Forget the Rules
Sometimes they just hold us back
During my trip back home to Scotland this summer I went rummaging through old art work, work which my wonderful parents allow me to keep in the family attic. I do this sporadically when I go home, revisiting the young creative me, and honestly I’m almost always inspired by her.
Something she would be surprised by.
This year I came across a couple of embroidery works which I did for my sixth year studies. I’ve since gone on to work with embroidery, working with communities in Mexico encouraging rural and isolated women to explore their own creativity, but this time I was blown away by my own. Not blowing my own trumpet or anything.
I’d never done embroidery before, and the fact that I’d never done embroidery before and didn’t actually know any stitches did not bother me in the slightest. I just guessed it wasn’t rocket science. This probably had a lot to do with my wonderful teacher whose idea it was in the first place to try my hand at arty embroidery.
Gordon Wyllie was and is a very well known Scottish artist, he never talked to us about rules. Instead he taught us to explore and to observe, then to observe again. ‘Look more than you draw’ he would say.
Rules are something I started to learn about later in my career and also maybe a bit at college and Art School.
Rules I feel though can act like a creative straight jacket. They awake a voice in our heads or maybe it’s other peoples voices that say ‘oh you can’t do that, I can’t do that because I’ve never done it before, I don’t know how, I can’t call myself that because I haven’t done enough of it etc’, all the while forgetting the most important rule of all, that it’s the idea that’s important.
If you have an idea and a vision you can do it, the technique or medium used is simply a tool, the technique isn’t the art, though it can certainly be mastered and become artful. If you think that you can’t do something you’ll approach the work tentatively and with fear, and that will be what’s reflected, not your vision.
I had honestly never noticed how good these pieces were, especially since I’d never picked up a stitch book in my life, though Mr Wyllle did teach me how to do those french knots, and I just went wild with them. Today I look at these pieces and I think that they could stand their own, even today, in the company of professionals.
Let’s face it if you are creative, confident and inspired the creative world is your oyster, who’s to say what you can and cannot do.
So here’s a shout out to all of my fellow creatives to throw away the rule book, have fun like we did in the beginning and let’s start making our own.
