For as long as I can remember I have loved art!
The immediate answer to the "what is your favorite subject?" question and my go to free time activity was art in its varied delightful forms.
It has been in my life from the earliest of years as my dad, an artist and creative himself, would pull me into his lap on cozy evenings to share a coloring book. Each of us taking a turn picking a crayon and coloring a piece of the Looney Tunes coloring book!
With time, I grew from coloring books and Q-tip water paintings into fighter plane drawings, sketches of people, contour drawings, cross stitching, real watercolor paintings, collaging, and making iron on Christmas sweatshirts...with gold glitter paint outlines. ohhh the 1990's!
But as I graduated from high school and looked to my future, I never once considered art as a career. Back then there was no digital art and the internet was just starting to take off. I was pretty narrow in my idea of what one might do as an artistic career, and galleries and huge oil paintings were not for me. I told myself to be practical. I landed on the idea of being an early childhood teacher, reasoning, there's a lot of room for art in the life of a preschool teacher. And while there was definitely room for creativity in my life as a teacher, personal art became a thing of the past.
Always in that someday place artistic creativity lived.
Occasionally on vacation I'd even pull out a sketch book. From house to house wherever my hubby and I moved, I brought along my old sketchbook and expensive watercolor brushes with paints my parents bought me when I was 12. But they saw little use as I had babies and raised them. Still when creativity is in your bones it comes out anyway it can, through making your baby girl bows and tutus, playing art with your toddler, or doodling all over your notes at church.
It pokes its head up in the kitchen as you invent new dishes and as you decorate your house. But I did not give it much thought or focus in my serious adult world.
I wonder how many of us started life full of creativity and imagination?
Do you remember?
your delight with some crayons and a sheet of paper?
making up little songs on the guitar?
choreographing your own dance shows?
writing your own stories?
directing the neighborhood kids in original theatrical production?
And as you aged did you find it packed away with the dress up clothes and the legos as you embraced "maturity", logic, and practicality?
If so, I want to encourage you, go pull it back out.
It's never too late to tap into your creativity, its a learned skill not elite talent for some select few.
You can feed it and nurture it and see it come back to life. And I must say, in this dark hard world it's ever so enjoyable to take a break and enjoy being childlike again!
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