I plan for this to be a blog where I share my lifelong creative journey and hear about yours. Every creative journey is unique because it is intimately connected with the person, the persona, and your life experiences.
By “person” I mean that real you, the consciousness you have known so intimately since birth. “Persona” is the image you project in public—like the professional you at the office, the party-loving extrovert in college, or the responsible Mom who volunteers for all the field trips. The persona may or may not be an exact reflection of the person. Usually it has at least a smidgeon of roleplay in it.
Now for the difficult most word to define: “artist.” It is such a loaded word that I won’t be able to go beyond its surface in this blog post. I recently read a great book called Get the Picture, which is a deep dive into the elite “art world.” Author Lisa Bosker does a great job of addressing the word. She points out that in the context of human history, the idea of the artist as a special rather elevated sort of person, is a relatively recent idea. It came about in the 19th century, I believe as part of the Romantic movement. The Pre-Raphaelites were part of it, followed by the Impressionists. Vincent Van Gogh became the icon of the tragic artist who did art for its own sake and died before his genius was recognized.
Before that, art was more like a trade. Artists got hired to paint a mural in a cathedral, sculpt a statue for a government building or wealthy man’s garden, or paint a portrait of a wealthy lady. In fact, wealth and status were always a big part of the art scene because trade or not, great art takes time, talent, training, and expensive supplies.
The vast majority of humanity were poor and too busy surviving to cultivate their creativity. Survival mode, I suspect, is the enemy of art and also human spiritual growth in general. I grew up Roman Catholic and there was always this running theme that suffering makes you a better person. While I hesitate to call total bullshit on that philosophy, I think it should be limited to suffering in moderation. Suffering comes as a built-in feature of life as a human and it’s good to find some value in it—like deepening our compassion for others and facing our dark side and surviving with more knowledge and understanding.
Yes suffering make you a better wiser person in those ways. But a brutal hopeless life of labor for enough food and shelter to stay alive is, I think, where the value ends. What can be sadder than a human with normal dreams and never having the space or time to an extravagantly free thing like sitting still for hours to observe nature and then drawing a picture of a beautiful flower. If I had past lives I would bet I lives hundreds of such lives. Maybe that’s why, in this life, I am so grateful to finally have the chance to walk in nature and draw pictures.
The picture above is one I painted digitally using Procreate and an Apple Pencil. It is a girl walking with her rescue dog from the shelter. She wears a Gunne Sax dress, a popular brand in the 1980s. I was there and had a dress much like it. That’s how old I am….. Anyway, I do digital art, traditional art in watercolor, colored pencil, acrylic, graphite, and any other media I can get my hands on. Sometime I combine traditional and digital art. I do not use AI tools to create art or write. I am excited about discussing all kinds of art techniques, art mindset, art books, art business, and all things art!
Scribbleflowers Journal 