Last Saturday, I had plans to meet my friend Carole and her two grandkids at the Amusement Park and Storyland in City Park. I had to get some footage for a video I'm making, and she thought the kids, Steven, 8, and Ali, 13, would like the rides.
Just prior to our afternoon meeting, Carole took her grandkids to the Art Museum to see the Disney animation exhibit. This is when I had this brilliant idea: Wouldn't it be fun if they all came over to my house (across the street from the park) and did some art. And so they did.
The idea was brilliant because right after they left the Art Museum, Ali said that she felt like drawing. You see, that's what happens when we give our inner artist some nourishment: she wants to make art. And after we make art, and we're ready to be filled up again.
This reflects exactly my experience 20 years ago when I went to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival with a class and where we saw seven major productions in six days. In between the productions, our teacher had us doing a lot of art, collage, playacting, mask making, etc. She explained that unless we made art, unless we emptied out and put forth our creativity, we could not take in more . We would become saturated with stimulus and overwhelmed with the productions we were seeing. So I started getting up early and doing collages. I took that practice back home and did some more each morning before I left for my newspaper job. See the site my early collage-making here.
Eventually I was accepted into a juried art association, had an art show and sold some pieces.
So when Carole (a very accomplished pet portraitist) and I and those two kids were playing around and putting paint on paper plates and making hand prints and using as much glitter glue as we possibly could, we were not just having fun, we were also getting ourselves emptied out and ready for the stimulations at the Amusement Park. It was magic.
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