A Moment in Time Pastel over Watercolor
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” Pablo Picasso
Creativity is a gift we are given at birth and instinctively express as children. Some of us have that gift nurtured more than others, but it is not a gift that goes away. We just need to have a desire to develop it and know how to tap into it. As adults oftentimes the inner realm gets over shadowed by constant pressures, demands and distractions of the external world. We lose sight of it and no longer trust in the spirit of play that made our unique gifts shine as children.
When we spend too much of our time on the ordinary, day-to-day things that we must do for our survival, the pen loses its flow, the brush loses its touch, the song loses its melody, our sense of what is unique, beautiful, and special about the world around us blurs. We don’t make time to attend to the creative side of ourselves or in some cases it gets stamped out by well-meaning but uninformed people.
Pablo Picasso said that “every child is born an artist; the problem is how to remain one once we grow up.” There are three barriers to our creativity that develop on our way to adulthood. We develop a fear of experimentation and play, we start chasing perfection, and we stereotype things and people.
Without these three things which cause self-doubt and fear of rejection, our inner spirit soars. So as adults we must re-claim our gift of creativity. We must again dare to give ourselves the freedom to play, transcending to a time where the creative spirit reigned in a vast seemingly limitless field of dreams. We need to take the pilgrimage back to our childlike state of mind and reunite with our childhood sense of play.
Creativity is messy. We do, we fail, we redo, and maybe redo 100 times. Then in that mess we find a gem, which sparks another gem. It’s not perfection all at once. It may never be perfection to us, but it could be perfection to someone else. It takes time, finding the right parts that fit: The right medium, technique, subject matter. It takes time and patience. It takes practice, a lot of heart, and learning to love the feel of just doing.
As artists our legacy lies in the ability to approach aesthetic endeavors with an authentic voice and vision; painting the way we feel despite ourselves and not the way we think we ought to paint.
It is the season of giving. We need to give ourselves the gift of play, the freedom to experiment and feel the joy of being free of stereotypes. We don’t need to be perfect we need to feel the joy in doing.
“As for what I am making now, perhaps it I art: but if it isn’t, at least it is something equally interesting to me.” George Rickey
I wish each of you a very Happy Holiday Season. I am so grateful for you sticking with me over the past year. It was a long journey. Natures force and my ability to play in my studio kept me from falling apart. It is in times, like this year has been, that being a “creative” comes in handy. You can escape in your creative process or that of others who have created for our enjoyment. Carolyn