I never know what is going to inspire me. I go about my life doing all the things people do, and I do various creative things, as I have always done. I don’t need to try to be inspired. It’s counter productive for me to look for the next big idea. That turns the wonder of discovery into work, and tends to result in something that feels contrived.

So like I said, I go about my life, and notice things that connect me to something deep inside me already. One thing leads to another. One significant observation or realization opens the door to something connected to it.

When my mother died, I became interested in my ancestry. I looked at old photos of my bygone relatives and I wanted to know more. I wanted to know them.

The generation before mine leads me to their parents, and they take me back to their parents. At each level, I unlock new stories about them, and about me.

With each level I unlock, the crowd doubles, and I begin to see, as never before, how we are all related.

I’m interested in pottery from early New England and paintings from mid 20th century Finland. My ancestors find their way into my writing, my pottery, into my drawings and my brother’s drawings. Rather than try to copy 18th century red ware jugs and pitchers, I admire them and add them to my visual lexicon. The things I care about are bound to influence what comes out of me. I love simple pottery forms. Nothing too ornate or perfect.

I don’t really feel like I choose anything. I don’t remember choosing acrylic paint, except that it dries faster than oils, doesn’t require so many ingredients, and is easier to clean up. As some point, I switched from charcoal and pencil to oil pastel and watercolor, but I don’t remember the choice. I dabble in all of them. For now, I’m working mostly in acrylic paint and clay.

Creative work comes pretty easily, because I try to avoid expectations and focus on enjoying the process. I think a lot while I’m painting, but not about the technical aspects of painting. I’m thinking of the story, like I do with my ancestors, who bubble up from deep in my DNA.

It’s a wonderful feeling to let my mind and my body be active. It’s a private land of dreams. No one is looking over my shoulder telling me what I should be doing rather than doing what I love.

When my life is over, I want to be remembered for being authentic. I don’t want to be like anyone else.

I want to follow the rules that make sense to me artistically, even if it means I use the medium differently than anyone else.

My own views about my art are somewhat influenced by other people. I don’t always like everything I produce. I question the work, and I question myself. When someone with no expectation of the piece sees it, they may love it. Or I’ll post images online and be surprised by the comments. I’m not objective about what I do. I am influenced by what it looked like in my head.

When I do a photo shoot, I don’t like to look at the pictures right away. The experience is too fresh in my mind to see the images for what they are.

My dad called me the other day and asked if he could use an old drawing of mine on a holiday greeting. He described it to me, and told me that he really loved the picture.

His comment meant a lot to me. My dad really loved my drawing.

Sometimes I’m influenced by negative comments. I try not to listen to those. Not all criticism is negative. It can be constructive. It gives me a different perspective, and that is valuable. What I do with it is up to me.

The culture in my town definitely influences my creativity. The community is supportive and generous, and makes it possible for me to be an artist.

So many life events contribute to my art. I never really know which ones are significant. I think they are all significant. We tend to label certain ones as our life story and reject or minimize others. We edit our experience in order to make it manageable, I guess. That doesn’t change anything. All of the information is still in us. It has influenced us, and could come to the surface at any time.

In the same way, we can’t pick and choose our ancestors.

Their DNA is in us, and without any one of them, we wouldn’t be who we are.

We each have 512 7th great grandparents. 256 great great great great great great great grandfathers. One of my 7th great grandfathers is famous for the Salem witch trials. His name was Rev. Samuel Parrish, and I wouldn’t have chosen him to be in my lineage.

This is not something I get to choose, and it doesn’t change anything. What I do with it is up to me.

I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for adoption.

My great grandmother, Lizzie Edith Miner, was adopted by the brother of my great great grandfather, and then married her cousin, so she is both my first cousin 3x removed AND my great grandmother.

We’ve known about my maternal grandfather’s ancestry going back to the 1400’s, and that male line has gotten most of the attention. Thomas Miner of Chew Magna, England, is a common ancestor of Ulysses S. Grant and myself.

My biological great great grandfather kind of got lost in the shuffle. He was a civil war veteran, First Company, heavy artillery for the Union Army. He later married Lizzie’s birth mother. Their names were Sylvester Himes and Ellen Shehan.

It couldn’t have been easy for a young, unmarried woman to have a baby and give her up in the 1870’s.

As an adoptive parent, this detail of my genealogy is particularly compelling to me. It has opened up a whole line of ancestors that I didn’t know about. Through internet research, I have discovered two of my 7th great grandmothers, dating back to the mid 1600’s. They are from the same area where I still have cousins living today.

I adopted a newborn girl 24 years ago, and then teen siblings out of foster care over the past two years. I thought I was the adoption pioneer in my family. I’m happy to discover that others in my past have opened their hearts and homes to a child that was not born to them, and to acknowledge the ones who, for whatever reason, were unable to raise her.

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.