The other day, I recieved an email from a designer friend who was puppy sitting. The puppy kept stealing soft things out of her workbasket (she is a quilter / textile designer). She was trying to finish a deadline for Totally Creative and found herself spending more time chasing the puppy than working on her deadline. This made me laugh, picturing the little guy trying to get her to play with him, and it reminded me of our 98 pound creative helper -  Murphy.

Murphy is a Golden Retriever. His parents were top notch confirmation champions (they were pretty).  The day we went to pick a puppy from the liter, he kept trying to steal the beaded bracelet off my arm. I told my husband that he has a good "eye" , so we needed to have this particular puppy.

We brought him home and tried to create an obedience champion from a beauty contestant. Notice the action work is "tried", not succeeded. After nine rounds of training - and he did very well at several of them, the single best performance -besides the standing still and "smling at his audience- remains his ability to "go get it" or retrieval portion.

Murphy has two favorite stashes of retrieval items. One, from a member of our household who is a print addict -  prints everything he sees on the computer screen- from email to news articles -  and the other, my studio work table. He has to work really hard to get things off the studio work table. He excels at standing on his hind legs. We think he thinks he is actually human. He will then grab whatever is on top of the table and parade it around the rest of the house until someone says 'OH Murphy." "Give me that", "What the $%^&?" or "thank you".

What I wonder is what is going on in his Dog Brain?

He is obviously selective in his choice of 'toys'. He picks up stinky teenage boy shirts and immediately drops them; no doubt that has something to do with the odor. He picks up stuffed animals from the bedroom of her royal highness (princess girl) and promptly runs down stairs leaving them at the feet of the nearest human announcing "hey, look what I killed"; and he takes the waded papers from print man's trash basket every single night, right after dinner. But why?

My DH says its in his blood; he is supposed to do it, it is like his job. I think he does it for attention - he wants to play or he wants to be petted, but mostly, he wants to be recognized good or bad. This is really warped, but  somehow, in the very same vein, is the thinking that rationalizes my designer brain. Murphy and I think alike.

I love to create things, but when I view it in retrospect, I think  the root of all the creating is the attention. It may be in my blood (see previous notes on Creative Genetics), but really and truly like an outfit you buy at the store, the finished results are what make you feel good and the comments (or money) that you might recieve - just as Murphy is often told "thank you" for retrieving- make you want to do it over an over. I am after all, addicted to money.

In college,  I learned that this is called positive reinforcement. Once you develop a behavior that invites positive results- kibbles, comments or congratulations - you tend to repeat it over and over.  Addiction is  much the same way. You do it, you feel good about doing it or it makes you feel good, and you do it again, and again and again.

Whatever the reason, I hope you find time for creativity today.

AOK

Hey, if there are fidelty genes, then there have to be creativity genes - and they must skip an entire generation...

What is really hard for me to remember is that not everyone is blessed with creativity. My mom for instance. She just can not be bothered with anything that isn't perfect, so trying to venture out on her own to 'create' something totally original is like me preparing dinner - it is just not going to happen.

Fortunately, you can pay other people to do it for you, to  make nice things for you,  I mean. I skip dinner alot.

It isn't that she doesn't want to be creative, it is just not in her genetic make up. It 's wierd  because when my grandmother was around, my mom was like a piece of cheese in a sandwich with artisan bread. Grandma and I would knit  Norewegian mittens and sew Barbie Clothes, while my mother was busy planning dinner. I thought it was just because she was my grandma that she did these things with me, but later, when she was unable to do them, I figured out it was in her blood. She HAD to do something creative, all the time.

One time,  my mom wanted 'sea glass earrings". She had collected the sea glass from Old Orchard Beach, in southern Maine. packed it up and brought it to my house in North Carolina and she even asked to go to the craft store to get the rest of the materials we needed. She clearly had  premeditated the entire thing, and I was able to predict what was coming next - almost to the second.

Not one minute after we sat in my studio to begin the actual project did she stand up and say - well I will just leave you to your work. She wasn't being mean, she was finished - it had already taken too much from her and she was afraid of  not meeting her own expectations.So I drilled, and I sanded and I adhered and viola - sea glass earrings.

When you are highly creative, it is really hard to understand those that are not . It is an entire mind set. It isn't about the creativity per se, when you think of yourself as Not-Creative;  rather  it is about the lack of RESULTS. Creativity, for some, is an action verb like laundry, or housework; not an open ended adjective to describe how your mind is working. For those people, even coaxing it out will not work. They don't have it - really.

If it isn't fun, and it doesn't come naturally, and practicing something to improve your skill sets makes you freak, then creativity is probably missing from your system. In the same way my starter husband was not wired with the fidelity gene, some peophle are just not creative and can not be drawn into it becuase for them, it is a chore.

Kits, as some believe, are not about cheating the "creativity" inside of you - you might not have the time, the strength, the space, the money or the desire to have a pile of 'stuff' to build from; they are about  convenience, building confidence and achieving some measurable quantity of results that is meaningful to you. They enforce success and you feel good. When you feel good, you do it again and again ... whicth is the hole point of a hobby ... right?