Making time for my artistic practice can be a challenge as an artist with a full-time job. There are days my creativity is only given the scraps of my mental and physical energy at the end of my workday or sleepy-eyed half functioning waking brain power at the bleary hours of the morning. Usually my day starts out with good intentions to make art ; but sometimes car oil changes, making dinner, keeping a commitment to my health by working out, and managing the other inevitable ebbs and flows of life gets in the way.
One evening I eyed the white-blue digital clock of the microwave in the kitchen inching closer to bedtime as I washed the dishes pilling up in the sink, trying to do the math of how much time I could get any painting done. I continued to scrub and ruefully decided dragging out all my supplies to paint for twenty minutes before scrambling into bed was not a worthy return on investment.
Just as I was beginning to chalk up the day to another creative failure, my boyfriend came home from work with two overflowing bouquets of spring flowers. One was of white, pink, and yellow carnations and daisies dotted with tiny sparks of white baby’s breath; and the other delicate pink tulips with curved pale green stems. The exhaustion and defeat faded into curiosity and a sense of play as I peeled back the crinkling translucent cellophane from around the blooms. I tossed both bouquets into one heap on the kitchen island. My actions flowed from cutting the tender stems and measuring heights of different flowers in my favorite crystal vase. I experimented with colors and textures laid over each other until I was satisfied with the arrangement.
I never got around to painting that day, but I made art. It was the mere creative experience of arranging spring flowers to brighten up our home before easing myself into my night routine was a completed “piece” that manifested outside a sketchbook and separate from the gessoed ground of a canvas. Simple everyday acts are art in themselves, but only if we allow them to be special, we allow them to be an Experience. The education theorist John Dewey talks about art as experience in a way that compares a collection of small creative actions as a part of a whole to individual twinkling stars make up the vastness of the night sky, in his book, Art as Experience :
“In such experiences, every successive part flows freely, without seem and without unfilled blanks, into was ensues. At the same time there is no sacrifice of the identity of the parts. A river, as distinct from a pond, flows. But its flow gives a definiteness and interest to its successive parting greater than exists in the homogeneous portion of the pond. In an experience, flow is from something to something. As one part leads into another as one part carries on what went before, each give distinctiveness by successive phases that are emphasis of its varied colors.”
All from one inspired action, that I initially dismissed as simple distraction, the sparks of new creative endeavors rose from the embers of a fading workday. My exercise in flower arrangement was one singular experience that resulted into several ink drawings from that same bouquet over the next few weeks. What flowed together was the part to the whole, or from the flower arrangement to the drawings. What we misinterpret as the mundane of the everyday can open us up to magical little worlds that become art. Our lives are a valuable reservoirs for the qualities to make art; because life is an Experience.
