A STARTÂ SOMEWHERE IN A FIELD
Hello!
This is my first wobbly attempt to share some ongoing ponderings, stories, experiments, and lessons through the illumination of cyberdom. The following display of curiosity is all about:
**creative process **
I have spent a good deal of time trying to locate my particular creative workings and, in the process, have discovered that there are some very limiting cultural assumptions about the human creative potential (so much more on this later).
Back when I was heavy in the deep thick blur of sorting out my artistic offerings (I’m never fully free of this), I became increasingly aware of society’s assumptions about art and that I had adopted these external views within my self. Not only that, I had converted them into a long list of confining ‘shoulds.’ Whenever I began to make something, these existing notions about art and creativity had a paralyzing affect. I got to realizing that ‘shoulds’ are more fitted to “I should clean the toilet” or “I should do this paperwork” versus “I should make art this way”? (Not that you couldn’t get Zen with toilets and paperwork)
Through my experiences as an art student, teacher and being in the world, I have become super amped about developing a form of guidance to help others expose their adopted and self-imposed limitations and realize their unique creative possibilities (and when I say ‘others’ I do mean that e-v-e-r-y-o-n-e has a valuable creative capacity!). So far, this guiding model has roughly manifested in both youth and adult visual art classes that I teach at the Wildflower Arts Centre in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
This pending composition of trials, revelations and blunders is fed by the temptation of the unknown. There will be far more questions than answers. I am clearly not alone in this realm and I will do my best to link you to the many who are also on this quest of the non-prescriptive creative.
So welcome! to some wonderful and frustrating baffling that has a good chance of enticing you to make things.
Confusion is the welcome mat at the door of creativity.
-MICHAEL J. GELB