You are an Artist. Make Art.

by

21
Shares
She Believed She Could So She Did

by Sarah Rudell Beach
{medium: my kids’ watercolors and magic marker, on a piece of cardboard from the Christmas card box}

“I don’t have a creative bone in my body.”

“I am SO not an artist!”

“I have many talents, but art is not one of them.”

My whole life, I’ve told myself variations of these statements, insisting that I am NOT AT ALL ARTISTIC and I DON’T DO ANYTHING CREATIVE. I dreaded art classes in school because the blank canvases and unmolded clay terrified me — I need to fill this space? I need to create something with meaning and beauty and purpose and originality? And I will be graded on this?

Am I doing it wrong?

Is hers better? 

Oh, the comparison and the perfectionism and the self-consciousness we all experience — how they hold us back from creative expression!!

“But I’m not at all creativ—“

DanceWAIT! What about dancing and performing? Isn’t dance a form of creative expression?

What about writing and blogging?

What about making cool digital images and designing the look and feel and color of a website?

Art is more than the works that hang in a museum. Art comes from the Latin word for skill or craftsmanship. It is something we create or something we do that makes our lives beautiful and meaningful. {And technically, I am an artist because I have a Bachelor of ARTS degree!}

Art is broader than we think.

I enjoy the creative challenge of designing the graphics that accompany my blog posts. I’ve started making jewelry because I love creating blingy shiny things. I like to put together vision boards and collaged outlines of upcoming projects.

It’s all art.

Jewelry

my latest blingy creations

We are all artists, and we can all make art.

Whatever our medium.

"Box of Crayons" by Abby, age 8 {crayola paint on computer paper from Target}

“Box of Crayons” by Abby, age 8
{crayola paint on printer paper from Target}

Daniel Pink, in his book A Whole New Mind, argues that we should all develop our creative senses through exploring design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning. Art helps us do that — creating something new requires us to connect the previously unconnected, tell the previously untold, feel the previously unfelt, and know the previously unknown.

Art “has the power to change our perception in ways that we may not be able to explain logically but that seem incontestably true.”
Karen Armstrong
 

When we create something — whether a painting or an essay or a dance or a bracelet or a sweater or needlework or a scrapbook or a song or a photograph — we see the world in a new way. We create narrative and story. We create beauty and meaning. We may understand another person. We may even understand ourselves.

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”
Joan Dideon
 

When we make art, we are often pulled in a direction we hadn’t anticipated, and end up at a destination we wouldn’t have reached had we just sat down and “thought about it.” I begin to write and I think I know what I’m going to say, and then words I hadn’t planned on tumble out and new meaning is made.

“For me, every act of art is the act of solving a mystery.”
Truman Capote
 

Making art is perhaps our most fundamental human capacity. We desire to make our experiences meaningful. Our ancestors painted on cave walls and danced and sang in rituals long lost to us, but that resound in the echoes of our cultural DNA. We are meaning-making, story-telling creatures.

“The story — from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace — is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind for the purpose of understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no great societies that did not tell stories.”
Ursula K. Le Guin
 

Making art is part of the human experience.

I’m embracing my inner artist. I’m painting with the kids when they paint (my daughter told me yesterday my painting should be in a museum!).

I’m writing and dancing and looking and photographing and sharing.

You are an artist

by me
{watercolors and a bunch of stuff from Michaels on cardboard}

What meaning will YOU make?

What mystery will YOU solve?

What story will YOU tell?

You are an artist.

Make art.

Sarah Rudell Beach
Follow Sarah
Latest posts by Sarah Rudell Beach (see all)