Not only does everyone have their own style, but everyone's got their own medium, a point that was brought home to me recently by three year old Matthew. Because the pursuit of creative fulfillment has defined most of my life (and underwritten most of my angst), I'm a mom constantly pushing creative activities - and hoping to see a spark emerge. We've gone through weeks and weeks of solid-color painted trucks. I have to draw the truck - bulldozer, scraper, grader, excavator, loader, cherry picker (the list goes on) - and he then paints it into single color oblivion. Fun for him. But I'm not seeing the spark. (He is just three, of course.)
Playing outside recently, however, he picked up a bucket of chalk and while we were milling around in the basement (looking through baskets of yarn, in fact), he sparked. With the concrete patio as his canvas, he'd drawn an entire assembly of trucks of all kinds - from fire trucks to bulldozers, they were all there - and you could tell what they were. There were even drivers inside many of them.
And they were each in different colors!
He proudly was telling me what each one was, and I just wanted to cry I was so excited. It would be nice if his primary medium was something smaller-scale and "indoor"-oriented, but seeing the spark that flared when he was working on his chalk drawings was a mom-moment of magnitude.
Right now, he's sitting next to me playing a Blue's Clues computer game that allows him to create all different kinds of artwork via the game interface. And he's loving it. (This is saying a lot since there are no emergencies, rescue vehicles, tools, or trains in this game!) So, maybe he's just coming into his creative own.
My problem is that I've always been drawn to too many mediums. From yarn to paint to fabric to words to programming, to photography, my energies are always split between various projects.
Who knows what I could do if I could ever settle on just one medium. It'll never happen, of course. I'm just one of the multi-medium crowd.
