More thoughts on creavity
What inspires me:
-opposition, boundaries (to a degree!)
-new or less-familiar emotions
-needing to work through complicated ideas (these first three are all related)
-excitement
-discussion
-discovering new art that I love, like this
I haven't been all that creative in the past couple of weeks, Valentine aside. A few days ago as I sat down to do morning journaling, after a hiatus of probably a week, I realized why. I've been playing a lot of computer games recently, which puts me in an escapist mood that tries very hard to self-perpetuate. Journaling and freewriting, on the other hand, make me more self-aware and help me engage with my life. So I think all together I was just spending too much time being escapist and not enough time engaging with my thoughts, and that made for creative and intellectual stagnation.
As I spend more of my days trying consciously to make more art and make art a bigger part of my life, I'm finding out more and more about what inspires me and what makes me tick. The list at the top of this entry is an example; for another, for two weeks now I've done at least some physical exercise five days a week. Sometimes it's a ninety-minute yoga class; some days I can't manage more than fifteen minutes of walking (though I still think, given the incline getting to Runyon, that a quarter-hour is nothing to sneeze at), but at least I'm out doing something. What sparked this was my realization (so long in coming!) that I love to start my day with exercise, but hate doing it any other time of day if it involves more than a little initiative on my part. So now I've worked it into my schedule in such a way that I get it over with first thing in the morning. On Mondays and Wednesdays, that means getting up at six or six-thirty, but I honestly don't mind. It's gorgeous getting out at that hour in the pale clear air, on streets still uncrowded by rush hour traffic, knowing that I'm doing something good for myself -- and knowing I won't need to spend the rest of the day feeling guilty that I haven't exercised! I don't think I'm losing weight, but I've (mostly) let go of that as a motivation; health is so much more compelling, and it's easier to believe that I'm getting those results. So I'm learning things about myself, even if they're not always related to art.
Speaking of art, though, lately I've really been yearning for a craft of some sort, anything tactile and three-dimensional I can really get my hands into. Drawing doesn't do it, and I can't be baking all the time. Yesterday, out of desperation, I made this -- it was actually quite fun, though totally useless -- but I really want to learn to sew. I'm constantly complaining that I never have enough clothes and nothing in the stores fits me, so if I could just learn to make my own (or at least do alterations), I could solve these problems and have fun projects to work on. The trouble is I have such high standards that I think it could be a long time before I'm really happy with what I make, so I'm afraid sewing would become this giant drawn-out timesuck that would eat up my time and prevent me from working on anything else. But I don't know. I don't want to give in to fear/uncertainty anymore, in anything (speaking of which, I just saw this last night and loved it), so I think I really might do it. We'll see.
-opposition, boundaries (to a degree!)
-new or less-familiar emotions
-needing to work through complicated ideas (these first three are all related)
-excitement
-discussion
-discovering new art that I love, like this
I haven't been all that creative in the past couple of weeks, Valentine aside. A few days ago as I sat down to do morning journaling, after a hiatus of probably a week, I realized why. I've been playing a lot of computer games recently, which puts me in an escapist mood that tries very hard to self-perpetuate. Journaling and freewriting, on the other hand, make me more self-aware and help me engage with my life. So I think all together I was just spending too much time being escapist and not enough time engaging with my thoughts, and that made for creative and intellectual stagnation.
As I spend more of my days trying consciously to make more art and make art a bigger part of my life, I'm finding out more and more about what inspires me and what makes me tick. The list at the top of this entry is an example; for another, for two weeks now I've done at least some physical exercise five days a week. Sometimes it's a ninety-minute yoga class; some days I can't manage more than fifteen minutes of walking (though I still think, given the incline getting to Runyon, that a quarter-hour is nothing to sneeze at), but at least I'm out doing something. What sparked this was my realization (so long in coming!) that I love to start my day with exercise, but hate doing it any other time of day if it involves more than a little initiative on my part. So now I've worked it into my schedule in such a way that I get it over with first thing in the morning. On Mondays and Wednesdays, that means getting up at six or six-thirty, but I honestly don't mind. It's gorgeous getting out at that hour in the pale clear air, on streets still uncrowded by rush hour traffic, knowing that I'm doing something good for myself -- and knowing I won't need to spend the rest of the day feeling guilty that I haven't exercised! I don't think I'm losing weight, but I've (mostly) let go of that as a motivation; health is so much more compelling, and it's easier to believe that I'm getting those results. So I'm learning things about myself, even if they're not always related to art.
Speaking of art, though, lately I've really been yearning for a craft of some sort, anything tactile and three-dimensional I can really get my hands into. Drawing doesn't do it, and I can't be baking all the time. Yesterday, out of desperation, I made this -- it was actually quite fun, though totally useless -- but I really want to learn to sew. I'm constantly complaining that I never have enough clothes and nothing in the stores fits me, so if I could just learn to make my own (or at least do alterations), I could solve these problems and have fun projects to work on. The trouble is I have such high standards that I think it could be a long time before I'm really happy with what I make, so I'm afraid sewing would become this giant drawn-out timesuck that would eat up my time and prevent me from working on anything else. But I don't know. I don't want to give in to fear/uncertainty anymore, in anything (speaking of which, I just saw this last night and loved it), so I think I really might do it. We'll see.
