My first attempt at art
Contrary to popular belief I am quite a creative person.
However, this does not manifest itself in the same way as it does for conventional creativity. What I assume most people think, as this is what I previously thought, was that to be creative you had to be fantastic at art, writing, music or dramatics. Those who painted, sculpted and wrought masterpieces from paint, pen, clay and iron were the true creatives. Those musicians who trilled, acciaccatura'd and crescendo'd their performances with great flourishes were the true creatives. The dramtists who created imagery through the characters they portrayed and conveyed what could be taken as true and genuine emotion were the true creatives.
To be fair to myself, I have dabbled in the aforementioned arts somewhat. I played a musical instrument throughout the majority of my pre-university life, performed in a few of the projects the high school's drama club wrote (although I wasn't a drama student) and have in the course of my lifetime written to a number of blogs. We'll leave the art category out of this as I peaked at stick figures.
All this being said, I never got very far with any of those creative pursuits. Sure I managed to pass level 1 but when the max level cap for acting is level 99 I wasn't even close. On a scale of 0 to Gary Oldman I fall towards the lower end of the spectrum.
The more I've thought about what it takes to be creative, the more I consider the work I do to be a creative pursuit. Writing code and styling sites, making decisions on workflow and using drupal to carve out successful websites is to some extent a creative process. Draw inspiration from here, imagine up a few additional details here, gain advice from dreams over there and code up a storm from around there.
All that digression aside and coming back to the point of this post, I was recently directed to this tumblr site. To some it may just seem like a few pictures of cartoon things but to me it was 151 artists' impressions of my childhood. I breathed Pokemon for a number of years, buying games, trading cards, having battles, watching the anime and generally talking about it with a number of friends at every opportunity.
- I remember when my Grandfather bought me a booster set of cards and inside, the fabled Charizard shiny.
- I remember when I took that same shiny to school and someone ran off with it only to be chased down by my friend group and I who demanded they give it back.
- I remember playing Pokemon Snap on my Pikachu edition N64.
- I remember defeating Pokemon Red, Blue & Yellow.
The list of Pokemon related memories I have is almost beyond writing and those memories don't even require strain to remember. In all likelihood I could probably still recite, off the top of my head, at least 130 of the first 151 Pokemon.
So when I see some of this art, with knowledge of my own artistic limitations and now that I am no longer an impoverished student I feel it's acceptable to treat myself. Although I've been ridiculed by a couple of close friends for desiring some of these I felt vindicated when revealing my ambitions to other friends who had the same love as me when I was younger.
Although the exhibition has ended and the prints are no longer for sale I've since been in contact with one of the organisers and followed her advice. This lead me to contacting Jane Mai and Erik Krenz who created a couple of the pieces I liked the most. Wish me luck for my first foray into the art world, if all goes to plan I will have things to hang in my study that make me smile when I look up during my own creative escapades.
