“Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only.” – Clarissa Pinkola Estés
What is your relationship with art? With creativity? With expressing your ideas, thoughts, and feelings in color, in sound, in movement, in words?
I am a creative person: I write, I paint, I make jewelry, I play piano, I write songs. But, that part of me is separate from the part of me that has a “real job.” I have internalized the typical questions that accompany learning that someone is an artist: “Oh, wow! That’s so nice, but can you really make a living doing that?”
We value productivity in our culture. We have been conditioned to believe that creativity is something that only certain people possess and that the creative process must result in something that can be monetized in order to be worthwhile. By believing that we “aren’t good enough” as creative individuals, we are missing out on enriching our lives and the lives of others.
When we were children, anything we created was beautiful. Pablo Picaso said, “All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist once he grows up.” At what point in our growth and development did we stop seeing the process of creating as beautiful? When did we become so critical of color, shape, texture, rhythm, and harmony that we stopped connecting with them? When did we move away from being creators to being consumers?
My own experience intersects with my path as an educator here. For me, I stopped seeing myself as “an artist” in middle school. I understood that my art did not measure up as being “good enough” and my art education experience, like many others’ experiences, was focused largely on developing skill through replication of a model (I had wonderful art teachers and this is not a critique of art education). One might propose that this “replication approach” is the opposite of creativity, and I would be willing to agree. But, technical skill must also be developed and this is the way many art education programs proceed to this day.
Here is where this intersection is taking me. Middle school students need more art, more creativity, more opportunity to express themselves, more experiences seeing themselves represented in writing, art, dance, theater, and music. And instead, we (educators) pull them back from these experiences and try to homogenize them into something that can be “ready for the real world.” Art is more than identifying vocabulary words and recognizing artists; it is capturing a feeling in color or sound or shape. We are living in a time in history for which there are often no words to describe our feelings; but, there is art.
I’ve traveled far from my initial point, or maybe I never actually made it. We all deserve to live creative lives. Whether we are writing, drawing, painting, sculpting, dancing, or acting, creativity adds dimensionality to our lives. It enriches us and gives life meaning. My challenge to you is this: be your own kind of art. Let your inner beauty find its way to the paper or the keyboard or the stage. You deserve to remain an artist. And our world needs more creative people like you.
