PERFECTLY IMPERFECT

Art was a passion for me starting as a young child. My mother made sure to keep the "art closet" stocked with supplies: colorful paints, pens and other various media. It was in my art that I accessed my creativity that helped me escape my oppressive home environment. I had the freedom to do and make anything I wanted free of scrutiny. It truly saved my life in those early years.

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Later in my primary education, I was told by a teacher - "that's not how you draw a flower" - in reference to a piece I made. My response to this edict at the time was to shut down my creativity feeling the bias and judgment that until then I had evaded with my artistic expression.

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It wasn't until years later that I rediscovered my creativity in large part to the credit of my first ceramics teacher at the University of Washington, Patti Warashina.  She saw that I was not interested in the confines of the hand-building "assignment" given to the class, but rather in throwing vessels on the pottery wheel that | then altered into human forms.  Rather than hold me to the expectations of the class assignment, she modified mine to require that I make more of the objects I was making just asking that I make them "twice as big" and to make "twice as many" of them.

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This act of meeting me where I was and encouraging my unique expression of the art subsequently inspired my artistic practice and my instruction of art to others as a teacher's assistant in graduate school. I saw my work as sometimes coaxing out the creativity of others rather imposing a rigid structure re art assignments on them.  In reality, higher education and art are oxymorons as art is not meant to be restricted to assignments or by subjective "grading" by others.

These valuable lessons inspired my gravitation towards the field of psychology. As a therapist, and ultimately a psychologist I had the opportunity and the gift to work with others to assist them in accessing and expressing their unique creative expression of self. Often involving working with them to free themselves of the conditioning, expectation and trauma that impinged on the creative unique expression of who they truly were.

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We live in a culture that largely puts us in boxes and hold us to perfectionistic expectations of how to be, look, think, act, believe and behave all motivated by fear...fear of rejection, fear of not fitting in, fear of judgment the SHAME associated with these fears. To think, or step outside of the lines is unacceptable. We are held to a standard of perfection that is unattainable.