Hello to everyone out there in the Do Art Nation! We hope you’re off to an amazing start to your week, making art and making the world just a little bit more beautiful.
I got to hop on the unicycle with Jerry again last weekend. I’ll be sure to post some more of my attempts soon. It’s nervewracking, of course–I’ve gotten much better since I started unicycling late last year. Jerry’s tips on practice have been incredibly helpful (though it’s become a joke between the two of us that someone with balance will often give advice that sounds like a word salad to someone who doesn’t). We also got to practice some new juggling tricks we’ll be sharing with you all soon.
But why all these shenanigans? Why add juggling, unicycling, and comedy to an art workshop? While we do a good bit of drawing and teaching at an art workshop–talking about elements of narrative as well as visual art–our ultimate goal is less to teach kids how to draw than to show them the power of their imaginations in real time.
There’s no shortage of drawing tutorials out there. I’ve seen lots of them, and benefitted immensely from some of the concepts and ideas they contain. But what keeps people from making art is not a lack of instruction. What keeps them from making art, ultimately, is the belief that what they’ll make won’t live up to their own expectations. That it won’t be as good as what their friend or favorite artist would make.
You can absolutely understand this self-consciousness, in a world where human-made art can attain to such heights of realism, emotional intensity, or apparent naturalness. It’s something every artist struggles with. Artists are certainly not un-selfconscious people! But what allows us to put on our artist hat and create is seeing the process as something fun and worthwhile, rather than just focusing on the result.
So we at Do Art Productions do our best to make the process of making art into something fun, engaging, and collaborative! But more than just doing a few “death-defying” stunts, we want to create a supportive environment where kids and audiences of all ages feel empowered to make something new, to try something different, and show off those ideas where they are comfortable to others.
That space-making, rather than any “art” that I do at the workshops, is the most rewarding part of the Do Art experience for me. Getting to learn all these delightful, WACKY skills is just the icing on the cake. How do you encourage other people to make art? Let us know, and don’t forget to keep creating!
