I have a constant driving urge within me to create. I know. No surprise if you’ve been following my blog or my FB page.  But sometimes, even though I consider myself a ‘creative’, I am surprised by what the muse has in store when I set out to express my creative urge.

Yesterday, after cleaning up the main floor of our house from the art workshop I’d held on Saturday (I’ll write more about it on another day. It was AMAZING!), I took a photo of ‘Felicity’, my clay guinea fowl by French artist, Heidi Caillard. Because I’d filled the island with art-making paraphenalia, she’d had to go reside on the side counter instead of her usual perch at the end of the island where she sits like a queen surveying her realm. She makes me smile.

I looked at the photo and thought, “Hmmm… That would be fun to write about.”

I didn’t get to it this morning as in the process of lugging everything up and down from my studio to the main floor and back again, I’d managed to put my back out. My morning was spent in bed until I got to the chiropractor at 2pm.

And still, that photo called to me.

So, I began to write words on it. The first words that came to mind were, “How to be an artist in a world of un-artfulness.’

I wrote out a few steps and realized the photo didn’t match my message. I went in search of a more suitable photo of my artwork.

Several hours later, I had the photo and the words, which were very different than the original version, all because I liked a photo I took of my guinea fowl on the island after I’d cleared it of all the art-making stuff we’d used in the workshop on Saturday.

That’s the creative process.

Unruly. Untamable. Unrestricted.

And that’s the way I like it.

Art-making isn’t about making something perfect, or even making something that makes sense. It’s about expressing whatever is calling to be expressed without fearing the expression will be more than, less than, other than what it is.

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Felicity – The photo that started it all.