My 200th Blog – It’s All About the Creative Process

Drawing with crayons Nancy Smeltzer, MFA

Well. here it is, the 200th blog on this site! I’m rather proud of myself after quite a year of adverse situations with my mother dying and me getting chronic Lyme disease and tick malaria. Some days it’s all I can do to lift my head up off the pillow from the die-off of the toxins, yet I wanted to make this 200th posting special. However, what to write about?

I went round and round for quite awhile until on my Facebook page last week in response to attitudes regarding making your art perfect, Ellen M. Cosgrove wrote “I approach them (her art work) with the attitude that I’m just fooling around, just playing, just experimenting. I think that gives me flexibility, and I’m more invested in the process than I am in the outcome.” What a great concept… just playing and having fun!!!

Remember how much fun it was when you were little just to fool around with art materials? I spent hours and hours just scribbling away on mountains of paper (and a few walls, I must admit). It wasn’t until I got further in school that I found out there was a “right” way to do art, but I was fortunate in that I got a lot of support and found out in Junior High that people actually liked what I made. That gave me a way, as a fat little girl, to stand out from the crowd because I was “the artist”. Even today, at class reunions, people still say that I was always doing art work.

So, I encourage you to do as Ellen said and go forth and PLAY (Big capital letters for emphasizing!) I found that when I give myself permission to do just that, and not create some SERIOUS WORK OF ART (that one had lots of sound effects with it), but just play with the materials and enjoy the creative process. I’d love to see some of your results!

If you have some well-lit photos of any of your “playing” with art materials, then send them to me at info@fiberfantasies.com . Perhaps, I can use them in a future blog or on a Facebook page. 

Why not leave a comment as to your thoughts on this posting. Please take a minute, fill out the form below or by clicking on the “comments/no comments link” at the top of the posting, and then share your ideas with the rest of us. We all grow when we share our thoughts and impressions, so why not join our growing community of those who appreciate art quilts and textile arts. We’d love to hear from you!… and PLEASE tell like minded souls about this blog! The more readers and contributors, the more I write because encouragement helps the words flow!

You can see more of my art work on my web site at www.fiberfantasies.com (be patient as it loads; it’s worth it), my spiritual healing work at www.transitionportals.com and can find me on Google + , Facebook (for Transition Portals) Facebook (for Fiber Fantasies),  and Twitter.

To find out how to buy my art work, please check out “How to Buy my Art Work” in the “Pages” section to the right of this blog.

2 comments

  1. James Goodman says:

    When I take photographs and I’m “playing” with composition and so on, and I’m not anxious about the outcome, even whether or not the picture sees the light of day; then there’s tremendous satisfaction and purpose for me in the craft of *taking* pictures, rather than having the goal of *making* a photograph (which is a separate, also satisfying and purposeful endeavor, albeit one filled with considerably more anxiety and stress than *taking* pictures for me.)

  2. Dear James, thanks for explaining how you see things through another lens…:) I’ve been thinking a lot of you lately, and how you took those great portal/door pics for me. You have such a great eye for seeing the beauty in simple things.

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