About Playing

 

Featured image: Playground

My art has always been about “playing.” I can remember that I was always making little play corners all over the house. Finally, after a while, I found areas where my mom couldn’t find them and clean them up—corners under the rafters, hidden behind clothes in the closets—but they were always special places where I could play and imagine.

My house is no different as a grown-up—it is filled with places that can turn into art-making areas in a jiffy so I can be with family all the time, or rather, so family can be with me. My studio is wherever I am; I just carry my supplies on a cart, like when I had art on a cart when I was first an art teacher.

I would unload my supplies from the trunk of my car after loading them into the truck for the week from the central supply house for the school district, then unload them again and go into a school to be the traveling art teacher for that day—no fancy room for art teachers back then.

Anyway—you carry your art with you always—and your art spirit is always playing and getting messy. My training in art frequently found me at the kitchen table, working on some process, trying to figure out how to make something so I could teach it the following week—simple enough for first graders and complex enough for high schoolers.

I was like a child at play, figuring things out without props or models, but through fantasy alone—playing with paper, paste, and scissors, not some fancy electronic thing that didn’t require any playing at all, let alone imagination. I played without plastic playthings—just creativity.

This kind of playing generates reality. This kind of playing is at the heart of social and mental health and is an essential, basic form of living. Playing is universal. Playing transforms the humdrum into the marvelous. Playing transforms. Playing is magical.

Never forget to play.
Never forget the magic.
Never forget the pure pleasure that playing in a sandbox brings.
Never forget the magic of a blue drop of dye in a clear glass of water.

Never forget to play.
Never forget about art.
Never forget to imagine.