"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.
Art is knowing which ones to keep."
- Scott Adams
Art and creativity is the center of our life. It’s physically, emotionally and spiritually at the center of our house. Art is the most abstract thing but it’s the most concrete thing. It plays a vital role in everything we do: Where we go for the day. Which adventures we chose to go on. What we will eat. Where we will eat. How we will eat. Chopsticks or hands? What clothes we will wear. Cue my daughter’s one-legged leggings. What music we will listen to in the car. “Honey” is the family favorite right now – but LOUD and EVERYBODY has to sing. Art is about how we interact with daily life as much as it is about my kid’s obsessions with sculpting and drawing and painting - the general modes of art. We create our reality, our life, through our paradigm of creative adventuring. The art comes in the choices we make from our adventures, from our mistakes, from our triumphs. Every day should be artful. Thoughtful. Symbiotic. Transformative, even if just for a second. This is what creative adventuring is and this is what transformed our lives.
What is Art?
Here we go into the Paris of pompous and pretentious. Buckle your Basquiat seatbelt.
But hold on. It really doesn’t need to be like that. And really, it shouldn’t. More than that – here, it won’t.
I swear: No French berets and clove cigarettes. Just straight talk.
Because this is how I give it to the kids:
What is art?
Art is choice.
What does that mean?
In the same way that you made choices to wear those clothes this morning, so too do you have choices when you pull out an empty piece of paper or canvas. You get to choose what you want to create, what colors you want to paint or color with and when it’s time to stop, when the piece is done.
Creativity is pulling out that piece of paper with that vision in your mind. Creativity is the attempt, the trying, the going back to solve that puzzle in your brain, to articulate it in the world somehow. Art is deciding how to refine that vision that you’ve been playing with and let the mistakes and failings guide you to your final draft.
Creativity is having the courage.
Art is making the choices.
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