My knee is permanently scarred from a close encounter with a
tar and chip street. I also lost my
virginity in the bicycle accident as I was riding a boy's bike and the bar
slammed my pelvis in a bone crushing way.
Okay, maybe I didn't technically lose my virginity, and I didn't even
know what a virgin was at the time, but tell it to my younger self as she
clutches herself in the grass and tries not to vomit at the side of the road.
Other than picking tarry rocks out of my knee, I kind of
liked the tar and chip road. The tar
bubbled and oozed on hot summer days. I
skipped around and popped bubbles. I
squiggled my bare feet in thick, black splotches. It's not like there were any cars getting in the way of my
fun. I'm sure Mom loved the black tracks
I made across the living room floor when I got home, but I often cleaned my
feet first with gasoline. Yeah, very
healthy. I feel kind of whoozy at the
memory of the fumes.
Can you really remember being a child? Not just a mental picture like a snapshot in
a photo album, can you feel the sun on your head? Smell the pine trees and tar?
Hear the crickets chirping and the breeze blowing? Taste Grandma's cooking? See your own small body by looking down?
Creativity seems magical.
Ideas can feel like divine inspirations we draw from outside of
ourselves. Yet, I think most of
creativity has real, tangible sources like observation and memory, skills all
of us can develop.
I have to think a minute to remember what I had for dinner
last night. Pea soup. Why bother remembering? It doesn't matter unless I want to describe
it to someone else -- and creating is all about sharing something. If you want someone else to like your
creations, appeal to a person's senses, the more senses the better. My pea soup has a lot of potatoes in it,
carrots, snow peas... This is a shopping list.
My stomach growled when the microwave dinged and I burned my fingers
when I lifted the hot, creamy soup amidst the wafting cloud of thyme and
tarragon... You see, more senses, more details, more interesting.
It's the same with painting. Many people draw something floating on a white piece of
paper. Give it a background! Give it a shadow! Remember how things look in real life. Memory isn't magical. We
all have it. Look around in your brain
and see what's in there. Maybe your
childhood street was cement. Maybe you
chalked pictures on it? Can you taste
the smell of chalk dust?
Then, after you've worked so hard to remember things and add
details, start eliminating. If it
doesn't add to the story you want to tell, erase it. In writing, I've decided I don't need the word
"that". It's often a waste of
space and I use it a lot. Delete. In a painting, maybe I put too many petals
on a flower. Be willing to paint over,
write over, everything unhelpful to your project. When I first wrote board reports, I thought I had to tell board
members and bosses everything I thought was important. They don't care and don't have time to read
it. I changed my ways and got praise
for my 1-page, bulleted reports.
The painting above wasn't meant to be anything, and I just photoshopped street lines on it for IF's word for the week. I created the painting by fooling around with some cheap supplies and
thought I'd use it as a background to something else. I like bits of it though, and now I'm not sure what to do with
it. Maybe I'll use parts of it in
something else, which is part of creativity too. Experiment, play, pop tar bubbles on the street and see where the
road takes you.
