" 'The intellect is a great danger to creativity...because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things, instead of staying with your own basic truth-who you are, what you are, what you want to be.' " - Wired to Create, Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire, 2015 (Taken from an interview by Ray Bradbury, 1974)
Prepare for a change of subject matter - again!
When I first started writing this blog thing, it was mainly to document my adventures on my travels. Then, when I came back, it had a lot more to do with the whole 're-integration' process - but I feel like it's time to shift once again. If you've looked in the 'about me' section of the site, you've probably read a little blurb about how this whole thing started, and how a goal of mine has been to find a new way to do art, teach art, and help the world get a little better. I had no idea how to do that. But a lot of things have shifted, and I've been a little enlightened...by a whole bunch of things: friends, mentors, experiences, opportunities I've been given, and a book I've been reading that I just randomly stumbled across.
While I was in Peru I tried to figure out what my goal was in teaching art. I've taught it for awhile in a bunch of different contexts, and each time there's been something off. I've always loved it and known it was important, but there was always something I didn't enjoy about directing people in creating things - until I realized something: How I became creative - I played.
When I was a kid, I played with all kinds of things. From ant farms, to pretending I was a scientist, to playing 'house' and with the old school polly pockets and barbie dolls with my sister, making up games to play outside. Then when I took art classes all through high school, I learned techniques...but I don't use many of them. The main media I use in the artwork that I do now came from a semester of high school when our art teacher was in school to be a school councilor on top of her art teaching. We were lucky that our art program was AMAZING, complete with 10-ton presses for printing and allllll kinds of cool media, and I was even luckier that in our grade twelve year, we had a substitute teacher who didn't art at all...so as long as we did all of our assigned projects, we had free reign in the in-between time to play. I tended towards the extra-heavy gel media. I didn't know that you were supposed to mix it with the paint first, so I just applied it and then brushed over it, and found out that I LOVED the way that I could create texture and use it to achieve depth in my work. I still use that now. I played with layering, and mixed media - and I had no one to tell me it was wrong. I learned to use media in ways other than they were intended to be used, and fell in love with art - and that's why it sets me free today. When I sit down to create something, if I have an idea in my head or I'm trying to copy something or do something that someone wants a certain way, it's SO stressful. But if I just sit down and let myself create something from scratch, I always end up loving my work. Why? Because when I sit down to just play, there are so many possibilities...but when I sit down to make something specific I have the ability to fail, and I hate failing.
The problem I had in teaching kids art wasn't the teaching aspect, because I love introducing people to new media. The problem was that we always had set projects for the kids to 'copy', and then we had to show them how to copy it. Within a matter of months I would see cute little 5 year drawing pictures from imaginations that had complete stories attached to them, and in time become more and more insecure and anxious about their abilities as we taught them 'the right way' to make the picture, or sculpture. The problem is, child or adult, the second we give someone a template to follow we automatically subject them to judgement. It doesn't matter if the person making the template has done 1500000 copies for practice beforehand, or has had years more experience than the person doing to copying - there will always be a comparison.
Anxiety has totally crippled our society. When I see a little kid holding back from playing because they are afraid to get in trouble or go too far, it breaks my heart, because it's such a sign that the future youth are going to live crippled by fear of going outside of the lines...and we really need to be able to do that. When did it become a travesty to make a mistake, or fail at something, or lose? When I instruct adults in a painting class and they have to stop and ask me if they're drawing a line the right way, it makes me feel as a teacher that my work is supposed to be flawless - because if it's not, who will want to copy it?
We've become masters of copying. We look at our role models, our teachers, our parents, our pastors and we feel like if we're going to be the best 'us' we need to BE who they are, look how they look, speak like them, walk in their footsteps....and we've done it as a culture so much that now we're trying to find and define our identity in the things about us that don't even matter: sexual identity, racial identity, personality tests, hair color, zodiac signs...the list continues and gets us so confused about who we are.
So what if we simplified it?
What if you were just you, and you actually had the opportunity to figure out what that meant beyond all of the tests, logic and ideas that other people have come up with?
There's a book I've been reading called 'Wired to Create', a bunch of behavioral research compiled by Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire in how we're all uniquely creative. We think about creativity as just visual art, but in every day of our lives and in every field, we're required to be creative. Whether we're building a house, making coffee, building a program, planning for the future, daydreaming about possibilities or just every day problem solving, we are constantly using the part of our brain that figures out something new, finds new ways to do something. It's the reason we have all of the things that we have: someone came up with the pieces of the computer that work together, and each piece that makes a clock work, the fact that you can combine certain ingredients to make a certain dish. We're creative every day. The book goes through a lot of other stuff too, all of which is fascinating - so read it if you get the chance. But the thing that really gets me is the fact that if we can be so anxious about painting a line; something that is SO irrelevant to our everyday life...what does that say about the anxiety that we get when there's something bigger at stake? What happens to us when we need to make a decision about our job, our finances, our relationships - our lives? Do we work it out, piece by piece...or do we just become paralyzed by fear, shut down, put up a wall, withdraw from the stress and pretend it never happened? I think we know the answer to that. In being afraid of possibilities, we've lost our ability to be persistent and loyal, and we've TOTALLY lost our endurance to run the race that's been set before us.
So now that I've rambled on and on about the issue that I have such a passion to dismantle, I'll tell you a happy story.
Once upon a time, I taught kids splatter parties. It was THE most fun part of my job, to let kids be kids and get messy and have fun without much restriction. To see kids that are used to structure come out of their shell with a little bit of coaxing. Today, I taught kids again (using 'teaching' as a loose term here), and I basically had a plethora of supplies. When they sat down to hear what kind of craft we were making, I told them they could make whatever they wanted with the supplies we had. The whole thing was awesome, but one girl in particular made me so, so happy: she started out by asking for her phone so she could draw a picture - I said no, that she'd have to use her imagination. She complained a little, saying she wasn't creative but eventually I caught her drawing with the paint markers, doodling. But then, when she thought no one was looking, she took a paper towel and crumpled it up, used the paint marker to cover it, and used it as a sponge. I had other sponges there, but it didn't matter, because she was being innovative and using something in a way it hadn't really been intended, and using it to just play - AND I caught her smiling :)
That's what I want to do with my life, friends. I want to catch people in the moment that they finally find out that they can do anything, and use that knowledge to actually go out and create new possibilities to fit them instead of just waiting for the ones that already exist, and trying to make themselves fit into them. I want to see a culture of people crippled by fear explode with joy and be set free from our mentality that we have to fit in, when there's literally nothing to fit into. Because when people find out who they are, things change, and hearts heal - and it's about time that happened :)
So make your day the best :)
Love you guys!
-B. <3