Some scenery I did. It involved a lot of lines.
When I was small drawing, painting, imagining, were all easily a part of my world and along the way I was encouraged, but fourth grade happened and I was faced with a critic. We were making papermache' pins for our mother's for mothers day. I was working on a butterfly. It was exactly how I wanted it. It looked like I thought a butterfly should look, but my teacher looked at it and didn't like it. She wanted me to make a butterfly like the one another girl had made. She asked the girl to show me how. I did not like the other girl's butterfly. I thought it was ugly, but I was also a dutiful child so I did what my teacher told me. So I began to learn to hide my art. It is a feeling that sticks with me to this day.
I am not against critics. They can improve what you do and make it better. A good advisor can help you come closer to your own vision. But that teacher did something destructive...she made me compare my work to someone elses in a negative way. And I was a child and I liked my teacher. I wanted her to like what I was doing. I had no defenses against negative criticism.
Negative criticism will always be there. A lot of times it exists in our own head. Sometimes it's a careless word from another person that sticks like a thorn in the finger. Sometimes that person wants to hurt us, not necessarily even knowingly, but from their own insecurity and fear of trying something themselves. So when we are venturing into this new experience that may be scary to us we need to learn to pick the voices to listen to. We need to learn to ignore the negative voices in our head and around us and to HEAR the voices that will help us in our process. When I shut myself off to all the voices because of one negative voice, I lost a lot of positive help. But when I began to listen again I was able to grow. This is still a process for me... art is personal but even though it is I am continuing to learn to seperate myself from my work so it can grow more.
So I want to encourage you to try something creative today. Something different. Maybe you need to doodle something. Or tear up some junk mail and and collage it on a piece of paper. Here's an idea: Take a piece of paper and fold it in half, then fold that in half, then fold that in half. Now open it up. Take a pen, or a pencil, or a couple of crayons. Now just using lines draw something in each section. In the first section use 2 lines, in the next 3, then 4, and so on. Try different angles and sizes of lines. Make each line a different color. Draw a thick line or a thin line or a curvy line. The next day do it again, except maybe start with more lines. Or use triangles, or circles. Play this way for awhile. Discover the infinite variety you can do with lines and shapes. Go back and color in sections... Add glitter, get a rubber stamp, buy a tube of puffy paint...
If anybody does this I would like to see some results. I would like to share them on this blog. Maybe you want to hide your tries for awhile and that is okay, but sharing can open up new horizons.
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