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Reanimating Relationships

I rode a train, met a new young friend, who thinks I should blog. Say what?

She, a champion swimmer, claims she’s not creative. I said I doubt that very much.

I told her creativity is problem solving, making decisions. I forgot to tell her it’s also play.

And makeup artists are called artists for a reason; tell me making up a beautiful eye is not a creative act, ephemeral, enjoyed on the wing.

I don’t believe creativity is limited to using defined art supplies bought only from a store labeled as an art supply provider. Art supplies are all around, stuff yearning to be transformed, reanimated. Once I dropped out of art school because I didn’t have money to buy supplies to meet the assignments. I had an assignment to work with wood, but I had no money to buy wood to sculpt with. I looked around, but didn’t recognize the wood lying around in an old garden, twigs and limbs and living wood. Now, I recognize materials all around me as art supplies. What I put my hands to can be transformed with imagination and play.

I especially like artists who work with what the environment gives them in specific places – the work of Andy Goldworthy comes to mind. Goldworthy is a British sculptor, photographer, and environmentalist who has been producing ephemeral site-specific sculpture and land art for decades. His lovely work with wood, water, life, and time changes, shifts, melts back into the materials it came from. Sculptures of ice, streams of leaves, sand in tide – transient beauty existing in one day, documented, gone from real time, shared in archives.

I am looking for a way to reanimate relationships, to make an art of it: to express tenderness; to support a friend’s endeavor; to admire a lifetime’s work. Look around; a little birdie told me this creative service is free: An Album of Letters.

Roberta Fountain