow my mind just some quiet, some stillness, all of a sudden imagination comes to life and creativity comes to life. Same with my sound; the thread there is quiet and silent. I’m being still, and then all of a sudden music happens and frequency happens, and I found myself really diving into rhythms and melodies that sound beautiful and were supportive of therapeutic purposes for the individuals and the people that I’m playing with.

I hope that people look at my fine art and say he’s giving something of himself, because really that is my tension to share something that I couldn’t put into words. Music is the same thing and sharing something I can’t put into words. Those that really connect with it don’t have words either, but they’re having a conversation with one or the other.

If people want to see your art locally in Southern California or online, where should they head?

Gene Jimenez: I have a hub of a website, and it’s called www.artistgene.com. From there you can go to my artist website, which has my galleries and whatnot, which is Art of Gene. You can also go to my sound work now on heal.me. You can also go to my comic book company there as well.

One last question. If someone is just starting out and they’re trying to figure what they want to pursue, what encouragement would you give them today?

Gene Jimenez: I’d tell them, we are here for a very short time, and we live in a society where it says you should work really hard. I’m all for that. I think my family taught me to work really hard, and I can work really hard making somebody else’s dreams come true, or I can work really hard making my dreams come true. Don’t be afraid to go after it. I know that a big part of it is going to come as failure, because this is your dream.

Nobody’s ever created your dream before. It’s an original thing and it’s part of that definition of creativity. It’s your imagination coming to life, so that it’s yours; that it is coming from you. It’s worth the failures. It’s worth the hurdles and whatnot. If you have it live for you and you have it live for you enough, you’ll have enough failure and you’ll have enough successes. That first step will always be worth it.