Recently, my husband and I took our two granddaughters, ages 6 and 10, to artBEAST in Sacramento. artBEAST is a drop-in arts exploration space for children featuring an open studio, arts classes, and arts exploration rooms. Though all children are welcome to visit artBEAST, special focus is given to creating an environment for children under 6.

Our ten-year old granddaughter wasn't too enthusiastic about going there again because she remembered it was for "little kids." But both of them had so much fun, we finally had to tell them it was time to go.

The open studio features tables, easels, and clay mounds where young artists can work. Surrounding shelves are stocked with paint, papers, objects from nature, recycled tidbits, glues, crayons, glitter, scissors, an array of brushes, and an even wider offering of objects from which to make art. The goal of artBEAST is to help children develop confidence in expressing and messing as they create art pieces that convey their sense of the world.

As I watched the girls using all the different media, I realized how little time I spend creating art. We grandmas nurture creativity in our grandchildren but do we nurture it in ourselves?

When I got home, I found two books on my shelf that address this issue: The Vintage Years: Finding Your Inner Artist (Writer, Musician, Visual Artist) After Sixty by Francine Toder and The Artist Within: A Guide to Becoming Creatively Fit by Whitney Ferre. I know many of you are already making art but for those of you who aren't, read on to find out their thoughts on how to nurture your own creativity.

Happy Mother's Day,

My daughter and son-in-law have done a phenomenal job nurturing their two "art beasts" since they were old enough to hold a crayon. Both girls spend hours every week in creative activities and their kitchen art gallery is proof. On our recent trip to artBEAST, Amelia painted this one in a matter of minutes.

The Artist Within

So why do we adults often agonize over a blank canvas when it's put in front of us?

Whitney Ferre says that "creativity is not just for kids, artists, and homemakers; it's for everyone who needs to create a degree of change."

In her video, Whitney says that when we get over our fear and claim our creativity, things will change. But because we've been told when we were little that we either have creative talent or we don't, we're afraid to put paint on paper.

Once we start scribbling paint on a canvas, our mind starts re-evaluating those things we told ourselves we couldn't do and it starts building our creative mental muscle. Then a floodgate opens because we give ourselves permission and that energy spills out into every element in our lives.

In her book,The Artist Within: A Guide to Becoming Creatively Fit, Whitney takes you through creative exercises that introduce you to the 8 principles of design that artists use to create works of art. The exercises strengthen the "muscles" in your brain that will help you to "lift" the ideas off the shelves of your mind and turn them into your reality. Her goal is to help you become creatively fit.

Here's a sample of one of her creativity "workouts:"

• Place your pen on the paper. Set a timer for 5 minutes. Even though 5 minutes may start to feel like a long time, resist the urge to stop before time is up--that is your left brain talking. Once you keep doodling past your initial urge to stop, your right brain can really begin to kick in.
• Start to make your marks.
• Fill a piece of paper with any kind of marks. Lines: straight, curvy, jagged. Shapes: all sizes, all kinds. Let one build off the other. Keep going until your 5 minutes are up.
• Can you identify how you were feeling before the workout?
• Did you want to stop doodling before time was up?
• How are your thoughts different after the workout?
• Do you see a rhythm in your doodles?
• Did you reach the point when one mark led to another without too much thought?

Whitney explains that exercises like these can help us loosen our grip on trying to control our surroundings and the people around us. When we let each part of our lives and the people around us find their own rhythm, it brings us closer to what we want.

 

The Vintage Years

 
Francine Toder, who will be our November speaker, writes that because of lifestyle and natural changes in brain and hormonal functioning beyond age sixty, we are at an ideal age for mastering the fine arts in ways that younger people cannot.  

 

Her book, The Vintage Years: Finding Your Inner Artist (Writer, Musician, Visual Artist) After Sixty, delves into the latest brain science findings in everyday terms and shows that if fed a diet of complexity, newness and problem solving, our "vintage" brains can flower and bloom.

 

Francine is living proof! After a forty-year career as a psychologist and approaching age seventy, she began asking herself, "what's next?" She went to look at cellos and rented one along with a self-instruction book, a music stand, and a metronome. And thus began her journey to becoming a musician and the topic for her fourth book in which she tells the stories of twenty men and women who began their artistic journey after age sixty.

 

So nurture that "art beast" of yours and as Francine writes: "explore the artist inside you that doesn't yet have a voice or that you had to quiet in order to satisfy the demands of your earlier life."