An idea rarely arrives in L. C. Atencio’s mind as a vague concept waiting for him to decide what to do with it.
He describes the experience more like watching traffic approach on a road. Just as a person can quickly recognise whether the approaching vehicle is a car, van or truck, Atencio says he can often recognise the form of an idea almost immediately.
Some arrive as poems not yet written. Others are paintings waiting to be made. Occasionally, he sees the beginnings of something large enough to become a novel.
“I see a lot of ‘ideas’ on the road,” he says, “so I pick the most interesting and compelling ones to bring to life.”
It is an appropriate metaphor for someone whose creative work has moved between painting, poetry, short stories, illustration and longer fiction. Atencio resists choosing one of those disciplines as his defining identity. He prefers the broader word: artist.
Understanding why means looking not only at what he creates, but at the unusual way he describes experiencing the act of imagining it.
An Idea Arrives With Its Own Form
Multidisciplinary artists are sometimes described as moving ideas from one medium into another: a poem inspires a painting, a painting becomes a story, or a piece of music generates an image.
L. C. Atencio describes his process differently.
Once he commits to an idea as a poem, painting or story, he says its fundamental form generally remains fixed.
What can happen is expansion.
A novel, for example, may generate visual material as its fictional world develops. Atencio can create illustrations or cover artwork connected with the story, but he does not regard that as abandoning literature for visual art. Instead, the additional work grows out of the original idea.
His own phrase for the distinction is concise:
“I can expand, but I cannot sidestep.”
For Atencio, a creative idea therefore has both an identity and a wider territory. The original work remains what it was intended to be, while related ideas can develop around it in other media.
That approach helps explain why writing and visual art can occupy the same creative career without becoming interchangeable.
Writing Like a Painter
The relationship becomes particularly clear when Atencio describes what happens while he writes.
As a painter, he says he is highly attentive to form, colour and perception. Those visual instincts follow him onto the page.
A fictional scene is not merely a sequence of sentences in his imagination. He describes experiencing it almost like a film playing internally while he remains fully awake.
Within that imagined environment, his perspective can move.
He can observe characters from outside, imagine what they are thinking or feeling, or mentally pull away from them to see the wider scene from another angle. His description resembles a camera moving through a fictional space, except the viewpoint is not limited by physical constraints.
“As a painter, I pick the best angles,” he explains.
The metaphor reveals how closely his visual and literary instincts overlap. The writer decides what information readers need; the painter decides where they should be standing when they see it.
People who have watched him write, Atencio says, have commented that they sometimes think he is daydreaming because he appears physically present while mentally absorbed elsewhere.
A Painting as One Second of a Larger Story
The relationship works in reverse when he paints.
Atencio does not describe a painting as an isolated image. In his imagination, the visible picture belongs to a much larger world that the viewer cannot see.
“A painting is literally a single second from an entire scene within an entire story,” he says.
Characters depicted in his paintings may have histories. Events may conceptually exist before and after the moment captured on the canvas. If he mentally shifted the viewpoint, he says, another part of that imagined world could potentially become a different picture.
This is where the storyteller influences the painter.
The finished painting may be all an audience sees, but Atencio describes an invisible narrative structure underneath it—what he calls the foundation beneath the “tip of the iceberg.”
It also explains an intriguing difference in his working habits.
He is comfortable writing in public spaces such as coffee shops, parks and libraries. A notebook can be closed or shielded from view.
Painting is different.
Atencio says he does not paint in front of other people. The developing image feels too exposed, and he prefers to reveal visual work only when he considers it sufficiently presentable.
For someone comfortable working across numerous disciplines, the creative process itself remains surprisingly private.
Why Poetry Offers Something Painting Cannot
Poetry occupies another place in that system.
Atencio says one of its attractions is immediacy. A poem can sometimes become a completed work within a single day, offering a sense of resolution that a novel, short story or painting may not provide.
He also experiences poetry partly through rhythm and feeling.
At times, he says, writing a poem can resemble singing in written form.
That distinction helps explain why he has resisted specialising exclusively in one discipline. Atencio does not regard painting, fiction and poetry as different routes towards the same creative satisfaction.
