Have you ever noticed how extraordinarily messy creativity can be? Think finger painting in a preschool class, and you’ll get there. My children were all creative and artistic, and my home was filled with crayons, coloring books, pencils, drawing and construction paper, paints, markers, stickers, a variety of building blocks, dress up clothes, modeling clay, fabric, beads, buttons. The list goes on and on. There is the messiness of all the materials scattered about and then the messiness of the project and then the inevitable messy decision of where to store all the treasured masterpieces. Nurturing creativity in the young takes a willingness to be flexible.
Nurturing our own creativity takes flexibility as well. We have to stop worrying about the mess we might make or the time a project might demand. We have to be willing to take apart what we have constructed in order to build anew. We can not be too attached to our creations, only to the process for even our vision must be able to shift and change, to expand and contract to fill the creative space in our journey.
There can be pain and disappointment in the discrepancy between what we creatively imagine and what we actually achieve as not all projects turn out as we had hoped. Yet, even our perceived failures can push us to stretch a bit further and again embrace the risk inherent in creativity. In our own worlds of creative growth, we can create unlimited opportunities to start over. How fabulous is that? There is always a clean sheet of paper, a different idea, a dream waiting to be made reality, a story needing to be told, but I warn you, it might get messy.
~Lisa Kiel
The mess. Oh , Yes, The mess! Over the years the mess has been just as much a companion as the sowing and harvesting of an idea. It’s the Compost in my studio , the left overs from other ideas and the turning of it , the mixing, the “recomposing” that makes this mess so real. Bits and pieces of paper, I chunk of pastel that has been crushed and has put out random explosions of color on a scrap of parchment that no longer seems to have purpose. But, somehow, these random messes have embedded message, just as random , just as raw. It is the chaos of mess that begets order. Find yourself a pristine piece of white paper and make the mess!