Eat it up
Garden View (mixed media collage), Copyright © Attaining Creativity 2008
When paint, when flow, when creativity arrives and pleases, it isn’t just enough to see the results of my trials. It isn’t enough to simply be approving of the final visual treat, staring back at me. I found myself, after finishing this piece, wanting to eat up the leftover paint that remained on my silver mixing plate. Gleefully, I kept moving the brush around in circles, like a piece of good French bread over the remains of grandma’s pasta sauce on my plate.
It is for such weird, yet universally harmonious, moments, that I enjoy the trials of creation. Although I have many times designed a drawing piece in my mind and have sketched it out before paint or pastels ever touch canvas, it is in those moments in which I have no thoughts or attempts, and I am basically just trying things out, that I find myself enjoying the process more.
It is as if by sketching out a preconceived idea, the attempts to bring it to life, exactly as I pictured it initially in my mind, are always bound to fail, as I punish myself for lacking skills or become frustrated by the disconnect between the fruit of labor in front of me and the ever-perfect creation that remains in my mind, unable to be attained.
As I poured water into the silver paint plate and saw the paints delude and create their own, ever changing beauty, I remembered that not only through my successes but also through my trials, through my lack of planning, have I found and have had the greatest fun. It is in attempting to deal with the detours in life, or in just taking the detours, that I have found myself smiling, living, enjoying my life. My journey towards attaining my own creativity cannot be planned, to the last minute detail. And while I go about finding it, attaining it, well, I’ll just keeping looking for those wonderful treats that lay in the creative messes that are detours.