Each gives him something different.
His analogy is deliberately ordinary: liking cake does not prevent someone from liking pasta or cereal. They are all food, but the experiences are different.
He thinks about artistic disciplines in much the same way.
According to Atencio, his creative interests have extended beyond writing and visual art into music, singing, acting and dance. He says he has auditioned for acting roles as an adult, and previously danced for the Walt Disney Company in Kissimmee, Florida.
Those are some biographical details. Still, the broader point is more revealing than any individual credit: he does not seem particularly interested in choosing a single creative category and staying within it.
Sentient Televisions, Emotional Quicksand and Working Letters
Perhaps the clearest evidence of Atencio’s imagination comes from the ideas themselves.
When asked where they originate, his answer is surprisingly simple.
He does not know.
“Ideas just drop into my head,” he says.
Some concepts that have appeared in his published work include televisions capable of thinking and forming opinions, quicksand that can reason and feel emotion, and spirits fighting demons and animals capable of speech.
In another idea, the sky has a face: the moon becomes its closed eyelid and the sun its open eye.
Then there are the letters.
Atencio suddenly recalls imagining the letters of the alphabet as members of a functioning community. Each was a being with a home, employment, responsibilities and family relationships.
The idea raised a peculiar question: what would it feel like to experience existence as a letter?
He pursued it.
About a year later, the concept had developed into a published work.
The example says something important about his process. The initial idea does not necessarily need to be logical or useful. It only needs to hold his attention long enough for him to investigate it.
There Is No Creativity Ritual
Given the volume and variety of ideas he describes, it’s tempting to imagine an elaborate routine designed to generate them.
Atencio says there isn’t one.
He writes and paints regularly, reads daily and surrounds himself with different forms of culture. His interests include classical music, metal and rock & roll, as well as films, theatre, art auctions, libraries and museums. He also mentions travel, beaches, parks and hiking in the mountains.
But he does not regard these activities as a formula for manufacturing inspiration.
“I don’t do anything ritualistically,” he says.
Instead, he describes trying to remain receptive to whatever occurs naturally. For him, forcing a creative routine too mechanically risks undermining something he considers essential to the work: authenticity.
That does not mean waiting passively for inspiration. He distinguishes between forcing ideas and consistently doing the work required when ideas arrive.
Originality Without Abandoning Consistency
Originality matters to Atencio, but it requires some qualification.
He does not believe originality means an artist must produce work in a completely different style every time. Within a collection, consistency can be intentional and necessary.
He wants to avoid creating work that he consciously believes resembles somebody else’s.
Atencio says that if an idea reminds him too strongly of something another artist has already created, he is prepared to discard it. At the same time, he wants his own styles to remain capable of evolving.
His ambition, in other words, is recognisability without imitation.
He cites Picasso not as a claim of equivalence but as an example of what recognisable artistic identity means: viewers can encounter certain works and associate them with their creator.
The balance is difficult. Too much consistency risks repetition; too much change can eliminate coherence.
For an artist working across several disciplines, that tension becomes even more complicated.
The Pressure to Choose One Box
Atencio believes creative industries often encourage artists to specialise.
Writers can become associated with one genre. Painters become associated with a recognisable visual language. Performers may be told that mastering one discipline requires excluding others.
He views that pressure critically.
Atencio says working across multiple disciplines has sometimes made his professional path more difficult because credibility established in one area does not automatically transfer to another. Entering a new creative field can mean proving himself again.
But he considers the trade-off worthwhile.
That helps explain why labels such as painter, poet or novelist each feel incomplete to him.
He prefers “artist” precisely because it leaves the category open.
For L. C. Atencio, painting, poetry and storytelling are not competing careers from which one must eventually emerge victorious. They are different ways of responding to ideas that arrive already asking to become something.
Remove the gallery, publisher, sales figures, reviews and audience, he says, and the underlying behaviour would remain.
He would still create.
The unconventional part of Atencio’s creative life may therefore be less about the number of disciplines he pursues than his refusal to decide that only one of them is permitted to define him.
The ideas keep appearing on the road.
His job, as he sees it, is to recognise which ones are worth following.
