Reclaiming Your Creativity - why we give up on art

You don’t have to consider yourself ‘creative’ to feel the loss of your creative connection. We are all innately creative. As Picasso possibly, but definitely should have, said “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up”.

No one warned me about crits (no, not a kind of lice infestation). Up until college art had been my go-to mode of self expression. Art - drawing, painting and making stuff - was something which came from the heart and I believed it would be my life. Problem was, I wasn’t prepared for the cutting approach to critiquing art - aka crits - one could expect at college.

Torn to Shreds

Looking back I realise I definitely needed to shape up my artistic act, yet I was extremely fragile and the approach unnecessarily harsh. Having felt like a fish out of water at school I’d escaped to what I assumed would be the embracing arms of creative life, only to find myself flapping around there too. My biggest problem, it seemed, was my eye for beauty. Beauty was out.

“While I was all absorbed in myths, fairytales and Hitchcock glamour, my art tutors were into lard as a medium and tampons as dresses.”

I didn’t get it. One tutor told me I shouldn’t admire certain artists, advising that I look to his preferred artists instead - art I couldn’t relate to at all. While another took a rather brutal approach to our tutorials tearing work to shreds - sometimes literally.

My Art Was Pointless

Being a creative-type, for want of a better phrase, was pretty much my identity, so when my capabilities and inspirations came into question my already delicate sense of self was crushed.

“I believed that the art I was producing was all style and no substance. In other words: Pointless. It broke my heart. So I stopped making art.”

Cue Helen the wilderness years.

Losing Our Creative Connection

For most of us becoming disconnected from our creative natures might not be so profound or dramatic. The unfettered approach to making stuff, imagining things and asking questions we enjoyed as children often simply gives way to self consciousness and what my mother has long dismissed - with an eye roll - as ‘thinking too much’.

“The thing is, being truly creative requires us to let go of our egos and essentially ‘reclaim’ our childish approach to creativity.”

That means: making the mess, letting our minds wander, and asking what might feel like obvious questions. Which is exactly what I’ve been endeavouring to do for the last few years through my creative sketchbooks, collage work, and exhibitions with my art group SEVEN.

Reclaiming Your Creativity

So, how should you reclaim your creative self? Well, reconnecting with that child inside is a start - to put it more specifically your ‘magical child’ self, as I’ve recently seen it described. Sound corny? Yep, maybe. I can’t tell you how long I resisted woo woo talk of connecting to one’s ‘inner child’, but, ultimately, I’ve come to realise that relinquishing control and letting myself play is powerful.

Powerful because you’re tapping into that part of yourself that bypasses analytical, ‘over thinking’, self censoring you. Powerful because you’re accessing a space, a place, just for you. A place where you can express yourself freely, without judgement. A place where you can meditate, be mindful, relax and reconnect with yourself whenever or wherever you need.

So, what’s stopping you?! Here are few tips for embracing your creative self through art journalling:

• Just begin

• Start small

• Join a friendly art class or online group

• Buy a cheap sketchbook - A5 is great for beginners

• Gather some inexpensive art materials

• Give yourself a theme - Spring, for example

• Ask yourself a question - Like: Where am I now?

• Join an Instagram art challenge and respond to their word-a-day prompts - For example, #februllage for collage enthusiasts

• Set yourself some boundaries - Think: A 20 minute, playing card-sized collage a day OR a double-page spread in my sketchbook per week

• Keep playing

• Stop judging

• Wait and see what emerges

Want to reclaim your creativity? What will your first step be?

Red Shoes - power, magic and stepping up

Once the preserve of the powerful, red shoes captured hearts and minds for centuries. But Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale distilled this obsession into something far more potent. Because red shoes got personal…

There’s a line in the film Chocolat where Juliette Binoche’s frustrated daughter admonishes her:

“Why can’t you wear black shoes like the other mothers?!”

Because, of course, this witchy woman who’s come to town to shake up the strict moral codes with her seductive and ever-so-slightly-magical chocolate shop does it wearing red shoes.

