Episode 4: The Value of Creative Community

9/10/21
The Growing Creative Podcast
S1E4: The Value of Creative Community

In today's episode, Jane dives into the importance of have community as you dig into creativity - for encouragement, accountability, & inspiration!

Resource Links:

  -  "Blessing for a Creative Community" by Jane Boutwell

  -  "The View from the Studio Door" by Ted Orland

  -  "Forty Days of Practice" by Justin McRoberts with Artwork by Scott Erickson

  -  "Walking on Water" by Madeline L'Engle

Jane Boutwell is an artist & creative coach based in Atlanta, Georgia. She loves to nurture and empower others to pursue their creative callings.

"I am an artist with an inquisitive mind, a heart connected to nature and a soul yearning towards God…a child of dirt and dance…a beauty bringing blessing writer… a poetic painter and potter.

Starting with mud pies as a child in the backyard, my creativity includes tactile, intuitive, and deeply-in-touch-with-nature ways of being in the world. I see myself as an apprentice in God’s art studio of the natural world that is full of metaphor, imprinted with the character of the Maker.

It is my passion to share the shimmering beauty and deep truths I find in the creative medium that seems most fitting. Those creative expressions include gardening, quilting, writing, painting, sketching, ceramics, dancing, creative coaching, podcasting, and family life with my husband and four children in Tucker/Atlanta, Georgia."

Join the email list to learn more about special offerings : https://www.janeboutwellstudio.com/contact
Free Sketchbooking resource here: https://view.flodesk.com/pages/5f7b3597322e6ae12d5c774e

Follow @janeboutwellstudio on IG for more.

Transcript

You're listening to the growing creative podcast. And I'm your host Jane Boutwell, I'm an artist and a creative coach. This is a space that will nurture your heart and empower you to pursue your creative calling, whatever that may be. I'd like to share with you today. A blessing that came to me just lately as the creative community that I lead called the growing creative fellowship celebrated its one year anniversary.

I say it came to me because it was one of those works of creating where it honestly just comes out of a place of need and straight from the heart without feeling like you've put a lot of work into it. I find that often it is having a need to express something for someone else that work comes out the most easily and the most feeling like you're just a conduit for the work and it's not,

you drumming it up on your own. So this blessing is really special to me because I feel like it was given to me for my own heart and for the hearts of those that I've been walking with for the past year. And I want to share it with you today and also share some thoughts about creating within a community and how vital that is. But first,

I'm going to start with this blessing. May you listen when the spirit Kendals your imagination? When the creative spirit that set the whole universe into being plants, a small seed in your heart, you who are imaged in his likeness, may you tend it well, may you treat that seed of an idea with tenderness and compassion? May you have the courage to plant it in your heart and let it grow?

When fear threatens drought, when the weeds of busy-ness choke, it may let the spirit fan, the flame of that idea may be fateful to let it grow and bloom with the beauty that can reflect your maker's heart into this world. May you hold hands with one another in comradery, looking into each other's eyes with honesty and with the compassion you want to show yourself as well.

When inspiration seems buried under the dark earth, like seed, may your heart tell you stories of the stars swirling above. May you look up and find the wonder and worship that reignites, that spark when your head echoes with voices that demean and harshly criticize may recognize them as allies of the enemy, may your war, your heart become an bold ind to wield your weapons of courageous.

Creativity may look from side to side and see you do not fight this battle alone. The God of angel armies chooses us as his hands and empowers us with his spirit. His is the battle. We turn our focus to him and close our ears to the enemy, play in his presence with the gifts he has given us in this world of wonder he has made and shine his light of love through your eyes.

I just feel like so much of the creative journey is something that happens alone. And as this prayer kind of hints, that it can be a battle and it can be a struggle. The voices in our head that discourage us bring about insecurity. It's something that's hard to keep going alone. I read after college, a book called the view from the studio door,

how artists find their way in an uncertain world. I read it because it was written by Ted Orland, who was the co-author of the classic art and fear that we had read while we were in a college class. He co-wrote art and fear with David bales, highly recommended. If you have not come across it before. One of the things that struck me the most,

the lesson I took away from this book was the importance of finding community. He says, somewhere in the middle of the book, he says after graduation, you alone have to provide the support system that school had provided for you. Up to that point, it's hard to overemphasize the fact that the most difficult part of art making is not the making a living part.

