17 September 2010

Bring Back Your Creativity

Did you know that you can get better at creativity – with practice? This would mean that the older one gets, the more creative he or she is. The article, “Age and Creativity” (on CreatingMinds.org) states that, “Creativity even affects longevity. It has been proven that people who stay mentally active live longer even than those who stay physically active.”

This is an invitation to be creative. What exactly is “creativity”? The state or quality of being creative is believed in most cultures to be innate; a natural human gift that we all have. According to dictionary.com, creativity is also ‘the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination.’

In present day culture, adults become trapped inside tradition, clichés and familiarity. We habituate ourselves to approaching life in certain, comfortable ways, and this leads to our becoming less creative. We don’t use our creativity and, so, it fades away. For example, one might eat the same thing for breakfast every day, week after week, year after year… being creative when making breakfast disappeared with the habit, with the pattern. This fellow gets so used to his standard breakfast that he never changes or varies it.

Thus we become stuck in the familiar. Not many people even read much anymore or study a topic of interest just for the sake of it. CreatingMinds.org goes on to say that, ‘Fewer still innovate for the fun of it.’

Have you spent most of your life avoiding being creative? You didn’t start your life that way – every two-year-old is extremely creative, for sure! Since our education system and family culture encourages children to conform, we eventually inhibit our creativeness and feel good about conforming.

So how does one not feel discouraged when an opportunity to be creative arises? Begin by understanding that you can gradually bring back your creativity. Here are some activities you can use to begin...

1. Know that everyone is creative; it is a natural birthright of everyone - including you.

2. Remember that the principle of creativity says that we are being inventive non-stop. Just about everything you do and say are things you have not said or done before, or at least not in the exact same way.

3. Begin to exercise your rather dormant creative muscle by visiting a furniture store and mentally play with putting different rooms together, just for fun.

4. Visit a nearby museum and stare at a great painting. Pretend you are the artist and decide what you would change about the painting.

5. Go to a garden center and pretend you are designing the grounds for a park. Pick out trees, shrubs, grasses and flowers that you would like to see in a park.

6. Go for a walk in the mountains and gather up some sticks, stones and leaves. Lay them out in some kind of order or disorder on the ground and draw lines with a stick in the dirt to go with you pile.

7. Hold three pens or pencils in your fist so all the tips touch the paper at the same time. Start scribbling around and around on the paper with all three together.

8. Choose a letter from the alphabet and draw it 6 inches high on a piece of paper. Now make a silly character out of it.

9. Buy a bunch of fruit and make a fruit salad.

10. Think of a quirky machine that would make life easier for you, for example, one that puts your socks on or removes bird droppings from your car every morning.

11. Take a beginner art class at the recreation center and focus on the creative process.

12. Start a journal about your life and travels. Glue photos, pictures torn from brochures and magazines, keys, wrappers and souvenirs into it.

13. Sit in a busy restaurant and make up stories about people you observe, young and old.

14. Read a fiction book and pretend you are the protagonist (main character).

The idea is to stimulate your imagination, just for the fun of it. The steps above should be treated like silly games you play with yourself and should not be taken seriously while you are doing them. Their purpose is to stimulate the use of your creative ability. It’s just like learning to ride a bike, remember? At first it was kind of scary and disconcerting, but soon you were riding free. If you give yourself the opportunity to develop your creativity, soon it will become a natural flow, just like when you were little.

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Art Is A Force of Energy Moving Through You

Creativity was always important to me; I was a born artist. My mother remembers me drawing houses in perspective when I was four years old, and I have always made and sold puppets, paintings, fashion, jewelry, sculpture, altered art. Yes, even as a child. One day, after I got married, I realized that I wanted to teach because I deeply wanted to share the experience and delight of "being an artist." Just creating and selling art became "been there, done that," and I wanted to give something back. I wanted to contribute something good to the lives of others. I seemed to be vibrating at a higher frequency. When I was teaching, many students, and especially adults, came into their first class or for a "check it out" visit to the studio believing that they had no talent. "I can't even draw a straight line," I heard over and over. Thanks to a great teacher I once had, I knew that the only thing they needed was a learning gradient that was individualized. In other words, each student is an individual with a unique set of skills and understandings, and each has their own way of learning. The most important thing I had to offer was step-by-step, individualized instruction for each person that included a lot of demonstration. Isn't it easier to to do something after watching someone else do it first? The students were always encouraged to work on a project that only they were doing; no two people were asked to do the same thing, you know, like... "Now class, today we're all going to do such and such." It's an uncomfortable feeling to be submerged into a situation where a person sees how their own creation appears alongside all the others that are similar. What happens is everyone starts to compare theirs with the others. Not good for self esteem! My fondest memories of teaching art are of the students learning at their own pace, in their own gradient, and discovering that they could actually create something beautiful and unique. I invite anyone who has ever had a desire to create something, anyone who has dreamed of "being" an artist or of taking an art class, to become an adventurer and take a step outside your comfort zone right now. Give yourself the gift of art. What's important is to allow yourself to create, to express yourself. What's not important is how good or perfect your artwork is. Express yourself! Have fun! And don't worry about the outcome because there is no such thing as "doing something wrong" in art. Art is the manifestation of a force of energy moving through you. All you have to do is open yourself.