April 07, 2004

Posted by on Apr 7, 2004 in Art

Last fall, a boutique owner contacted me to do some cards to sell in her shop. I told her I would look into this but never really found the time. In the winter, I sent out a few handmade cards to family and one friend, who is an artist and a production designer on movie sets, told me I should really market them because they’re really good. I said I would look into this but never really found the time.

I did, however, find the time to shop dozens of times for all the materials I would need. I would lose myself for hours picking out card stock, ribbons, colours, punches, stamps. There wasn’t anything that would make time fly faster than mentally creating these cards. But, to actually make them, well, I kept telling myself, there wasn’t time. I had work to do instead.

I went through this pattern again last night, losing myself in a supply shop, happily bringing the purchases home, knowing exactly what I want to do with the cards then saying, �when I have a spare moment in the evening, I�ll do it.� That�s when I realised that this is work, it just feels like play and that isn’t wrong � that�s exactly how it should be.

When people ask me for direction I always reply with the wise words of Carl Jung:

What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits.

Somehow, I seemed to have forgotten that for myself.

With so much writing projects going on, tight deadlines, revisions, new ideas, trying to finalise books, the idea of play has been slightly lost on me. That’s not to say I’ve been working unhappily, on the contrary. I love my work and what I’m doing; I can’t imagine doing anything else. But it’s all been structured work, no free form like drawing, creating, or making cards.

I had begun to think of anything unstructured that didn’t have deadlines or a direct benefit as play and useless. If I sit and create cards during the day, there’s no guarantee that anything will come to fruition. That if I just do something that is fun with no direct pay off, it must not be work. It’s just too much fun to be work.

And that’s where I was wrong.

The one belief I’ve held very strongly is that creative people cannot do just one thing creatively. A writer cannot just writer, a painter cannot just paint, and a designer doesn’t just design. Creative people like to have messy hands dipped in many inks. We aren’t satisfied otherwise and this is OK. In fact, it’s more than OK because creativity inspires creativity. Doing many things help us to create in the different areas. Designing cards will help me to design, to write, and to remain creative. There is a benefit. It is useful.

One of the biggest struggles I’ve had working on my own is not feeling guilty about the freedom I have. The freedom to work the hours I want, to take days off when I want, to lay in bed in the afternoon or break for tea. This is a common struggle for artists and I thought I was pretty much over it. I no longer apologised for working at home while friends and family went to a cubicle. I no longer felt sheepish about saying I napped frequently in the afternoon and I could take days off without having work on my mind. But I hadn’t come to terms with the fact that play was good and useful. That creativity doesn’t have to be structured; it just has to feel good.

That’s why I called this site Girl at Play after all; I wanted my work to feel like play. It just took me awhile to get comfortable with that.