When I show my work, I often encounter people who tell me with great certainty that they have neither the creativity or the artistry to create images like mine. And no matter how I much I protest that they are equally creative and they just need to find a way to tap into it, they just don’t believe me.
But the fact is, one year ago today, I hadn’t produced a single one of my creative images.
I was an enthusiastic amateur landscape photographer. Two years ago I was stockbroker who was so exhausted she didn’t dream. Three years ago, I picked up a camera for the first time. It makes my head reel thinking of how much has changed for me in such a short space of time, but it also makes me believe that anything is possible.
I’ve never thought of myself as a creative person, meaning I wasn’t creative in the traditional sense. I can’t draw. I can’t paint. I wasn’t always writing stories and nobody ever looked at me and said “that girl is an artist.” I think we often have this belief that it is the opinions of other people that decide whether we are creative or not, as if it were some sign tattooed on our forehead, plain for everyone to see. But as much as no one else saw it, the signs were there, and they were the signs of my particular brand of creative endeavour too. I loved to perform. I would make up dances and games. I had a different hair colour every other week and people at school knew me as the girl with that weird chinese jacket or those crazy boots. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely was not that cool vintage chick. In fact, my outfits were often a disastrous mismatch of styles, but I was expressing my creativity through a performance and using my own body as part of that performance. Self portrait artist might have been a dream career choice for me, had the careers teacher only had something to offer besides the most generic professions.
I believe we all have these subtle signs of creative expression. We carry them with us in the ways we amuse ourselves when no one else is looking. The things that inspire and enthrall us say a lot about how we translate our own internal experience into the wider world. And it is easy to lose those things as we get older. As children, we are constantly at play and we are fearless. It simply does not occur to us that we should not attempt to sing, or dance or play the lead or express our dreams.
As we grow up, we grow self conscious and there is no time for game playing anymore. Because no one has seen that artist tattoo on our forehead, we feel ashamed of our imaginative pursuits and we let them go. We forget that we once saw ourselves as the knight in shining armour or the prima ballerina. We forget the music that once preoccupied us and the stories that fascinated us. Perhaps a little later in life, we wish that we had stuck with ballet, or amateur dramatics, or painting but it seems silly to take it up again now. Too much time has passed and we weren’t really very good at it anyway. And what if we don’t know how to express our creativity? What if we don’t know what our medium is? Surely that means we’re not really creative after all.
But I believe that small kernel of creativity resides in all of us, no matter our age or background. Because we are human, we are capable of relating our experience through metaphor and imagery, and we are capable of making stuff. And that’s all creativity really is “making stuff that reflects and communicates our experience.”
Sometimes it takes an event to free up our creativity and clear out the old stuck patterns. Sometimes it can take the support of people who believe in us and can cheer us on. For me, it was both. The event I’m referring to was “Squam Art Workshops,” an art retreat in the forests of New Hampshire that I attended in Sept 2010. I was “making stuff” before then but it really didn’t reflect me or my experience, and since then, I have only produced work that reflects me and my experience. I was tremendously excited to be there, but also incredibly intimidated. I kind of felt like a fraud, like I was going to be daubing around with finger paints while the person next to me was painting a masterpiece. At this point I’d have to own up to the fact that I was, in fact, not an artist at all and, worst of all, until recently I had worked in finance. I’d then be marched to the exit and sent back to the realm of the stockbrokers.
Thankfully, on the first morning, Elizabeth MacCrellish, the founder of Squam Art Retreats and one of the single most lovely people I have ever met, spoke to us and reminded us that we would just be “making stuff,” making friends and having fun. This simple act of kindness and reassurance brought a childlike sense of enjoyment to proceedings and allowed every attendee to relieve the very adult pressure of worrying about whether you’re going to be good at something before you even try it.
In the forest of New Hampshire, instead of judgment and rejection, I found the support and encouragement I needed to tap in to that childhood love of performance and to change the direction of my photography to include and celebrate that. It was an intense experience, as all life changing experiences ought to be, but it was also intensely joyful. I was very sad not to be able to go back this year, but the ripples from my creative awakening had been so great that I needed to stay and work on my fledgling business. I’ll be back in 2012 to continue my creative journey.
I’d urge anyone who’d like to be creative, but who doesn’t think they are, not to give up on those childhood dreams, not to concern yourself with whether you have the artist tattoo or whether you’re any good. Just keep making things and keep opening yourself up and you’ll find your way. You’ll find that way of expressing yourself that reflects your experience in both form and content. And, believe me, it can happen very quickly.
One year on, and from afar, Elizabeth is still inspiring me. The title of this post comes from her message to this year’s Squam attendees, in which she quoted John O’Donahue’s “A Morning Offering.”
may my mind come alive today
to the invisible geography
that invites me to new frontiers
to break the dead shell of yesterdays
to risk being disturbed and changed
may I have the courage today
to live the life that I would love
to postpone my dream no longer
but do at last what I came here for
and waste my heart on fear no more.