Go Art Yourself

On November 23, 2014

That’s right. Go art yourself. Even if you do it badly. Even if you make a mess, the lines aren’t straight, the wire kinks, the paints are all dried up. Art yourself once a day to prove imperfections do not diminish the accomplishment of creating art.

This is the purpose of my new YouTube channel, to nourish creation, even when the result is a holy, hot mess.

Though there will be plenty of jewelry time lapse videos, lessons, techniques and tutorials, I’ll also take the opportunity presented by this venue to try new art, and sometimes win and sometimes not, but always create. And I’d like to share these experiments with you, ask you to be a part of the journey and create something as well, even if afterwards we can look at our crochet ski masks and think to ourselves in abject horror “Dear Lord, what have I done!”

And yet we create.

We create because we are full of wonder, each one of us, waiting to burst with the weight of it. We obsess over beauty and sadness, satisfaction and disappointment, which are the bedfellows of all art, whether perceived as good or bad. We wake up in the morning and think about yarn, thread count, crystals and stones or charcoal and paper. We sleep and dream of the same. And sometimes there’s spiders. Ahem.

And yet we create.

And when we are told it’s not art, it’s not good enough, it lacks skill or refinement or purpose or place, tell that person to go art themselves too. Maybe their insides hurt too much from holding in all the feels, from forcing the dam to plug its holes. Maybe they just need to be told its okay to be bad at something and still call it art.

I plan to be bad at many things.

And to start that list, we’ll include making videos, because this is a wicked bad first attempt! I  had to tape my phone to a vase, stand the vase on a box to get the right height, then Houdini my arms around the vase until both hands were in frame. Winning at film on a budget!My lighting was off, my background kept shifting, the focus was inconsistent, my hands left the frame too often, and I ran out of memory, completing the last 20 minutes without recording. Sigh. And then I had to repeat the three hour upload process twice, because the music was (first) blocked from usage in certain countries or (then) just not suitable to my ear drums… I had a vision, I tell you, and the music would be right!

And it was fun. A thousand people could nope right out of that video and it will have still been the most fun thing I’ve done this month. I made a video. I’ve never made a video before, didn’t know how when I started, but did it anyway. Because who ever needs to know how to do something before they do it? Except doctors… because that’s important.

In the coming months, I hope to improve not only my videography skills, but to learn new crafts as well. Because can you ever have enough knitted socks? Of course not! And I’ll need your help realizing this YouTube dream of mine. In the comments below, or on any video I post, offer suggestions of crafts you would like to see in the future. And whether I’ve had any experience with them or not, I’ll give it my best. Sculpting, oil painting, knitting, cake decorating, throw it out there and I’m game to try it. And if you try a new project, feel free to share it with me. The world should see all art, even if we think we’ve failed miserably, because it still embodies within it the emotional residue of our time creating it.

That’s gotta be worth something, right?

Nicole