It's the staying alive as an artist part, without a support system, you not only lose a precious connection with your fellow art makers, you lose access to all those school experiences that have no natural counterparts in the outside world. And he goes on to talk about getting feedback for your work, et cetera. But before I go into that, I just want to say that this is not something that is just for what you would consider,

find studio artists that are going to be in galleries. That's one of the things that I am kind of passionate about as unlocking and opening up our view of what art is and, and seeing that we all have the capacity to be creative in different ways. And the struggle that artists have is, is a struggle that everybody has when they are trying to live their fullest,

most creative selves, and that creativity can come out in different ways for all of us having a way to be in community is something so vital. I think back I was actually looking through photos, searching for something for a project I'm working on. And I came across an album with photos and it said, quilting, bee ranch. And I was like,

well, lunch, what on earth is that? Did I misspell it? How did I make up a word like that? Could it have been ranch, quilting, bee ranch. What, what was in the night remembered? Ah, yes. I spent years meeting together with friends who probably never would have considered themselves artists at the time that we would get together.

At first, we called them craft or Nunes. We would put our children down and pack and plays in the bedrooms at one person's house. And maybe if one child wasn't ready to nap, maybe they were three or four. I think that's how old our oldest ones were. We'd let them watch a movie. And we would go down in the basement or whatever,

extra room and we would sew. And those crafternoons were a highlight. And I think what it was for me, especially was finding a community of people, making things, you know, we don't need this high view of art, that it has to be communicating something vital and edgy and different than anything else. In fact, I'm going to do a whole episode about that later,

but just being around other people, creating things with their hands, from their hearts at the time, it was either baby slings or baby clothes. And then it grew into quilt making. And that quilting bee wrench was an invitation to a couple of friends to come over. I had all the pieces cut out for a giant queen size quilt, and I wanted their help laying the pieces out and deciding how to get them in the right order.

And instead of brunch, it was kind of a mix between having brunch and a quilting bee. So there you get quilting bee wrench and it was, it fed my soul. It was so, so vital to my life as a maker, that time to have a community of people that could remind me of things. I forgot like stand back and squint your eyes say,

can see how the darkness and lightness of different values is spread throughout the quilt. I learned that before, but I forgot that's not my strength. And that's one thing that's beautiful about community is that we all have different strengths that we bring to the table. There's a beautiful word, prayer by Justin McRoberts, he and Scott, the painter, you should look him up if you haven't.

He does these very, I mean, they're so simple, but so dynamic and powerful Scott, the painter does the visuals and they're coming out with a book 40 days, prayer book. So Justin McRoberts wrote these words to this prayer that just really struck me the other day. He said, may my limitations be doorways to partnership and relationship rather than reasons to feel shame and be isolated?

I think so often we fall for the lie that our limitations, whether it's, we don't feel as creative as somebody else or our house is messy or we're scattered and our kids are a mess. There are all kinds of limitations we might have that we think should stop us from spending time in relationship and community with other people. But really each of the areas that we're weak in is an invitation for us to come into community with somebody else who has that strength to come into partnership.

As the words of the prayer that I wrote says, you can hold hands and comradery and look into each other's eyes and see you each have weaknesses that the other might have strengths in, but there are still love and respect. There there's compassion for the parts that are hard. There's a willingness to remind each other to keep going what you're doing matters. Another thing that I think is so vital that you get when you're in creative community with other people,

with the focus of being creative together is the opportunity to let your art or your handiworks speak. I am a big fan of Madeline Lingle. Her book, walking on water is just a life book for me. In fact, I made a handmade book where I wrote down my favorite quotes from the book. So I can flip to them and find them quickly.

And this one takes up almost the whole page in size because I think it's so important. She says art is a communication. And if there is no communication, it is as though the work had been stillborn. I think this is so, so powerful. It can feel so insecure to put our work out in display for other people to see there's a lot more ways to do that now than there was,

you know, 20 years ago, even five years ago, there's teen billion, different social media apps where you can post what you're working on up there and wait, anxiously wondering, will someone give it a like, or a comment it's like taking the skin off your heart. It's so vulnerable. But when we have a community of people with us in our art making and our crafting and our creating,

we have kind of that first layer of people, we can do the vulnerable work of holding out what we've done and see what our art communicates to somebody else and hear from them. And sometimes somebody might not get it, but you have the opportunity to explain. And in the explaining, you realize that even if not everybody gets it, this does matter.

