My Art Endeavours
In 2012, the year I chose my GCSE options, I was asked to choose between two of my favourite subjects, Music and Art. For someone who has always had anxiety, and found decision making difficult, this was an impossible task. The only reason I was able to reach an answer is because I was told that as I would be taking these a year early (don’t ask, I’ve never really understood why) that Art would be an option for me in year 11, but Music would not be. As it turns out this was false for a number of reasons:
1.) Art was not an option for me in year 11. I ended up doing a Drama VCERT that had been handed in wrong and so actually counted for nothing and
2.) Having only had Music BTEC available to me prior to year 11, I actually was able to take Music as a GCSE that year, and I will forever be grateful to my wonderful music teachers, who gave up their weekends, to try and cram a whole GCSE’s worth of knowledge into me in a year (they succeeded by the way).
But this is hindsight, of course, so with this information I chose Music. I then, grieved the loss of a formal art education, but never let it deter me from formulating my own curriculum. So I art, and because I love arting, I art in a lot of ways.
It took me a while to realise that my creative spirit did not appear out of the blue. It was only by comparison, to my friends and their left-brained families, that I realised that my creativity is the culmination of my family’s love for crafting, and creating things out of nothing, just heavily amplified. Both of my nan’s are crafty. My father’s mum carried a sketchbook with her whenever she went away, painted our bedroom walls with great murals, crafted paper dolls and play-doh from scratch for us to play with. My mother’s mum, hems our trousers, delicately paints intricate clay creations and patiently hand-stitches cards for us, on every occasion a card can be sent. My mum decorates our house with a keen-eye, exploring texture, patterns and colour combinations across our walls and ceilings.She creates fantastical ideas to shock trick o’ treaters on halloween, and carefully picks and arranges flowers beautifully on beds of oasis, for lost loved ones. I come from a line of creative women and their various artistic endeavours. Everyday I yearn to venture on my own artistic endeavours, to look back on my all my crafts and remember the joy.
I’m glad, in a lot of ways, that I wasn’t able to learn to create art formally. I know that many will say, you have to know the rules to break them, but I love that I can create without the fear that I’m doing something wrong, because I haven’t been taught the ‘right’ way to do it.
So, here are some of my crafts!
