Art can be a medium for helping us explore our thoughts and ideas as we make our way through midlife. Also, as we become more appreciative of the world we inhabit, we become better at noticing things around us. As a result we become better at capturing what we see on paper, even if our results are never destined to hang in a gallery!
As with all arts, many people had bad experiences in art classes at school and have believed they aren’t creative. Don’t worry, the ideas on this site don’t require you to be able to draw a shadow, create perspective or blend colors from opposite sides of the color wheel!
The ideas offer ways to tap into your talents and unfulfilled desires. The projects require you only to tear and cut things out of magazines, arrange them in a way that appeals to you, and to occasionally to color in blocks of text. Now that doesn’t sound so difficult, does it?
The bottom line is that you are creating these items for your own enrichment and pleasure. There is no requirement that you share your work or have it critiqued. I suggest that you carefully pick who you share your finished work with if you have lingering feelings of doubt about your skills!
Creating these projects is about rediscovering yourself, and letting the lost pleasures from your earlier life back up into your life. It is also about thinking what you want to get from the rest of your life, and using images to visualize where you want your life to go. In addition to common sense and intuition that probably tell you this, there has been research carried out that found that if you know what you are looking for you’re more likely to find it.
Sometimes we also want guidance, reassurance that our gut feeling is what we should go with. Art of the sort I’ve described can help provide items that can offer this support. they can also simply provided us with objects we have created that we like to look at.
However you feel about art, approach these creative projects with an open mind and see what you find for yourself.
