Reply and kind of a rant or is it a motivational speech?

For those of you who read the comments on this blog, my latest post had a comment from Le ShallowGal, one of my favourite Blog Authors (as a huge Terry Pratchett fan I enjoy most writings that include humorous footnotes SG's posts are no exception. Go check out her blog now. It's OK I'll still be here when you get back).

In her comment, SG mentioned both her love of art supply stores and her lack of artistic ability. I replied to her Comment via email but I felt that my reply would also make some pretty good blog fodder too so here's an expanded reply that kind of went a little ranty and hopefully ended a little more motivational as opposed to a demanding lecture...

I can't even begin to tell you how many people say that they don't have a single creative bone, artistic bone, crafty bone.... in their body whenever they find out that I'm one of those "arty" people. The fact is that everyone is creative, case in point? Remember when you were a kid? a new box of crayons was a goldmine.

As we grow older, we're trained to consider art to be of lesser importance than other aspects of education. When budgets are cut, the first things that are threatened with the budget scissors are the art classes. It's kind of sad and it kind of makes me angry and it kind of puts me in the mind of home-schooling the Peanut so that we can keep the visual art as a big part of her education instead of slowly eliminating it as she grows older.

There is a misconception that creative talent is something that you have to be born with and that there are people out there who can just pick up a pencil and create master works from day one; and there are lucky souls out there who pick up a pencil at age two and can draw photo- representative images by age 13, their name is Picasso (this I think explains why we have cubism. The man had mastered rendering and got bored...) What we don't think about is that these people also work at what they do. Some people are more natural at it than others but the creativity still has to be nurtured. Natural talent is something that we are all born with.

What I'm getting at is that the Artistic bone can be cultivated. When I started art school I couldn't draw at all; some introductory art classes helped me learn, advanced classes helped me to grow and continuing to draw keeps my skill sharpened.

I'd suggest that the next time you find yourself haunting the art supply store to pick up a nice sketchbook and a pencil, even if you use it to just doodle swirly lines and tic tac toe's while you're talking on the phone, you can feel all artistic and creative without too much risk. After a while you might feel confident enough to graduate up to paints... or not; just don't let the fact that you can only draw a stick man stop you from drawing a stick man.