Putting words to it, talking about it in that group, strengthens your understanding of what the work means and builds more confidence in you to share it to a broader audience. And it's not just trying to gain followers and attention. It's letting the artwork do what it was made to do. Art is a communication I've had the honor to be a part of a mentorship group for this year with a dozen other women,

all creating different mediums, some photographers, documentarian, videographers, writers, artists, painters, different mediums, all different things, but gathering together mostly through Marco polo group and cheering each other on being there for the hard times, encouraging each other. When we want to just quit, we've all talked about how it's felt like we each have our own mountain to climb.

We're climbing Everest, and we have to do that work alone, but we get to come back to the base camp and share stories and encourage each other. Show the blisters on our feet and look in the eyes of somebody else that can not and say, yeah, me too, we're not made to do this alone. A lot of the creative process is lonely work where you have to have peace and quiet to let what's in.

You come out space to do the actual, creating the building, the typing of the words, whatever the medium is, it takes time alone to do it, but we're not made to be doing it in isolation. So I just hope that these words today can remind you of how vital it is to find a group of people that can be a part of your journey with you,

be your base camp cheerleaders for you climbing the mountain of your craft, finding your way. I wanted to read you one more quote from this book, the view through the street from the studio door by Ted Orland, he says, implicit in this view is the sense that artists need to satisfy a whole list of things to find themselves artistically speaking high on that list is an environment that allows whatever you have at your core to come to the surface in ways that can be expressed and heard and understood over the long run,

finding an outlet for showing your work is nowhere near as difficult as finding an environment conducive to making your work. If you're like most of us and most of us are, then you need others. Acknowledging your place in the artistic community may be an essential part of your artistic development. It has been for me as well as for most, every other artist I've known over the years.

I hope that even if it's just inviting a friend over to tea and work on whatever it is that you enjoy to make, whether it's quilting doing coloring books, journaling, just having a moment to gather together with another person and probably for a lot of us that might work best online these days, it's been really amazing to have the gift of this year.

It's been crazy. It's been hard, it's been sad, but one of the neat things to come out of it has been for me, the opportunity to connect with people all over the world. Now that zoom and a Marco polo FaceTime all of these ways to connect digitally have become so much more accessible and easily a part of our lives. And just the way to connect,

being a part of online courses and groups of people following the same journey of growth and learning and connecting with them and having conversations has been just something I simply couldn't have done without. I couldn't have continued doing my work, showing up to the process, getting through the hard phases where things feel like they're not moving forward. And what's the point. Anyway,

being able to look into people's eyes and find encouragement there and companionship, I hope that you will value that, see the importance of it, seek it out, create it and take it as it comes different seasons look different for some of us. It might just be popping a movie on for the kids, putting a few babies down in a pack and play and having a Crafternoon.

But I'm sure that it will feed your soul as it has mine until next time, may your warrior heart become emboldened to wield your weapons of courageous creativity and clay in his presence with the gifts he has given you. And this world of wonder he's made and shine. The light of love through your eyes and end to the eyes of your friends and creative companions.

Let your limitations be doorways interrelationship instead of isolation. Thank you for listening to the growing creative podcast. I'd like to thank shepherd Martin for audio editing, and then music is provided by sad. Moses. Don't forget to check out the show notes for transcripts and links to sources mentioned in the show today. If you want to stay connected, be sure to subscribe to the podcast.

So you don't miss an episode. If you go to the growing creative podcast.com and sign up for my studio newsletter, that will keep you in the loop. We'll be opening the doors to the growing creative fellowship September 9th, through 21st love sending our members, tutorials, sharing monthly zoom group gatherings, as well as a monthly co-working session. We even send quarterly curated,

creatively enhancing crates to cultivate your imagination. Ooh, that's a mouthful. If you need something to nurture your heart and empower you to pursue your creative calling, I hope you'll join us in the membership. If you enjoyed today's show, it means the world to me, if leave a review and let me know what part peaked your curiosity or touched your heart.

And I'd love it. If you'd share the podcast with a friend that you know, might need an encouraging message today until next time, keep growing creative.