The Real World: Where Creativity Goes to Die
You were an artist when you were little.
Perhaps you were a finger painter, a play-dough maker, or a crafter of creatures born from the twigs and dirt in your backyard. I don’t care how, but in some fashion, you were an artist.
I, have always been an artist. I am consistently reminded of this fact by the strange childish drawings that remain on the walls of my parents’ home. Here are a few gems:
I took drawing and painting classes throughout all of grade school, directed and edited “movies” that I forced my family members to partake in at age 11, made ceramic bowls at summer camp, followed in the footsteps of my grandfather and became addicted to black room photography, gained the reputation of “pro-bubble-letterer” in 5th grade, and even dabbled in the fine art of face painting.
Despite my life-long resume of creative endeavors, if you ask most of the people I was friends with in college, they would refer to my Prezi skills as just about the only artistic quality that I possess.
HOW SAD IS THAT?!
Now I’m not trying to say I hold the talents of the best artist that ever lived. In my 12th grade advanced drawing class I made two pieces over the course of the whole year (my work ethic was not appreciated by my teacher). I preferred to goof off with my friends rather than delve into the deep and complex projects that my art teacher attempted to inspire us with (if you haven’t already, please sense my sarcasm).
It’s not that it’s a tragedy that people don’t know me for my glorious talents, it’s the fact that I haven’t really been exploring the creative piece of my brain over the past four or so years that is truly tragic.
Now as a “real-world” lady, working 9–5 and attempting to have a social life, while also trying to keep my bank account from dwindling, creating art hasn’t really been on the top of my to-do list. It’s easy to get caught up in the daily grind and forget about the little things that really make you tick — like walking around the city with just your headphones and your camera, or making a goofy sketch on a restaurant napkin.
A few weeks ago I was working in Starbucks, waiting for my boss to finish a meeting. Catching up on my email, I didn’t realize that the woman sitting across from me had been sketching me the whole time!
As I got up to leave, she stopped me to let me know that she had in fact been sketching me the whole time… At first I giggled, then I was a little creeped out. But the woman told me that sketching people was something she always did while she was waiting for her car to get fixed (meanwhile, flipping through her sketch book to show me the drawings of all the other people that had unknowingly been modeling for her).
At the end of the day, this creepy lady was just tapping into her creativity, finding a way to turn the things she saw into something that she could be inspired by. She was giddy and almost childlike in her tone as she unveiled herself to me and showed me her masterpieces. While I admittedly had trouble taking this woman seriously, she was able to remind me of my own creative passion, by exposing me to hers.
So in attempt to keep passing on the passion, here are some of my most favorite things that I have created over the years. I hope you think they’re cool, but more importantly I hope that by putting them out there for the world to see, I am able to motivate myself and bring creativity to the forefront of my life again.
This is one of the pieces that I managed to complete during that unproductive year of advanced high school drawing class. It is simply a portrait of a clown drawing on his makeup. Most people who saw the drawing chose to interpret it as the clown drawing his own body — they found a deeper meaning in something that I intended to have no deeper meaning. And that is the magic of art.
While the quality of this image is awful (because it’s a picture of a picture), it will always be one of my favorite photographs — not necessarily for the photograph itself, but for the process behind it. I took this photo in NYC, when I was on a school trip in 10th grade. On that trip, I decided to challenge myself and go up to random folks — a man living on the street outside CVS, a father holding his daughter’s ice cream on the steps of the Met — and ask to take their photo.
You could say I was the HONY before HONY.
I ended up writing part of my college essay on what I learned from this valuable experience that I created for myself:
Pacing back and forth outside a pharmacy, I built up the courage to go ask two elderly ladies sitting on a park bench if I could photograph them. At first they looked confused. One said in a surprised tone, “You want to take a picture of us?” I assured them that I did and they agreed. As I was setting up my shutter speed, the other asked, “What do you want us to do?” This thought hadn’t entered my mind. I could have told them to look off to the side, or pose like supermodels. Instead, I took a second to think about what I was doing. I had no idea who these two women were. I knew nothing about their past, but I was about to capture them on a piece of paper for anyone to see. I was responsible for showing people who these two women were. I felt obligated to portray their true character and to make people want to know them. I told the women to do what ever they wanted. They turned to me with their large round glasses, tilted their heads together, and smiled.
This is another one of my most treasured photographs. It’s from the Soweto township in South Africa (I spent 4 months in Cape Town during a study abroad semester). I don’t remember a whole lot about this moment besides the fact that this little girl was drop dead adorable. The interaction between her and her grandmother is completely blissful to me.
ALRIGHT. So, I’ve shown you what makes me tick in attempt to get you (and myself) back out there creating and getting inspired by our world.
