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What is creativity?

Katy — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 13:15:35 +0000

All my professional life, my coworkers have described me as creative. I always demurred because I have the drawing skills of a kindergartener, and I’m a math major for goodness sake! But when I discovered papercrafting I discovered that while I can’t draw or paint anything from scratch, I’m pretty good at taking existing things and making something special. It was then that I realized that the act of creating is something that I’m VERY good at and I was, in fact, doing it all the time at work. Give me a form, flyer, or process that needs to be (re)invented and I’m a happy camper. Give me transactional work and I want to stab my eyes out from boredom.

Karen Walrond at chookooloonks has a fantastic post about creativity today. Here is just a snippet:

I’ve come to believe that in fact, we’re all creative beings, and we all have the power within us to create art. The trick, it turns out, is to avoid falling into the trap of believing that art or creativity is limited to the ability to take a pencil and a piece of paper and draw a realistic likeness of something that exists in real life. Art and creativity can, and should, mean so much more than this. Art should mean photography. Writing. Music. Cooking. Building. Needlework. Mechanics.

Creativity and art should be defined as the manner in which we are called to express ourselves, in ways that fill us with joy and grace.

Go read the rest of the post – it is fantastic. I’m going to work on the vision board she talks about; please share if you do too.

So if you hear that nagging “I’m not creative” voice in your head, just tell it to be quiet. All you have to do to be creative is to make something. It doesn’t need to be perfect and you don’t ever need to share it. That is what this hobby is about to me. Bringing an idea to life. Even if it doesn’t work out the way I thought. Because sometimes it comes out better than I’d imagined. And that brings me joy.

How stamping saved me this past month

Katy — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 21:17:32 +0000

I’ve been thinking a lot the past few days about this post by Sarah Bush: Is Art Your Sactuary?. Sarah has really fantastic insights about creativity…how to find it, keep it going, and rediscover it if you’ve lost your mojo.

Sarah’s post about art being a sanctuary really hit home for me, because I’ve been on a creative tear all month. I’ve posted a lot on this blog…and that is only the tip of the iceburg of projects I’ve got going now. What I realized after reading Sarah’s post is the extent to which I’ve been using stamping as a stress reliever.

My full-time job has been very hectic and stressful. I work in the solar industry – business is booming and we are doing at least 2-3x the amount of business as previous years. Fantastic right? Well, yeah, but we are doing it with the same number of people, and I’m feeling a bit worse for wear.

What has saved me is going home, pulling out some stamps and paper and playing around. Or getting some wood, fabric, and a staple gun and creating a cool side table for the living room. Or putting together a new storage unit for my burgeoning stamp collection. All of these have kept me from getting stuck in my own head and stewing about the stresses of work.

One of the things Sarah talks about is appreciating yourself. Here are my self-appreciations for this month:

I appreciate that I was able to keep a calm head at work by focusing on crafting at home.
I appreciate that crafting on a daily basis has made me more creative in all aspects of my life
I appreciate that I found the time to finish and submit a fab project for one of the monthly SU! Demo art contests.
I appreciate how being an SU! Demo has allowed me to stay close to two of my good friends from college who live far away (my uplines Jess and Amy).
I appreciate how crafting connected me to an online community that is vibrant and supportive.

Wishing you lots of creative mojo!