Playin’ The Edge

I love the 100 ideas on Keri Smith’s blog.  It’s a fun list and I plan to consult it when I have noodle time and am not sure what to noodle on or with or about.  Sometimes you just have the urge and are not sure where to direct it.  My faves are:  illustrate your grocery list (26), spend a day drawing only red things (9) and make a painting using tools from your bathroom (87).   

It takes a lot of good strong qualities to be more creative and self-expressive but the big one that hit me in the face recently is Courage.

I was doing some painting last weekend, just playing around, and I noticed that it was all coming out pretty pristine and controlled.  When really, the stuff I like is more along the lines of the “My Kid Could Paint That” images at the bottom of this post.  (Aside: I love the name of her blog, “A Beautiful Mess”.  That’s what I strive for). 

Look at the two at the bottom.  Amazing stuff right?  And it’s funny that I’m grooving on the art of a kid but that really fits because it IS my inner kidlet who should be driving the painting. 

But I remember how that all turned out for me.  In grade two we were coloring something and Mrs. Isenor came by my desk and said “Corilee! You’re drawing outside of the lines!”  She got shouty about it and everything.  She was pretty pissed.  And did the shame and humiliation ever drive THAT learning home for me.  Thanks Mrs. Isenor, you earned your pay that day.  So here I am a *number* of years later doing my darndest to unlearn that lesson.

I don’t want to draw inside the lines.  I want to upchuck my emotions in technicolor all over the page.  I’ve been playing with hot pinks lately, what do you think?  But it takes guts to be willing to see your guts.  Talk about playin’ your edge.  No arm balance was ever quite that scary for me.  What’s the fear of a smushed nose compared to, well, seeing your fear in all it’s glory on the paper?  Now that takes courage. 

We’re all creative and self-expressive all the time.  You might say, nope not me, I don’t have a creative bone in my body.  And when you say that you’re probably thinking about painting some perfectly photo-realistic picture or glass blowing.  You’re right, you probably need some training to pull that off.  But you’re still creative and self-expressive all the time.

When you tell your buddies a good story, there are a million ways you could form the story.  You picked one, you picked one with each word that came out of your mouth.  Now that’s creative.

When you decided what to wear this morning based on your mood, the weather or what would hide your lunch spills - pretty creative.

When you put something up on your wall because it makes you feel good and not because of some idea of what best matches your couch, that’s creative too.

And it’s important.  Our lives are richer and a heck of a lot more fun if we look for more opportunites to express ourselves and be creative.  And it doesn’t really matter what it is, as long as it’s something we groove on.  Something that gives us a little scrap of joy.

But we always get stuck on the idea that whatever we “produce” won’t be “good enough”.   But that’s crap.  It’s about the playing not about producing.  It’s about expressing who we are and where we’re at at any given moment.  We get so hung up on Perfection.

I learned something about that when I did a raku class.  It’s a pottery technique and uses a special clay that’s full of sand and small rocks.  When you throw a pot on the wheel you’re convinced it’s going to wear off your fingerprints.  But the rough clay is used so that the pot has a better chance of withstanding the raku process.

The pots get fired first in the kiln as usual and then they’re dipped in special glazes that contain metals and other compounds.

The fun part happens next.  We took our pots and the class went to some potter’s lawn by the ocean.  We’d take a big bunch of shredded paper, dump it on the lawn, light it on fire and throw a pot in it.

The fire would bring out amazing colors in the glaze - shimmering metalics and rich deep colors too.  Then we’d use long tongs to take the pot out of the fire and throw it in a bucket of cold water to freeze the colors as they were.

Pretty tough process for a delicate clay pot huh?  Sometimes even the strongest looking pots broke. Our teacher told us that raku was first done by Japanese monks a long time ago.  They made cups for their tea ceremonies and the tea helped them stay awake during their long meditation sessions.

And he said that it was the broken cups that were most valued by the monks.  They would put them back together and value them even more than the pots that were “perfect” and unbroken by the raku process.

I think that’s the best way to look at our creative play too.  You just don’t know what you’re going to come up with, so why pre-judge it?  Why judge it at all?  The fun is in the doing.  You think that people looked at Picasso’s stuff and said “oh yeah painting the eyes on top of each other, wow what perfection.”  No, they thought he was nuts.  But hey, judgey people don’t need to see your doodles, scribbles or macrame.  You’re just telling a version of a story.  So what’s yours?