How often do you get to do anything just for the sheer pleasure of doing it? Maybe you wait for the weekend or a vacation to participate in such frivolity. Or maybe you’re lucky and you’re an artist of some sort, where every day offers opportunities to play.
Creative work can benefit from guidelines, limitations, parameters and even deadlines, but those things can often inhibit a sense of play, which is a big building block in the creative process. Thinking too much while in the process of making art can get in the way of intuition. It’s great to have preset notions of what an artwork might be, and in the process of producing that work, it’s entirely possible that a wholly different train of thought presents itself as an opportunity. Staying open to such possibilities involves the intuitive process where decisions are made and actions taken that are not based on rational thought.
Play comes in very handy as a way to stay open to possibilities. Doodles, goofing around, changing tools, changing hands, a different color. There are endless strategies to move out of your repetitive patterns. Do you need help coming up with some? Let me offer a far from exhaustive list:
Take blurry pictures
Turn it upside down
Use your least favorite color
Cut it in half, then in quarters, rearrange
Use a brush bigger than any you’ve ever used
Start with black instead of white
Try it on a computer (well, maybe not, nevermind)
Ruin it 7 times before calling it done
Play the same note over and over
Draw a circle 100 times
Switch hands, draw them again
Play it backwards
Make it a diptych
Paint out your favorite part
Do a self portrait
You get the idea. Play for the fun of it, and if something unexpected comes up, check it out, see what it’s about.
One Comment
Nice. I don’t play often enough. Except in the kitchen, when hunger, creativity and whatever is available becomes subject to a new application.
Stay cool…
dew