One Artist's "Creative Habit" Seminar Experience

There are so many good blog authors writing about technique, composition, color, and subject matter that I often wonder what I might add to the mix. In this post, and a few future posts, I will be sharing an experience that turned out to be quite enriching to my personal growth.

I recently attended an eight week seminar to engage with the book The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp. For those who do not know, Twyla Tharp is a successful choreographer.

Her book is dense with information and ideas; it also includes exercises after each chapter, and I'd like to share a few of the aha moments I experienced as a result of these exercises. The seminar included 6 attendees and one participating leader. Most of us are visual artists, but we also had a dancer, and an art instructor for young children. This mix added even more to this seminar - I'll share a few of the best moments in future posts.

One of the exercises (after Chapter 3) is to write a Creative Biography. This has a list of questions that I am actually still working through to completion. However, the early questions went like this:

1. What is the first creative moment you remember?
2. Was anyone there to witness or appreciate it?

I instantly remembered sitting at the kitchen table when I was about 5 years old doing a finger painting. It was a vivid memory with my parents busy with other things and I just loved the sensation of smooshing the paint with my hands all around the paper. No one actually made a big deal out of and and I don't recall that it was saved and mounted on the refrigerator like many of you might  remember doing as a kid to display some important creation. Nevertheless, it stuck with me all these years.

I decided to do another one shortly after the session without any idea what it might look like. I just let stream of consciousness take over. I squeezed and spread some color onto the paper, and scraped with my fingernail to make the drawing. It is not a very sophisticated image, but it connected me to the same feeling of pleasure I remembered all those many, many years ago.

Revisiting the Past in the Present
R. Campagna
© 2018

The image I finger painted as a six year old was of my family, but this one is just me, flowers, the sun, and a goose! I looked up the symbolism of a goose since I had no conscious insights about this choice of imagery, but after reading the symbolism associated with the goose, it totally fits my personal tendencies, and I bet I can tell you a story or two around it!! 😊

In my next post I'll share a moment of revelation from another past experience that caused a life long challenge.

I would encourage anyone interested in self discovery regarding your creative inclinations to do the exercises in Twyla Tharp's book. It was/is inspiring!! 😍
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