Your Courageous Life

When I was making the video for Across Mediums yesterday, I dug out art supplies that had been neatly tucked away, and as always was laughing at myself for completely and totally forgetting about what supplies were still there. I am the type of person who will walk around an art store for an hour, getting inspired, my check card burning a hole through my snazzy little purse as I lust over new pens and galkyd and tubes of paint and spackle and thinners and ephemera and papers and think, “I wish that I could get all of these supplies!”

And then at home, there are more than I know what to do with, half the time.

When I was working through the Across Mediums project solo a few years ago, I found that I connected with something elemental that I had not been using on a regular basis since childhood. Remember what it was like to just color on the floor? I could do that for hours. It was so entertaining to just be with myself. I noticed that when I first started Across Mediums, the voices telling me that I was not enough were much stronger than when I stopped doing the project a few months later. It had grown easier and easier to just dive in, not make too much out of what I had set out to do, and simply put pencil to page, glue to ephemera, pen to lined notebook, and go for it. I was not trying to make something, I was simply trying “to make.”

Yesterday I was thinking about the element of play, and how necessary it is even in our adult lives, and how hard it can feel, how challenging, to make time for it. Yet just five minutes of sketching can soothe. One of my favorite headache remedies is to go out and shoot pictures. It has cured more than one intense headache. Dancing to a good song can lift me out of a bad mood. Journaling can clarify my thoughts. I’ve been accused more than once of being too “in my head,” yet when I look around the truth is that I step out of my head and onto a page, into a room, into some music more often than not.

And MUSIC–I didn’t realize what a tool it was until I got an iPod a few years ago. I’d been wondering why everyone was so addicted to them (and finding it a wee bit pretentious, I confess) and then I got my first–a freebie when Andy bought a computer–and before I knew it, that thing was full. I loved being able to take any music with me anywhere, change it up to suit my mood, and easily play a song over and over (remember the days of having to rewind a tape to hear your favorite song?).

What I’m bringing to the Across Mediums e-course is that same sense of playtime, of just getting to dive in and get messy and not worry at all about technical ability. There’s really only one rule of sorts: get in there and do. Of course the voices about “not good enough” are going to come up. Of course. And yet, just get in there and draw on a page. Tear it up. Draw over it. Take a picture. Glue the picture face down. Whatever. I’m referring to the course as an experiment in radical creativity, because the point will simply be to create, not to get technical know-how (and to be clear, I’m certainly not bashing technical know-how or saying that skill is pointless! Of course it’s valuable–it’s just not the focus of this particular course).

I’m curious to know–how do you PLAY? I posed this question to the Courageous Year participants recently. How do you get out of your head? What songs do you dance to? Where do you go to sketch when the sight of your own same four walls are too much? Do you read trashy magazines over coffee? Find someone to take a power walk with? How do you PLAY?

Related posts:

• an experiment in radical creativity

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 10:46 am |