Creativity

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My Personal Experience Going Through the Creative Process

For Di McDonald’s Newsletter - May 25, 2002

It’s 2:30 a.m. I sit transfixed at my studio worktable bathed in the blue white light of my Luxor tech lamp. The cold white page of my sketchpad lies on the table staring blankly up at me. I pick up my pencil and slowly bring my hand over the pad, stopping poised in mid air, in suspended animation, like the still frame of a leaping ballerina over the paper. My stomach is doing cartwheels and my heartbeat would give a cardiologist cause to dial 911 to notify the hospital ER that he’s bringing in patient, Marcia Acker-Missall for an emergency Creativity bypass.

Oh good grief! I’ve been asked to design a doll for a workshop and before I could get my lips to listen to my brain…my ears are hearing me say, ” I can do that!”

The creative process for me is multi faceted coming in waves of highs and lows somewhat like the birthing process. It is on the one hand exciting, thrilling and electrifies my every nerve. It can also be a bit frightening as my internal critic is very hard to please. It is a time in which I am stretching myself to move toward another level, exposing my soft inner self to the outside world much like a soft shell Crab in molting season. In order to grow, the crustacean must shed its protective outer shell and risk vulnerability while the immature one is allowed to develop.

Suddenly I find that I feel the urge to check email to see if there are any urgent matters I must respond to immediately. After doing that I return to the studio and I doodle. I look up at the ceiling and out the window…ah! There’s tons of laundry sitting in the basket and I had better get it done so that it won’t get in the way when I am really focused and working full steam ahead. So, downstairs I go and start the laundry all the while telling myself that I will get the work moving along while the laundry is in the washer. I return to the studio and doodle some more. The timer rings loudly. It’s time to put the wash in the dryer. While I’m doing that I realize that it’s about time to set the dinner table and I attend to that task and then return to the studio again where I find of course that nothing has changed in there while I was gone…. but I have changed.

All the time that I was doing laundry, doodling and setting the table my mind was working on what to do for the project. It was processing images and ideas while I was engaged in physical acts totally unrelated to the actual project I needed to do. A vision crystallizes in my mind and I can finally see a pathway to explore. I am fired up with a vision. I am full of expectation and now ideas keep flowing in so fast that I feel bombarded and breathless.

Having found my focus, I become totally consumed by the process, which fuels me with an energy that defies the urge to sleep or do much else other than the work at hand.

I have always felt the need to stretch myself and explore the many byways of the visual arts. It is an uncontrollable desire within me that compels me to experiment… to make something with those lightening flashes of images and ideas that course through my mind. It’s wonderful and I love it.