You may have seen the carvings and fine paintings of my mother and grandparents on both sides of my family in three October posts on Instagram. An uncle built the Fitzall custom mouthpiece used by Louis Armstrong and other famous musicians who regularly traveled to backwater Grand Rapids, Michigan to be fitted. My father and brother held patents for industrial designs. And from earliest childhood I was encouraged to be creative with gifts of colored pencils and heavy papers and my efforts were praised and framed. That lifted me effortlessly over the biggest creative hurdle of all--being told I wasn't.
The end of one year is a good time to think about the next. I'm wondering where creativity comes from and how to make it happen! I believe creativity can be learned by anyone at any age and don't believe its given to some but denied to others. As a teacher I taught my own students how to be creative and saw many of them blossom in creative ways once they believed they could. Anyone who really wants to learn can.
So whenever I personally hit an artistic road block, it's good to be reminded. Sometimes the block is getting tired of old ideas and wanting to reinvest in something new and exciting. I've been working on a series that's a shift from painting what I actually see before my eyes and moving toward new associations, allowing my imagination to roam between unrelated words or images for no other reason than to see what might happen, just for fun. That's often how creativity happens, letting the mind free-associate among things that aren't the same at all or are never thought of as connected, for instance flowers and clothing or dancing lines without bodies or swashes of color that make sounds.

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"Wants2Dance" whirling in a spin, a party dress twisting around her
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The original was a hibiscus unfurling on the island of Virgin Gorda.
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Inspired by a rare flower in my garden and hot colors making lively music
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These two new pieces are what snapped to attention when I freed my mind from conventional thinking. I'd begun a new series weeks prior without even realizing it, that became images and ideas like nothing I'd ever created before, blending real things like stairways or flowers into something else, allowing ideas to flow wherever they wanted. "Wants2Dance" and "Flirtatious Lily" were in good company with previous paintings in a series I didn't realized I was making and that was already underway.