I’ve been different all my life. At every phase, ever since I can remember, I’ve been described as a “free spirit,” or something similar. I’ve always embraced these descriptors, and I love that I’m seen as unique in appearance and behavior.
Further, most people I’ve looked up to in life are also odd ducks. I’m a sucker for those who march to a different drummer, and I’m drawn to roads less traveled. But, for most peculiar people there is often some skill or attribute that explains, or even justifies, that eccentricity. Musicians, writers, painters, poets, and makers of any kind—they wear their strangeness as a badge of honor and a billboard that points to a creative talent or passion they possess. It almost feels like square pegs are just innately supposed to be creative. So, what was my reason? To what was my billboard pointing? Why was I eccentric, but not artistic?
Aside from an obsession with listening to music, a pleasant singing voice, and being part of an extraordinarily goofy (in the best way) family, I always felt a layer was missing from my personality. My whole life, I possessed pretty much zero creative talent. I never took one art class, and I literally cannot color in the lines.
Yet, in Spring 2017 as I walked down the streets of Sacramento, California, depressed by concrete, accompanied only by my dog, and desperately homesick, I started noticing and shortly thereafter obsessively photographing the less conventional (to me, anyway) beauty much more common in urban areas. Rusty mailboxes, angles and textures of concrete meeting grass, decay of built environments, creative graffiti, and fallen leaves became my muses. I would snap pictures on my cell phone and then edit them into brightly colored, deeply textured, and almost surreal abstract photos. Suddenly, and with no training or warning, people began calling me a photographer and artist. My weirdness was beginning to have an excuse, but it wasn’t until I left California that creativity really sunk its teeth into my soul.
A few months after I arrived in my new-old rural home, I still spent a lot of time alone, but was much happier and at ease living at the lake house my grandparents built up from a fishing shack. This house was my one constant location in life, and it was where my mom, stepdad, and ailing grandmother still lived. Even though I was often alone, I wasn’t lonely. It’s funny how solitude feels different when one feels safe. That safe solitude combined with a slower pace of life allowed my mind the space to further explore creativity.
Completely on a whim while shopping in the “big city” an hour from the lake house, I snatched up a package of cheap oil pastels off the shelf and began drawing. My first successes, and big fan favorites to this day, were abstract floral drawings. Made up flower varieties in nonexistent vases with thick layers of bright color blended by dirty hands, resting against abstract textured backgrounds with heavy black outlines were how I got my start in drawing.
Fast forward a few more months into the future, when I first picked up a paint brush, a cheap canvas, and some even cheaper acrylic paints, but quickly realized that, at least to me, brushes weren’t textural enough. I next reached for a cheap plastic putty knife, allowing me to do large swipes of layered color, and I continue to use that most often as my art tool of choice. I usually choose dissonant color combinations and my art is almost always about how I feel around other people.
So now, I’m a working artist (among other things), devoting my life to helping others find creativity inside them. I truly believe we all have it, and that the only thing stopping us from making art or crafts or other artisan products is the expectation that it won’t be any good. First off, good is completely subjective. Second, if you make something that doesn’t look like what someone else made, who says that’s a bad thing? That’s innovation, my friends. That’s free expression. Art is the only way we humans get to create a whole new reality, to express our truths without having to explain them to anyone. To me, art is freedom itself, and it’s the freedom I most prize. Had I not taken a leap some would consider backward, abandoning a seemingly successful life on the west coast and returning to the green, open spaces of the Midwest, it’s a freedom I would not have known exists in me. In California, I began to have an inkling. Here, I have discovered a calling.
Vincent Van Gogh once wrote to his brother, Theo, “…and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?” Full agreement, Vince. It’s more than enough.
Sara Middleton is a correspondent and columnist for Mid-America Publishing and resident artist/owner of Studio Sol Gallery & Creative Space in Eagle Grove, Iowa. Email her at sara.studiosol@gmail.com or find her at http://studiosolllc.com
