Here it is: another blog post borne from the encouragement of "That's what she said," an inspiring blog link up/series hosted by Dean and Courtney that uses the words of women as inspiration.
It was only yesterday I wrote on my blog about wanting to throw out one of my most recent attempts at portrait making. My drawing skills stopped improving at around age 10. All my faces look the same and my improvement is stagnant at best.
I had a bit of a breakthrough, though, which is what I wrote about on the blog post. My a-ha came right when I was so frustrated I almost tore up the little face I was creating. Something caused me to stay, though, and the result was deep love.
A reader commented about her lack of creativity. I responded like this:
“I would have said the same thing in the past. It wasn't until I started flexing my creative muscles in the direction which felt most familiar to me that I started to stretch into unknown - and in some cases quite scary - to me. A big part of my growth comes from not throwing it away and allowing the imperfection to woo me.”
Writing is my “anchor art” - the art form I have always used throughout my life is writing.
Writing has never left me. Words have never deserted me, even when I was painfully depressed and was insistent the sound of my voice was an insult to humanity so I dared not speak.
My love for words prevailed.
Somehow, ironically - I even feel like words love me back.
I have worked as a life coach since 1999. Many of my coaching clients mentioned The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron as being a helpful resource. I decided to read it so I could speak about it with them. I like to know what may be of service to others as well as myself.
I also hold myself to not doing anything half-way, so I started working with the book, doing the exercises and also writing daily morning pages.
It is due to this writing practice - three pages of longhand writing in either a spiral notebook or composition book daily - that my life started changing and my creative inklings started to take form. It wasn’t just writing that blossomed.
I even found myself restoring a plain beige lamp I bought at a yard sale into a spectacle in purple and gold.
“Where did that urge come from?” I wondered as I proudly turned on my lamp.
I didn’t realize then that creativity begets creativity. When the creative process is ignited in one area, it is natural to stretch and spread into other areas, even when we have no idea how to do what we are attempting to do. At best, with creativity we simply follow the nudges without worrying about the product being "perfect."
Those are my personal favorites.
The creative process taught me to flounder.
Creativity exposed me to the glory of drawing outside the lines, of disregarding the instructions in paint by number. I discovered the freedom of adding slight variations to cookie recipes, to drawing people with strangely colored hair and faces that include either handwriting or book pages.
I remember a time when my friends encouraged me to get a digital camera in the days before they were everywhere and long before our phones had powerhouse cameras included.
“My brain can’t learn another new thing,” I would tell them. “Seriously, I don’t have the capacity to stretch my way into another skill set.” I was exhausted just thinking about it.
I finally bought a digital camera: a cute pink Sony cybershot and I started my own process of playful experimentation.
My Flickr account - where I put most of my photos for safe keeping - now holds 27,509 photos I have taken. Today’s traffic shows the photos that are receiving the most traffic today are photos tagged with “writing” which makes sense. Writing is my anchor art, remember, and if creativity was a family with a lineage, writing is what gives birth to the rest of my creativity.
I have given myself permission to be a beginner, to grow through creative adolescence and to continue to develop as a cross genre creator of art whether that art is performance - because I was also reborn as an actor and became a director thanks to writing practice - or art one can touch and hold. My writing and photos are in books, greeting cards, magazines, websites and in people’s homes.
The latest stretching is into the world of mixed media, where my art has also found its way into private collection.
I didn’t put any of this on life goal lists.
My heartbeat knew better. I started to create and then got out of the way. And I repeated the process over and over again.
Like Maya Angelou tells us, “You can’t use up your creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”
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Julie Jordan Scott inspires people to experience artistic rebirth via her programs, playshops, books, performances and simply being herself out in the world. She is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy-extraordinaire and mixed-media artist whose Writing Camps and Writing Playgrounds permanently transform people's creative lives. Watch for the announcement of new programs coming in September 2015 and beyond.
To contact Julie to schedule a Writing or Creative Life Coaching Session, call or text her at 661.444.2735.
Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
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