Sunday, November 4, 2007

wishing to create

Yesterday (the day I should have posted this!) I went to an open-studio event put on by a group of artists that included my favorite client and his wife. Their art was really lovely and I wished I was feeling more flush with cash than I am right now (wish my client was giving me more work at the moment!) so that I could buy a piece.
But what really knocked me out was the art of a friend of theirs, a woman who had recently had a stroke and lost the use of her right hand -- her dominant hand. All of her art -- and it was really luminous and beautiful pastel work -- had been created using her left hand. What an inspiration. Some people might have given up after losing such an indispensible tool, but she was still so driven to create that she fought to learn how to use her left hand to do it. She struggled with making her pieces look the way she wanted them to, but they were absolutely beautiful. And there were so many of them. Amazing.
I have so many excuses for not creating: too busy, not talented, don't feel like it right now...but creating is something I really want to do. What flimsy excuses those are.
The colorful drawing above is by my 10-year-old daughter, Allie. She doesn't spend much time sitting down and drawing for fun anymore, but she does have mandatory art classes in school, so she can still create beautiful work. I guess I just need to enforce some "creativity time" on myself.


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