The beginnings of the creative journey…..
September 10th, 2006I was asked recently if I have always been creative, and that got me thinking. When or what or how, did I first create?
As a small child I wrote poems, mainly for school projects and the like. I remember being told off by a teacher for not giving credit to several poems in an anthology I had been putting together. I was a bit confused because the poems the teacher was referring to, were written by me. I think she had a hard time believing I had written them myself.
I then learned to play the accordion for several years, and if I was ever any good, it was because my parents made me practice a lot. No real talent there I’m afraid 
I returned to writing in my late teens, poems again, this time full of woe and teenage angst. I found it somehow therapeutic to put into words all the things that nobody wanted to hear. Lots of my writing was about escape and liberation, fromm my situation at the time. Looking back on some of my poems (yes, I still have them!) it’s hard to imagine being in so much pain.
In the midst of this I discovered cross-stitch and embroidery. Starting with pretty little designs and samplers, I moved on to altering a pair of jeans, embroidering flowers and various signs and logos onto them. Around the same time I remembering decorating a pair of espadrilles and even my DM boots, with markers and paints.
Again, I returned to the pen and wrote multitudinous poems about lost loves and the accompanying pain of heartache sorrow. I’m sure I’m not alone in scribing those thoughts, am I?
Towards my mid-twenties, I was introduced to gouache, and watercolour paper. So began my first relationship with paint. I painted because I had run out of words, for me, the paints became an extension of my vocabulary, allowing me to pour out my soul.
I revisited my gouache and my brushes a few times over the years, but never with any seriousness.
Now here I am, and this is what I make. I want to explore and experiement with art, but there is a certain safety that comes with being told a theme to work with or given a deadline to create to.
I’ll be back.
