Dear friend, as you can see in the picture above I am so excited about writing this post today :) And the reason is: your participation in my yesterday's post about the Flower Girl drawing.
I would like to start saying that I have an invisible little box full of treasures. And those treasures are important lessons that I have learned over the years from teachers and other great people. Yesterday's post had to do with one of the lessons in my little box and I would like to share it with you today:
When I was still a very green artist (student) I was lucky enough to attend an art school run by someone great: Ramiro. He was a revolutionary teacher and the things that he did as an art educator were remarkable.
I have heard that art cannot be taught, maybe that's right and maybe that's wrong. But what I am sure about is that, as creative people, we can exercise our imagination, we can push our mind a little bit further and make it work often so it becomes stronger. Like a muscle, the mind of a creative person needs constant stimulation and Ramiro understood that so well.
One of the things that he did that I consider remarkable was this: He created a program for us to exercise our creative minds. He organized small teams of students and over the school year each team had to put together an art show in the lobby of the school. The team had to work closely to make of the show a success. Each student had to create a few pieces individually and then talk (or write) about them when the group show was up and running. At the same time you were expected to talk about other student's pieces as well.
As you can imagine that was a lot of pressure for a crowd of teenagers that were still very insecure about exposing/sharing their own ideas. But as the shows and the debates started coming out a great thing happened: Suddenly we were all excited about these shows, we couldn't wait to see what people were going to come out with, every student's creativity was on fire and I remember this period as one of the most amazing ones in my creative life.
While reading your interpretations of the drawing yesterday I felt the same excitement that I experimented in the team that I was lucky to be part of so many years ago. There is something so unique and inspiring about expressing/sharing our ideas with other people. Each one of your interpretations was just great and each one was colored with your own unique personality. That's the beauty of every person's point of view, there is never right or wrong when it comes to our imagination, the most important thing is the imagination itself and the fact that we can practice it as much as we want. By doing so we develop our creativity even more.
There are two things that I miss so much: being a student and being a teacher. I have been thinking a lot about how to bring these two elements together into this blog so that you and I can learn from each other and teach each other at the same time . I have to say that through your interpretations of the Flower Girl drawing I learned amazing things that I was not even aware of and you also brought lots of smiles to my face. Your ideas went way beyond my imagination and to me that's an amazing gift and lesson. I want to thank you so much for your generosity.
I invite you to keep these interpretation games alive in this blog as a way to stimulate our imagination and as a way to connect with each other through one of the most rewarding things ever: art :)
Let's do it!
We make such a wonderful team!
Long life to our amazing creative team!!!!!!
Elsita :)
(If you would like to read my ideas about the Flower Girl drawing I invite you to take a look at the comments in the previous post)
