When to Call Yourself an Artist?

Since you could speak, you could call yourself an artist. Maybe you didn’t know how to put it into words then, but once you started to make art you figured it out.

So many people I work with when they first come to me would never call themselves an artist or maybe they would say, I like to make art for fun, but I’m not an artist like you. Yet if you ask any four-year-old who just made art if they were an artist they would tell you proudly, yes! Kids have a natural ownership of their artist-selves.  If you put a bunch of paint and paper in front of a person that age they know exactly what to do with it. It’s a natural instinct that we all have. 

We are all born artists. We are here to create. Humans were making fires and drawing hieroglyphics way before we developed a written language. It's our birthright.

We proudly express our creative nature as small children, and then, as we get introduced to school and immersed more in our culture, we start to believe that artist is a term designated for certain people with some special talent that you either have or you don’t. Then we see that reinforced in our classes and in the world of museums and galleries that arbitrarily assigned importance to one artist over another.

The fact is you are made of Creativity. It’s bursting in you. It just needs to find a way out. The best way to do this is through play. Revisiting that little you that wants to make a mess, and following their lead. Experimenting, observing, and delighting in what happens as your hand moves a brush along a surface. Making things just to make them without any pressure about anyone seeing it when you’re done. When we give ourselves permission to let go and be free with what we make, we have fun and we want to do it again and again. And when we do things repeatedly, we start to learn and build skills. 

Science backs this up. Research shows that play and exploration trigger the growth of new brain cells in the part of the brain responsible for learning and memory. And for adults, a study published in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine found that play reduces stress and promotes wellbeing. In other words, your brain is still wired for this. It never stopped being true, it’s just that we’ve told ourselves we don’t have time for it.

Sitting in front of a canvas to play is a big shift from approaching the making because you want it to look a certain way. It’s about leaving your expectations at the door and diving in to let the process lead you along the way. Once you start making in this way you revisit that little four-year-old you and start to realize that you actually are an artist.

If you want to start reinvigorating your artist-self but don't know where to start, you might want to check out my coaching and workshop offerings. Sometimes it just takes a little nudge in the right direction.

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