Luck & Power

Red shoes are powerful. In China, for example, red shoes were often considered to be “full of lucky” as Eddie Izzard might say. Which is why in some traditions a bride’s red shoes were tossed from the roof to ensure marital fortune.

But, in the west red shoes have traditionally been the preserve of popes and royalty. As the “online cabinet of curiosities” that is Messy Nessy Chic says:

“The [red] shoes’ origins go back to Byzantine days, when they were donned by Norman kings as symbols of bloody martyrdom. Their successors, the Roman Emperors, stuck with it – in fact, they became a standard high-fashion accessory for aristocrats. If your shoes were red, you were a somebody.”

So, when an ordinary woman - a woman of no public standing - wore red shoes there was trouble.

Overstepping the Mark

In 1845 Hans Christian Andersen came along with his foreboding footwear-focused fairytale The Red Shoes, a story about a girl, plucked from poverty by a rich old lady, who dares to wear red shoes to her confirmation:

“Everyone looked at her feet, and ... it seemed to her that even the old pictures of the funerals, those portraits of vicars and their wives with stiff collars and long black robes, fixed their eyes on her red shoes, and these were all she thought of when the vicar placed his hand on her head and spoke of holy baptism, of the covenant with God and that she was now going to be a grown-up Christian person... but all Karen could think of was her red shoes.”

Of course, it doesn’t turn out well. Karen has overstepped the mark in her beloved red shoes. And, so she is punished. Cursed to dance to her death - always good to know where you stand, eh?!.

Unsurprisingly, this story has inspired many a feminist conversation. Why is Karen’s choice of footwear so troublesome? Pride? Vanity? Excessive aspirations? Sexual explicitness? Well, what many forget is that The Red Shoes actually features not one, but three pairs of red shoes - and not all of them are cursed.

Three Red Shoes

First, there are the handmade red shoes made from scraps of fabric given to the poor, bare-footed Karen by Mother Shoemaker, a village elder. So when Karen’s mother dies what does she wear? Well, the red shoes, naturally. The only pair she owns. 

In contrast, the second pair of red shoes belong to a princess, no less. Now living with the wealthy old lady, Karen has been forced to cast aside her crudely-made red shoes - shoes she believed to be magic due to her stroke of good fortune. Now she’s learning what it means to be good and proper. And yet:

“Nothing in the world, though, could compare with red shoes!”

So, when she spies the third and final pair in the shoemakers, she’s a gonna. A dead ringer for the princess’s pumps, these red shoes were meant for a Count’s daughter. So Karen’s ultimate sin, it seems, is her desire to step above starchy middle class respectability and into the lap of aristocratic luxury - she is literally walking in someone else’s shoes.

What Do You Stand For?

In real life, just as in the story, Andersen’s red shoes have taken on a life of their own. Probably most famously there is the 1948 Powell & Pressburger film about a ballerina (Moira Shearer) torn between love and art.

Then there is Kate Bush’s 1993 album, The Red Shoes, which expands on the film and puts a very Kate Bush spin on things. As Hilary Davidson writes in her paper, Sex & Sin: The Magic of Red Shoes, Bush:

“ [U]ses the red shoe motif to trace a journey through feminine emotional experience, losing and regaining love, passion and a sense of self.”

So, as women have become increasingly emancipated it appears the story of The Red Shoes has evolved with them. No longer simply footwear, the red shoes seem to have become symbolic of our own agency, or lack thereof. As Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes in Women Who Run With The Wolves:

“[W]e may travel life’s path in one of two ways: in hand-made shoes — crafted with love and care according to the unique needs of the individual soul; or in red shoes — initially promising instant fulfillment, but ultimately leading to a hollow, painful, split existence.”

Your Red Shoes

So if, as the Jungian analyst tells us, shoes are symbolic of what you stand for, what do your red shoes represent? Are they red shoes of your own design? Or are you squeezing your feet into someone else’s shoes, and being led a merry dance?