Creativity is Always There When You Need It the Most

Dear Reader,

Lately I’ve been thinking about how the part of me that loves art and theater and writing, the artist part, has existed long before I became a wife or a mother or a teacher. This month I’ll celebrate a birthday bringing me one year closer to fifty. There are times when I’ve wondered if some of these artist parts would fade out and become something I once loved but no longer an active part of my life. Certainly they have ebbed and flowed depending on the season of life but instead of fading into a relic of the past they’ve remained a true part of me that I can always return to when I need them.

Here’s a sprinkling of the way these parts have been showing up in the past month:

Helping Others Make Space for their Artist Parts

Last month I held a “shared creative night” with a few friends and my daughter. The invitation was to bring along a hands-on project to do alongside others while we chatted.

We had a small group that night and I started our time off with “wrong-handed drawings”. This is a Carla Sonheim1 inspired exercise that my kids and I have done many times over the years. The purpose of this exercise isn’t to make a “good” drawing or to even get a likeness of the person, it’s simply to loosen up and spend more time looking at your model than the paper.

The reaction of my friends when I described what we were going to do was priceless. “Wait, we’re going to draw a portrait with our opposite hand?” I told them we’d be using Sharpies so there was no erasing or starting over. After they got going and I reminded them to breathe, they eventually started laughing and everyone had a good time with the exercise.

The whole evening reminded me that not everyone can make time for art every day. I remembered how much I enjoy helping women carve out space for creativity in their lives. I’m hoping to make it a monthly gathering at my house.

“(Drawing) is almost more about looking than…using your hand. One comes from the other.”

Carla Sonheim

Drawing What’s Under the Surface

A lot of what I draw in my sketchbook is a collection of things gathered from daily life. I snap photos of flowers, of something I see on my bike path and then I return to the photos later when I need something to draw.

A different type of drawing is the attempt to capture something going on inside of me, something that I can’t simply copy from a photo. It’s a type of illustration and it’s something I don’t consider my strong suit. But the few times I’ve managed it, it’s been a cathartic moment, similar to capturing a feeling or experience through writing.

A long run of insomnia this summer found me investigating what was beneath the insomnia2. I started journaling in the mornings like I haven’t done in a long time, trying to see what would rise to the surface. Two books that I’ve been dipping into are Practices for Embodied Living: Experiencing the Wisdom of Your Body by Hillary L. McBride and Feel Something, Draw Something: A Guide to Collaborating with Your Emotions by Caitlyn Metz.

A few weeks ago I sat down to make some drawings about all the things floating to the surface.

After the sketches I pulled out my Gelli Plate to do a little experimenting. I’d recently seen a video where you could draw on the Gelli Plate with Posca Markers, cover it with paint and then pull a print and the drawing would show up with it. Something about the distressed layers from the Gelli Plate captured the stripped down feeling of three weeks of insomnia and wrestling with my body. I was able to name something true about my experience by rendering it onto paper.

Art doesn’t have to be an illustration to be cathartic.

Often just the act of pen and paint to paper is enough to bring calm to the chaos if my emotions are becoming a sandstorm. Yesterday I felt the storm rising and took myself off to a coffee shop for a few hours. For this session I simply sketched from the photos on my phone.

All of these sketches were warm-ups for this final sketch of the day.

Here’s a fun little note about this one. I made a mess of the cat at first but I really liked where it was headed. So I turned to another page in the sketchbook, redrew the cat, tore it out and pasted it over the old cat. Then I started adding color and finished the piece. Lesson: Don’t give up when something doesn’t go your way at first.

Though nothing particularly profound ended up on my sketchbook, the simple act of putting lines on the paper shifted the weather inside of me away from the brewing storm.

More Creative Inspiration

A few final bits of inspiration from this past month.

What Women Create and Where Women Create: I’m continuing to thoroughly enjoy my subscription to a print magazine for the first time in years. I look forward to every issue and read them slowly, a page or two at a time. I also love that they are usually full of great quotes.

Kelcey Ervick, Author and Artist: I discovered Kelcey’s newsletter, The Habit of Art, last year and I look forward to her newest work every week. Her newsletter is unique, a combination of words and art and it’s like a creative boost every Sunday. I can’t recommend it enough. Recently I joined her paid subscription and I received this hand-drawn postcard sent while she was on a trip to Ireland!

Blessings from the Guest Nest,

Aimee

Click over to the comments and share something that’s inspired you this week.

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