Do schools kill creativity?

White Minus Green

    Recently in a random conversation about colors someone said to me that the color pink is very hard to make.  I asked isn't it just red mixed with white?  I've been making pink for years.  No, they said, that's just light red.  True pink is actually white minus green.

     How mystical. 

    Continuing to be random, I said that makes me think of my favorite Dr. Suess book "O the thinks you can think" with its impossible curly-cue stairways and especially its forest of white and red striped trees.  Really a wonderfully imaginative, assumption-turning little publication. 

     And now for a final only apparent irrelevance, here's quote attributed to Einstein:

   " Creativity is the residue of wasted time." 

   

Quotes from Gary Molander

Hello readers,

     My life has gotten very blank slate/empty again with a parttime greenhouse job done for the winter, no courses ahead and a drought of music.  Not feeling entirely bubbly about this (to put it veeeerrrrryy mildly) but trying to keep my mind busy and sane.  Here are some quotes from a book I just read on creativity and faith by Gary Molander.  I haven't decided if I agree with all of them but they make me think.

"The first myth is that art is some sort of feeling.  It's a mood to be summoned from the ether.  But creativity is a practice.  It's an action.  To bring it into to being you must act as if it's already there.  It's a lot like love.  You may not always feel it, but the more you act upon it, the more you'll experience it."  

"Art..reminds me that not everything needs to be resolved for it to be beautiful." 

"Beware the artist whose skill level surpasses their character." 

"There should be no difference between our lives and our art.  It is all the same.  We all have but one body of work."

"Creativity, in the Divine sense, is when we see a void, then fill it with ourselves."

"An artist is a heart condition, not a job." 

John Cleese on Creativity

Here's a 35 minute John Cleese talk on creativity. Quite entertaining and enlightening.

Storm sailor

Last week a fellow musician, who by the way has challenged himself to write a song per week, told me he'd written a song inspired by one of my paintings, posted above.  He even sang it for me. 

Art feeding art.

I don't know if I can adequately explain how encouraging and creatively satiating this was for my often starving artist's soul.  Dare I admit that my artistic self is often like a beggar, desperate to be fed with kind words about the value of my creativity?

Does anyone else feel this way? 

At the same time I'm thinking more about my need and my calling to be autonomous;  to create no matter what others say.  It's a mysterious paradox, this being made both for creative community and for independence.

This picture, by the way, was painted last winter, about the time I started this blog.     

Summertime trigger

Interesting to think over my art blog gaps and wonder why these occur.  This low key summer isn't much of an excuse.  I've had the time.  Our internet works. Our computer hasn't been stolen and I haven't even broken both arms.

In light of my most recent art blog gap I'm realizing I've had an underlying dread of summer for most of my life.  Funny how not blogging about creativity would bring this to light.  It's becoming clearer to me that this dread stems from so many childhood Junes when my restless father made his yearly announcement we might move.  Summers were when we travelled with him on his itinerant lecture tours. We saw many countries and richly cultured places.  And we watched my dad research possible relocations for our family.  Mercifully, I still spent most of my school years living in one place with  friendship continuity during school months.  Even so, by end of June, most of these friends, who attended an international boarding school where I was a day student, headed back to their parents and homes in other countries.  Summer strikes again. 

Now I'm wondering, since I do that a lot, if certain seasons trigger anyone else creativily, either toward increased freedom or toward artistic blocks.  And what might be underneath these triggers? 

Something very useful I've gained from my part time work in holistic health is that the more issues are acknowledged and identified, the simpler the correction for them is.  Time, or summertime, will tell if this is true for creativity. 

Acceptable medium

    I chatted yesterday with a fellow musician who also likes to sew.  She said she can't draw or paint but wishes she could since she sees pictures in her head.  I asked if she could make these pictures in fabric instead.  An "aha" moment for us both. 
    Now I'm wondering how many artistic blocks come from what we believe are acceptable or unacceptable mediums for our ideas.