let's celebrate our unique wiring to create art

Newsletter Friday...here is September 5th's excerpt...

This week I am pondering our unique brand of weirdness. I hope you will join me in my musings (and in a celebration)...cause seriously, do you ever wonder why you? Why you have the desire to make art?

Maybe you are like me and no one in your family (and I mean no one, not parents, sibling, aunts, uncles or oodles of cousins) has had any desire to seriously pursue drawing or painting.

So why us? Why this compulsion that won’t be ignored?

This week I have been emailing info to my students. I have been sending out the supplies list, maps to my studio and registration receipts. While doing this I found myself getting excited. I am excited for these people and what they are embarking upon.

I wondered yet again what motivates people to offer up hard earned money and move their bodies across the city (sometimes further) to take a coloured pencil course or workshop.

For the most part, these are not aspiring professionals wanting to hone their skills but folks with careers in other lines of work. I used to think that art was just a hobby for them and a group class was a safe bet for some entertainment and relaxation.

Now I am not so sure.

I suspect there is a deeper, more fundamental motivation that drives us to want to learn how to draw, colour or paint.

Perhaps what motivates my students to be present is related to that ancient need to create, apart from the other activities in their lives. There is something essential in the act of creation, or in simply learning to create, that answers this need.

In fact one student has shared that the reason she loves taking classes is that she absolutely loves learning how. This is what gives her immense joy. (and coloured pencil is apparently her last medium left to learn the how of, and boy do I have the course for her, I am going to love rocking her world. LOL)

 

   some students suddenly looking very busy, heads down working away – cause the camera has come out, LOL

“Learning never exhausts the mind.” Leonardo da Vinci

I take my role as a teacher seriously, very seriously. I deeply value the trust my students place in me – they come with their hopes and dreams, with their fears and insecurities and they really hope that I will deliver - that I will offer up the instruction they need and that I will create an environment of learning that is fun and supportive.

Uncaring, lazy art teachers do exist and so do terrible courses. Even if coloured pencil doesn’t end up being their favourite medium (not sure how that could happen J) they should go away having had a great time, having learned an awful lot and still be inspired to keep on creating.

I have had my own art teacher/course from hell experience. Seriously, it was so bad that when I finished the course (it was a basic watercolour class), I put all of my art supplies away. I was convinced art wasn’t for me. Fortunately a year later I came to my senses and pulled myself up by my bootstraps and started teaching myself to draw and colour in spite of that horrible teacher and that horrible three month experience.

Please don’t ever let a bad art experience stop you!

So perhaps my role is more than teaching people all sorts of useful and necessary techniques.

What if my job is also facilitating a connection with this real reason they are present, the universal fundamental desire to create?

Woo-hoo, that steps up my game a notch! I love it.

 It is this love of creation that brings us all together. It is why you are reading this newsletter.

 So this week, please let me encourage you to celebrate this uniquely weird thing about you. You love to draw, to paint?! Then by gosh go do some drawing or painting.

 Create...explore. And savour the knowing that there is a tribe of like minded souls, hard wired just like you that are also creating just for the sheer love it.

 Why not us? I for one am very grateful for my unique brand of weirdness. J

And if you work in coloured pencil and you love drawing all sorts of detail, well, let me just say that you are a super sort of weird and a super sort of wonderful!!!!

If you want to share your thoughts on being gifted with this desire to make art, I would love to hear from you.  What are you going to do to celebrate your unique brand of weirdness?

Here is a sneak peek at next week’s newsletter – I shall be sharing instructions on how to put together a very inexpensive light box. No screws or nails, no power tools, I promise!

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Last call: If you have been away on vacation, living under a rock or gasp not reading my newsletters this summer AND you want to join us for the CP Basics class starting on the 20^th, check out the details and register ASAP, here’s the link:  

http://www.teresamallenstudio.com/classes.html