I am a self-taught artist that started creating as a therapy. I have a pretty busy life and needed a way to express my creativeness. I started scrapbooking in my early 20s but found that I put too much pressure on myself to take pictures of EVERY event and then create a layout for said event. I started to fall behind on my scrapbooks (because you know, you gotta have several...one for each child, one for the family, one for each year and don't forget gifts....) and became aware that I was dreading the time spent creating yet another layout for yet another birthday. Don't get me wrong. Shopping for the supplies was a ton of fun. Putting it all together in a pretty little book was also fun....until you start to fall behind. I would find myself looking forward to "scrapping" the vacation we had just taken but knew I couldn't until I got caught up. Because, truth be told, if I didn't scrapbook in order I would never scrap those in between events. Tedious. Boring. Expensive. Pretty soon I didn't even want to take pictures because I didn't want to stinking scrapbook them!! I gave up.
I still felt the need to create but thought to myself "What about the digital route?" Dude! I would totally fall asleep at the computer. BORING! There is just something about glue and paint and ink and paper that just couldn't be replaced with punching keys on a laptop. Plus, lets face it, I had pretty much everything the craft store shelves had already sitting in my art studio (aka my dinning room table).
Then I ventured into photography. I could make incredible fine art prints with my camera and maybe even some money. Yup, so now I have all the photography lighting, equipment and backdrops.....sitting in my storage room. Again I was bored.
One hot summer day I was sitting on my front porch in the middle of the afternoon drinking coffee (yes coffee...even though I was already sweating) watching my kiddos play in the front yard after a late night of nightmares (hence, the coffee). You can only hear "Mom look!" so many times and look up so many times to the same somersault trick so many times before you start to go a little cookoo! I started to doodle in my sons notebook that was sitting on the steps next to me. Holy cow I sucked! That was supposed to be an eye! That's definitely not an eye! Maybe I could watch a youtube video or something. So I found a youtube video on how to draw an eye and wouldn't ya know! I did it!! And it looked.......ok! This is fun I thought.
And that's how it all started.
Screw everyone and their perfect scrapbooks and their perfect photographs and their perfect lives! I wanted to be messy, child-like and fearless! To me it became about the journey not the destination.
Now I create every day! I've found that my art doesn't need to be perfect. I don't need art school to be considered and artist. I love what I do and just want to share that with you!
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