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Sunday Letter: You have this well inside of you, keep digging.
Good Morning,
I will get straight at it this morning. We were all born creative. We all have this well of creativity inside of us. We have this secret space inside of us that is made for making.
Some creative wells are pretty deep and they got that way because someone has been digging in them. You are creative. I am creative. This morning I am going to tell you a bit about my creative well.
Like you, probably, I drew as a child freely and easily. We never seemed to have any paper in our house so I would take the blank end pages of my father's paper back books and tear them out and draw on them. I would look through the old school text books in the house and see my older sister's drawings of women that they rendered while bored in class. I'd try to copy those drawings. And I would draw my own. I passed no judgement I just drew until I was about seven or eight and I started noticing others drew better.
Suddenly, it seemed the end papers of books became score tallies for card games. Fifty cents a game and a nickel in the hole, that was family time when I was growing up.
I left drawing behind as a young child.
I still made things. I made Barbie clothes, and crocheted granny squares. I played with copper wire and buttons to make really awful earrings. I wrote letters. Lots of letters. But I never thought of those things as creative. I never saw myself as creative. The only thing I ever drew was a vine with leaves, it was my go to scribble, my doodle. It never occurred to me I could draw.
Creativity was something I left behind as I grew up and even as I went through university. I never even thought about the word. And the word is a bit daunting. It just never came up.
In my third year of university I started visiting the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia just to look at the pictures. I had just discovered the difference between original art and department store art. I was twenty. I was doing a political science degree. I read books on Russia and the Middle East. I had no artistic inclinations other than I was curious. The idea that I could be an artist was not even an inkling in the back of my mind. I think it would have seemed a ridiculous idea.
But inside of all that, even though I did not know it, I was still the little girl who drew on the end papers of books.
Inside of each of us is that tiny artist. That little hand that brought what was around us to life so freely and easily with out judgement or despair, or foolishness is inside us.
That little hand is inside the hand you have now. Just look at your hands, really look at them and remember. Remember the time when they were not afraid to pick up the pencil, to mark things up with crayons, and hold them up their work for the world to see.
These hands are ours. They still hold this memory in them. And this memory is powerful because once we stir it up we realize that our well is there ready to be dug again. Ready to make.
I became interested in drawing again when I learned how to hook rugs. I was twenty four.
And it isn't all about drawing, that's just what happened to me. I still can only draw what I can draw. I know that the more I draw the better I get because I start to see again. Some where along the way I accepted that the way I drew was the way I drew. I could not draw everything but what I did draw had some feeling. The things I cannot draw I get some help with or I use a template or a pattern, and that's okay.
I don't limit myself by my own abilities. I learn from others. I study. I read. I teach myself. I ask for help. That way my abilities grow. That is the thing I love about creativity. It can be collaborative. It grows and builds upon itself and upon the creativity of others. As much as it is a well, it is also this big teetering tower that has grown because we have helped each other.
And if you keep using it, it gets better as you age. You have more sources, more knowledge, more history that you can draw upon. The well does not dry up. That's a myth. You keep digging, it will keep flowing.
Over the last year I put a lot of my creative energy into making DFS Colour School. I hope you will join me and learn this creative approach to colour for hooking rugs.
Enjoy your Sunday, and I 'll write next week,
and remember ...
You are creative!
Deanne
PS. If you sign up for colour school before April 3 you will save $50 on the registration.
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