تفسیر درس

##Art Programs – Commentary Lesson

Hi, this is Kristin. Welcome back to the commentary for the conversation Art Programs. It’s interesting that this conversation came up that I’m doing the commentary for this right now because it was just yesterday I was speaking to someone about creativity and bringing more creativity into my life.

And I was talking to her about how I’ve always thought of creativity as being something like drawing, y’know, drawing things or painting things or, like my father does, making things out of…making sculptures, y’know, statutes, making something out of clay, for example, like an animal. Basically, creating something, making something, that’s what I’ve always thought is more about…is what creativity is about, is an art form where you’re making something.

But actually it doesn’t have to be. There was about, well I finished it a couple of years ago, but there was several years ago when I was really feeling like I needed some creative, some creative outlet, a way to express myself. And so I found a drawing and painting class which was actually drawing and painting a Tibetan thangka.

My teacher is from Tibet and he learned how to do this in, growing up in, actually he left, his family left Tibet when he was young. He grew up in India and went into a monastery at an early age, a Buddhist monastery, and learned how to draw and paint Tibetan thangkas. So a thangka is a drawing and painting of a spiritual figure, like a god or goddess, in Tibetan Buddhism.

And so I found this class and I started taking it and I was really enjoying the drawing part. I loved the drawing. And I had chosen the deity, or the god that I wanted to draw and started working on him and had a wonderful experience. But then once I got to painting him, I found it very difficult. I found it very, it was very detail oriented and I just felt overwhelmed and thought it was really, really difficult to do and ended up having my teacher help me finish it. And I actually have it here.

But that whole process took me at least four years. Four years of mostly working on it only one day a week for a couple of hours. I didn’t really work on it at home. And there were times, too, when I would be out of the country and wouldn’t be able to go to class. So that was at least a four-year process. And what a wonderful…it was a very creative process for me and it was wonderful, too, because I became friends with my teacher and his wife as well as two of the other people who were in my class.

So I was talking to this woman yesterday, as I mentioned at the beginning of this commentary, about how I took that class and I don’t know that I would really want to do something like that again. Y’know, the painting part was so overwhelming for me. I was also telling her that to be given a blank piece of paper, blank meaning there’s nothing on it, just a white piece of paper, or white whatever to draw or paint on, I’ve always found a little overwhelming to come up with an idea to bring forth to put on that paper or whatever it is that you’re drawing or painting on. It’s a little overwhelming for me.

And I was talking to her and telling her how I’d always thought that creativity was more about making something, as I mentioned earlier. And she was telling me, no, basically creativity is about expressing yourself and it can be done in so many ways. Yes, it can be done by drawing or painting or like my dad likes to make sculptures from clay and wood. Or it could be just from singing or even from dancing or it could be from arranging flowers. Cooking can be creative.

There’s so many other ways to express yourself creatively. And when she was talking to me about this, it really made me realize, wow, okay, well, I love to dance. That’s something I should do more of then. In fact, Joe and I both like to dance. We both love to go listen to live music and dance together. It’s a fun way to express ourselves through the music and it’s…it’s very, it’s like we’re playing. It’s a time to play and just have fun and not be so serious.

So that’s something I would like to start doing more of is dancing. I don’t do it enough. What about you? What creative outlets, what creative things do you do to have fun and to express yourself? It’s important to have something, otherwise, y’know, these expressions they get locked inside of us. It’s nice to let them out. And it inspires us, too, to…it inspires…whatever. You might be thinking through, y’know, your dreams, your plans. It can be very inspiring to allow that to come out in some creative way. So share with us on the Ning site what creative things you like to do.

Okay, that’s it for this commentary. I’ll see you next time. Have a good month.