Why We Want to Create

Why do we want to make things, anyway?

“C.G. Jung once described creativity as an instinct. If I do something creative in a day, I can sleep well. I’m relaxed. But if the practical world of traveling and family and obligation prevents me from doing something creative – if I can’t make anything – I feel tired and sick and somewhat depressed.” –Thomas Moore in “Finding Life at Work” in Spirituality and Health, March/April ’08.

I came across this passage recently and it reminds me of what a friend who edits tests for a living once told me: “Writing fiction helps me stand things. If I write an hour in the morning before I come to work, it helps me cope with the rest of the day.”

In The Dynamics of Creation, British psychologist Anthony Storr says that artists create to arrive at a sense of order in a chaotic world, to keep depression at bay, to seek status and prestige, and other psychological reasons. But perhaps the best reason, he concludes, is that some of us are simply blessed (or cursed, depending on how you look at it) with a creative restlessness, or a “divine discontent” that makes us want to create something. This artistic discontent is useful to society because others need art, music, books, etc. for entertainment, comfort, and catharsis.

What a perfect equation: some needing to create, others needing the catharsis of the creation. If we’re resisting our own creative restlessness, maybe we should stop fighting within ourselves and do what we are programmed to do?

Click Here to Read More..

Wildness in the City

Inviting Nature into Urban Areas

An Iowan named Roger Gipple, a retired farmer and environmentalist who lives in Des Moines, established “The Agrestal Fund” a few years ago. The fund is managed through the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation and was created for purposes of instigating a conversation about wildness in Iowa. (“Agrestal” means “not domesticated or cultivated; growing wild in the field.”) Gipple’s seed money has sponsored essay contests about wildness and has co-sponsored interdisciplinary conferences on the wild at Iowa State and the University of Iowa.

I interviewed Gipple couple of years ago for an article I was working on; he told me that as our landscape continues the shift toward fewer large tracts of unspoiled nature and more urban areas, we will need to learn to value those small places of “wildness” in the city, like flowers growing between the cracks of sidewalks and raptors dwelling in urban trees.

Since that conversation I’ve become even more sensitized to intentional invitations from cities toward nature and even the stylized, artificial echoes of nature. For instance, I love the new Millenium Park in downtown Chicago – especially the concrete and steel stream meanderings through the park along a prairie stand of native plants. You could see this creation as almost a parody of the miles of tallgrass prairie that used to blanket the Midwest. I choose to see it as an homage to what once existed – and maybe a blueprint or archetype for nature, should she ever have the chance to prevail again. There’s a similar stream near the new Des Moines Public Library; it too touches my heart.

And then there are those larger, wilder areas within or close to cities, like the lovely Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and my most recent find: the pristine Crystal Springs Reservoir near San Mateo that my husband and I discovered while in California last November. Our trip to Yosemite during that trip west was fabulous and grand, but it’s those natural areas close to our urban areas that serve us on a more daily basis. They certainly feed my soul, anyway, as a writer. I try to get into some kind of natural space, however wild or tamed, on a daily basis because that’s where the muse visits me most often.

In Iowa, there are many spaces on the fringes of towns and cities. A couple of my favorites are the Woodpecker and Squire Point trails near the Coralville Reservoir in Iowa City and the River East trail on the eastern edge of Ames.

Click Here to Read More..

Why We Feel Better When We Create

Science tells us why creating feels good
It turns out that science may help explain why creative types feel better when we draw, write, paint, sing, or make a movie. Robert Gitchell, a retired orthopaedic surgeon, writes in a recent University of Iowa publication that when people engage in creative activities, “they change the production of interleukins, the cytokines that play an important role in the function of the immune system, enhancing beneficial cytokines and reducing those related to stress.” In fact, manmade cytokine injections are actually used to boost the immune system, and a certain type of interleukin is used in treating certain cancers, says Gitchell.

In other words, taking time to create something makes good stuff go on inside your body. So what’s keeping us from writing that shaky first draft or making that ugly painting? Apparently it doesn’t even have to be good on the outside in order to feel good inside.

Click Here to Read More..

Good Crop Rotation at Blank Park Zoo

Drawing animals helps you see them

They stood there doing double-takes like crazy, their heads rotating rapidly from side to side. I’m talking about the flamingos at Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines. I was zoo scrawlin' there earlier this month with my niece Anna and good friend Kelly. (A scrawl is a sketch-crawl – like a pub crawl, only sketching instead. If you think you might be drawing-inclined, check out master scrawler Danny Gregory.)

I don’t try to make a living by drawing, so the act of doing it is completely untainted by the need to go commercial with it. It reboots my head, gets me back to beginner’s mind, and simply fills me with joy. Drawing helps me slow down enough to see things I wouldn’t otherwise – like the tinker-toy knees of a flamingo or the perfectly patterned spots on a giraffe. And somehow the act of drawing helps fertilize my writing, which is how I do make my living.

I heard Joni Mitchell say in a TV interview a few years ago that for her, alternating painting with song-writing was “good crop rotation.” That’s how I feel about drawing and writing.

For drawing materials, I use Canson or Cachet black hard-cover sketch books with 100 pages of thick drawing paper; a Pilot Precise black rolling ball pen (fine point) for sketching directly (no pencil; no stops and starts; I draw contours first and just go with my mistakes); and a palette of Prismacolors on the lighter end of the spectrum, such as canary yellow, yellowed orange, light blue, and true green.

Click Here to Read More..

Don't Be Suspicious of Yourself

Artist Stephen Dickerson says to do what comes easily

You see a painting like the one on the left by Houston artist Stephen Dickerson. It strikes you so forcefully that suddenly you want to create something right on the spot. That’s what happened to me two years ago at the Des Moines Art Festival after I saw Dickerson's colorful cityscape paintings.

I burst out of the display area and sat down and sketched the Des Moines Public Library and the Principal building. When I look at my sketch I clearly remember talking to Dickerson, hearing his wonderful Southern drawl, and being totally envious that he was making it as an artist.

I called Dickerson after the festival in my ongoing quest to soak up the wisdom of artists and writers who make their living at their work. He wins the prize for quitting-day-job stories: after graduating from the University of Alabama with a BFA, he began working as a display designer for a large retail corporation. Eventually he worked his way “up” into management, working 70 hours a week and hating it.

After 18 years of working for The Man, he scraped together his collection of paintings (“I had time to do about one a year”) and entered an art show in Birmingham. That was 12 years ago and he’s been working full-time as an artist ever since. He lost $5,000 the first year, showed a profit the second year of $15,000, and for the past 9 years, has achieved his goal of making more money than he made while working for “that stinking corporation.” He has even been able to put his wife through pharmacy school.

Dickerson says he changes his style every year rather than get locked into formula-painting just to please customers. “I lose customers every year and get new ones,” he said, “but somehow it works out. I decided that if I’m going to do such a risky thing, I’d better please myself.”

I think about his next statement nearly every day as a freelance writer/editor (the emphasis is mine): “I feel like the luckiest person in the word. People buy these things I make; I do what I want to do; it all works out. The key is to find what comes easiest to you and not be suspicious of it.”

Click Here to Read More..