Funny Thing About Creativity

I have been playing around always with 3D art lately, and am not sure I like and/or love the results.

This is all new for me.

Up until a couple of years ago I thought my creative artwork had dried up and moved to the desert. I was “creative” in my younger years, but never took an art course. Nor a writing course, for that matter.

That didn’t stop me from trying — and improving — whatever latent talents I had.

After I retired four years ago, I took up crafting, enjoying it enough to perfect the talent into an actual craft fair material. That led to down time in the winter, and, needing a filler, started sketching and drawing circles and designs and pop art sort of things. A field — and style — I never really took seriously.

Now that the winter chill has snuck into Wisconsin I find myself experimenting once again. Where this 3D stuff came from I haven’t a clue. I started with copying some of the geometric pictures I sketched last year and added things like 1/2″ G clefs and clock hands on circles.

Is it art?  Oh yes. Is it good? That’s best left to psychics and mystics. And art teachers.

I’m neither putting down nor building up my budding new career. But I am surprised that I both like and dislike my work.

Is that natural for an artist? To feel disappointed that I can’t turn the ideas in my head into actual art pieces? To want to have my art be fantastic every time I start out?

This is where practice makes perfect. Or, rather, makes you better.

 You know all those cliches. You can’t get lemonade out of lemons unless you work squishing juice out the fruit and adding ingredients to it. You can’t finish the race if you don’t start it. Blah blah blah.

I believe self growth is full of satisfying moments and disappointing moments, especially where art is concerned. Like advanced degrees or top paying jobs, you don’t make it there on day one.

So it is with art. No matter if it’s your first time or the 100th time or the 10,000th time, every time you do something you do it differently. You find more control. More understanding. Your fingers move easier, your coordination improves.

Will you or I ever be on the art gallery circuit? I would love to think so. But in reality, I’m just as happy learning to do something better and better every time I try. I find it therapeutic as well as keeping those synapses in my brain firing.

I am accumulating a sketchbook full of ideas and a pile of art boards. What does Kenny Rogers say in the song “The Gambler”:

Cause every hand’s a winner
And every hand’s a loser

You  know the rest of the song. And we’re not there yet.

So let’s keep on practicing……

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