Stagnate

You would think I was a fount of creativity, wouldn’t you? You would imagine me, an Art Director (in all but title and salary), a person who spends her day dealing with the design and production of vast quantities of direct mails and signage and photography, would ooze creativity. I am sorry to report you would be disappointed. After the bulk of a career known as the office speed demon, every last-minute rush project imagined dropped in my lap with mere hours before deadline – and missing deadlines is on par with taking a Doc Martin to the gut for me and my over-inflated work ethic – I have lost most anything with some semblance to creativity. It has been systematically over-worked out of me.

Once upon a time I was a doodler. I doodled on every relatively still surface I could find – margins and notepads, binder covers and locker doors, napkins, scraps and even the living flesh of both myself and friends. I doodled with purpose, a clearly intended image taking shape. I doodled without thought, fingers working on the backside of a memo while my mind engaged (at least somewhat) in an office meeting. I doodled because somewhere in my cells with all the ribosomes and mitochondria and cytoplasm floated around some tiny molecule hell-bent on spilling whatever thoughts and emotions were trapped inside out into the material world. Now, I will admit I have never been a great artist. My doodles or drawings or whatever else I scratched out on paper are no great works of art. I have never had any formal fine art training, never sat in a classroom sketching apples and vases learning about perspective and proportion. I draw because I love it, I draw because it is a challenge, because it stretches my abilities, somehow lightens my emotional load and relaxes me.

Sadly, that creativity that once soothed me has atrophied, has gone dormant and become nigh inaccessible to me. And, with that, any confidence I have had in myself as a creative person has dried up like slugs on a hot sidewalk. At times, all that remains is an insane and insatiable jealousy of people still able to tap into their creativity, specifically those in my same field. When I see my fellow designer at work drawing in his sketch pad, retracing those drawings in Illustrator, and given the wide berth of time and resources necessary to creating something truly unique – while I, with nothing but a cubicle wall separating us, am mired down in direct mail pieces and e-blasts with two-day turnaround times, unable to take the time to actually CREATE anything, shackled to the creativity-sapping brand standards – well, I toggle between wanting to commit acts of gruesome violence and throwing myself off the Crescent City Connection in some ill-conceived cry for help.

And so, here I am… on a Saturday morning at my favorite coffee house with a sketchpad and a No. 2 pencil… in what is, perhaps, a more logically conceived attempt to take back some small part of what I once was. Harking back to a time with the Martinez Art Guild, I am making a commitment to myself that once a week I will come here – free from deadlines and brand standards and the incessant “creative direction” from those not genuinely qualified to give it, free from expectations and agenda, free from self-doubt and self-deprecation, free from the distractions of the internet and t.v. and cell phone – and I will doodle. I will draw or sketch, sometimes with a clear intent, other times at random while eavesdropping on my neighbors. There simply MUST be something left in me, something I can unearth if I dig long enough and hard enough, if I am as relentless in this pursuit as I am with everything else truly important to me.