When I think of what creativity means to me, it’s the thing that made me different. It was my identity. My brothers were good at so many things, and when I compared myself to them, I felt bad about myself. I didn’t value art yet. They could do things that I couldn’t do.
When I’m creating something, I have to have a plan, or at least an idea in my head. That gets me started, but then I keep my mind open and make discoveries along the way. Ideas come to me all the time. The idea to start a project, and then the ideas about working on it. When I stop, I’m not finished. I critique it, and then I modify it. I have to step back and give my mind time to take in the composition and then meander through the brushstrokes.
Sometimes that initial gesture stays the way it came out. Other times, I make alterations. At other times, I obliterate the whole thing and start over.
I want to feel a connection with the work. I want it to represent me when it goes out on its own.
I can’t turn the creative spigot on and off. I do notice that paintings flow out for a while, then writing takes over. I make pottery whenever I get the chance. Drawing fills in a lot of the chinks. There are times when you won’t see me creating anything at all. That’s when I am experiencing other things so that I will have something to say. Life is research for art.
Here’s what I do to enhance my creativity: I acknowledge it. When a thought… a memory… an impulse finds its way down my arm and out the pen, it lets the other ones know that it found the way out, and they line up waiting for their turn.
I have to be ready with something in my hand to record it, and some surface for it to wriggle out onto. Paintbrush to canvas, ink to paper, stylus to clay, fire poking stick to sidewalk… it could be almost anything.
I’ve heard it said that cave painters weren’t the artists, but the Great Spirit, or the collective unconscious is the artist. We are just the conduit. For many years, I have said that I just need to keep a grip on the moving paintbrush or pen in order for my creative impulses to manifest themselves. We shouldn’t think of ourselves as something separate from the universe, imposing some new, innovative ideas on it. We are made of stardust, and those wriggling expressions are just a tiny exhalation of the cosmos.