I'm taking Marisa Haedike's (of Creative Thursday) e-course, In the Fishbowl, and the first class was today. She has such a calming voice, I kept having to slide the audio button back a few mm's to relisten. I wonder if she missed her calling as a hypnotist? I loved the podcast, nevertheless.
Some of the questions that she put forth sound like some I've considered before. So I'm trying to hear them with fresh ears. It was in 1993 that my cellmate Nancy (in the prison of my dayjob as a clothing production manager, no drama here) introduced me to SARK, who at the time, was revolutionizing young women's lives with her cries to "Live juicy!" and "Eat mangoes naked!". She was the colorful, creative equivalent to Betty Freidan, in my world. It was then that I began allowing myself to consider being creative as a profession.
So much has transpired since then. For one, my Succulent Wild Women's group is turning ten years old this year. Unbelievable! We haven't called ourselves that since it's inception, but we are still rather succulent, I must say. I started my own business in 1999, in clothing, just the way I'd learned it. I was trying to marry my new creative freedom with pretty much the only way I knew how to make a living in L.A., but I forgot how much I didn't love that job in the first place. I closed the company in 2003 and went back to school-to figure out how I could create a job that was more....creative. I gathered some tools there, but I have certainly taken the scenic route to what I'm doing now.
The first question is "Why do you love what you create?" and I'm starting to notice an uncomfortable feeling coming up, only tempered by knowing that the work I do now (my paintings) is the work I get totally lost in. I'm willing to stay up until four in the morning if I can do just a little more. I feel like my heart is totally in the right place at the moment. My paintings are my little babies. I feel a little afraid to name why I love them. I wonder why? I'm going to try anyway.
Awakening, mixed-media on board.
I love what I create because I think my paintings are a reflection of where I'm at in my life right now. They have relevance to me. Each of them is meaningful and helps me to grow in the process of making them. I have to admit, I love when someone tells me that a piece has moved them in some way or even just that they like the colors. I love the community that my work (in its own way) fits into. By community, I mean that small, but growing group of people out there all hooked into some similar ideas about how we humans operate and what we require to live satisfying lives. There are insights to be explored, risks to be taken, wild bits within us to rediscover.
I think of my work as gently supporting those notions. Like little colorful affirmations of what is circulating in the greater consciousness during a significant time in creative history. Just being "creative" feels like being superheroic to me because it opposes that which is destructive, without directly trying to control or stop things that must find their own way. I believe that living a creative life is choosing to live a whole new way; it shifts energy and gives birth to...goodness and thoughtfulness, authenticity. The promise in that is what I can taste just a teaser of when I'm creating.
