It seems like every aspect of my life includes art. I can't help it. Call it a sickness, an addiction, whatever you want to label it,...art-making simply happens. I can't not make art. It usually leads to good things. Here's what I mean:
When I taught school, I wasn't content to purchase bulletin board borders or instructional posters with their beautiful graphics and perfect lettering. I just had to make those myself because no store seemed to have the exact idea I was looking for. Although mine were decidedly more primitive-looking than the mass-produced ones, my kiddos loved them because they saw an attainable skill. They often asked if they could help, which of course led to greater engagement. I let them whenever I could. In fact, some of their concepts made their way into posters for other classes, hence greater ownership of learning.
Whenever I bake, I have to add some kind of embellishment. It's very hard for me to simply do something straight from the recipe. I seem to be hard-wired to modify everything I touch. My family has no problem with that. They love the tiny mint-chocolate dove sandwich cookies with the delicate crunch and silver bead eyes. They love the blue and white snowflake sugar cookies with the iridescent edible glitter. The bite-sized raspberry-almond shortbread is the decided favorite. Very putzy..very time-consuming, and very very worth seeing them gobbled up in less time than it took to make them.
But this driving compulsion to create gets me in trouble sometimes. For instance, when I'm given a recipe for a dish I signed up to bring to an event and it ends up looking different from everyone else's...not uniform enough. Hmmm...not uniform enough. Perhaps that's another reason I am no longer teaching. I never could master the whole boxed and scripted thing.
And I feel so off balance when asked to 'dial it back a notch' so as not to seem competitive or make participation intimidating to others. I have the hardest time with this one. When one is asked to be creative with a project, but not 'too' creative,.......YIKES! How creative is too creative? I wasn't given that filter, evidently. How do I cope here?
So here's a bit of encouragement and a word of advice to all you creative types. If your job depends on it or if you need to help with a project that involves a bunch of people helping to create a uniform look, then of course dial it back..or up..or whatever direction you need to dial it for the good of the whole. Then when you get back in your own studio, go wild! Don't hold back. Give it all you've got in you. Make a mess. Dance if you want to. Create something huge and splashy or tiny and intense....just do your God-given thing without anyone in your head telling you to stop showing off. You aren't showing off. You are releasing what's inside you. Give that creative energy the room it needs to grow and blossom. If you keep that bottled up too long you WILL eventually either drown slowly in a shallow puddle of mediocrity or you'll explode....like a squirrel on a power line.
