Photo: Thomas Hawk – (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Starting Someplace

The creative brain falls between a laboratory and an easel. It is the overflowing sketchbook, the jot file, and sticky note thinking that occasionally yields an idea worth exploring.

My creativity works in cycles.

A friend of mine said recently referring to her ebb and flow of artistic pursuits. Isn’t that just like us: to cycle between ideas treating them like places, visiting often, but never staying long?

Because to stay is to stale…right?

The Safe House

The concept of a safe house is to provide sanctuary for the hunted, but how do you provide sanctuary for a creature that is so often their own worst enemy? A creative often hunts themselves in the form of self-criticism?

I actually have an idea on that.

What if sanctuary comes through relationship? What if the people that we so often assume will criticize our work became the beneficiaries of it?

Photo: Bernat Casero – (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Then creative work is done with the express purpose to be given. Not that sometimes we need creativity to process personal emotion – I get that. That’s not what I’m talking about here.

Here, I made this for you.

I’m talking about the crawl-space of the hand-made good. The little space where we find ourselves using our own creativity because we’re motivated to make someone smile, laugh, or think differently. In other words, we create because there’s someone we know that will like our work.

So why not start creating for those people?

I want to encourage you, and I want to help you find others that will too.
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