Art opens my heart wide. It fills me up to the brim with possibility. I can have an idea, a wild and crazy, wonderful flowing idea, and I can put it down on paper in myriad ways. The actual act of making art is expansive too—it’s the opportunity to lose yourself in materials and process, to fall in love with handmade paper, to be awestruck by pens, to hypnotize yourself with the feeling of smearing deep blue paint smoothly over the surface of a board.
Making art is an expansive process. We all construct a lot of roadblocks in our minds about art, some common ones: “I can’t draw,” “I’m just not creative.” But the truth is, we were all freely creative once, and all that was different then, when we were kids, was that we didn’t care what anyone else thought, and we didn’t have years of judgments echoing in our minds. The real difference between being actively creative and not creative, between being able to draw and not being able to draw is your perception.
You may say, “that still doesn’t make me good at drawing.” But who said anything about needing to be good? Drawing is about putting pen to paper. The goal is to live, and if you want to live expansively, your life will be about doing, not judging.
My particular favorite art is pen and ink drawing. I make quirky, whimsical drawings, I love to draw words in made-up, lively fonts. I am in love with the alphabet—the different personalities the letter “k” can have depending on how you draw it (with a loop or with straight limbs), how a lowercase “e” can zip across the page like a little tyke, or command an audience as a standup uppercase. When drawing letters, I often feel like I’m running wildly with crayons, drawing with my toes. It’s an amazing, silly, childlike feeling that I wouldn’t trade for anything.
Every day, I'm trying to understand how to bring that feeling of wide-open possibility and joy into other parts of my life. Is it possible to pay the bills with wild abandon? Can I market my art business with the same playful nature that I use to draw? Can I come up with a whimsical creative idea to end the recurring disagreement between me and my husband?
