I’m doing the A to Z Challenge again this year.  My plan was to have a theme but that hasn’t worked out yet.  One may develop as the month goes on. 🙂 

I think that a lot more people are drawn (ha!) to art than we realize, and maybe even more than they realize.

I can remember when I was a kid, I used to draw these endless pictures of two hills with a sun rising between them, and a blue sky and clouds with a perfect arc of a rainbow. I included a river sometimes and little tufts of grass, sometimes there would be trees. Occasionally there would be seagulls (really just v-shapes in the sky). It wasn’t a good drawing per se, but there was something satisfying about drawing it. I knew what it was going to come out like, I liked using the art supplies, and it was fun. I would never have called it art, of course, and it wasn’t even particularly creative, but it made me happy to do it.

At that point in my life (and for a long time after), I didn’t know that you could learn to draw, that you could learn art techniques. I thought that you had to start with *some* talent and that you could improve on what you had, but if you didn’t have any natural skill then you might as well choose something else.*  So after a while, when no natural talent appeared, I just stopped playing with crayons and I stopped drawing the hills and rainbows.

But I still felt that pull, I still WISHED I could draw. And I did, sometimes. I drew things for my kids, or for birthday cards for my family, that sort of thing, but I never really did any actual practice because, after all, I wasn’t an artist. (I’m moving away from that position but I’ll write about that another day, this post is about that pull to create.)

I think that there are a lot of people in that position though. A lot of people who can’t name what the feeling is but they feel pulled towards creativity – they flail on dance floors, they spraypaint graffiti, they doodle on walls, they make weird comments (online or in real life)**. They may not have an appropriate channel for their creativity, but they feel that need to put their stamp on things, to say that they were here, that their ideas matter.

They may not recognize that art is what they need, they may not understand that art is available to them for that purpose, and for those that do ‘get it’ they might not think that they have ‘permission’ to create art, but they do.

Part of my work as a creative life coach is giving people permission to do the creative things in their hearts. I just wish that I could let them know that they had the power to choose it all along.

 

 

*I believed this about a lot of things, not just art.

**No, I don’t think that every shitty internet comment comes from a thwarted artist, but I think that some do.