Surprisingly, this week’s Single Frame Stories prompt, “Creativity”, pretty much stumped me. I’m not an artist. I take photographs and play around with processing them, but I am hopeless at creating anything from scratch. I have my own style, but it’s nothing ground-breaking or heart-stopping. It’s just what I do. It fills my time and it helps me relax. I just get in a zone and don’t see anything else. My senses are heightened, and they are fixed on what I am doing – trying to create my interpretation of the scene I have captured. Results may vary.
I was going to wimp out and skip this prompt. But then, ironically, I stumbled across this quote:
The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
~ Sylvia Plath
So…feeling chastised by a dead poet, I intended to go into Second Life today and travel the grid, trying to find something that could tell the story of Creativity in a single shot. I was actually anxious about it, wondering what I could possibly come up with.
And then, I remembered a photo I had taken at Runestone, but hadn’t used in my original post. This painter’s easel has been at Runestone for as long as I have been going there. And it’s one of my favourite spots. I can never walk past it without grabbing a palette and putting brush to canvas, pretending to recreate the scene of the house across the water, playing at being an artist. When I opened the photo, I knew I could show in one shot how I feel when I am working to finish a picture: focused on the object, with everything else around me a blur.
I hope I succeeded.
If you want to participate in Single Frame Stories, you don’t have to be a blogger. All you need to do is upload your interpretation of Creativity, in a single photo, to the Single Frame Stories Flickr group. You can open a free account there, if you don’t already have one, and participate in this remarkable project. The deadline this week is Friday, so there is time to display the work at the Single Frame Stories SL10B installation. Go ahead…give it a shot. You may find yourself in the zone, too, once you’ve overcome your hesitation to share your creativity.
Pics by Peep 
Photography is an art of its own and what you do creatively with yours as I have said in the past makes you a creative artist. Your outlook and the method of getting to the end result don’t matter as much as the passion and drive you put into a work. Not all artist work with paint, ink, clay or steel. The biggest part of being an artist is seeing what others can’t see then finding away to show others what you see in a medium that you feel comfortable with to achieve this communication. And the more I watch you explore you medium the more I am convinced you are an artist.
As I mentioned on Facebook, I do appreciate your unflagging support. I hope that I never lose the drive to improve. Whether or not I ever consider myself an artist remains to be seen, but I can’t imagine losing my love for what I do 🙂
It’s funny that (the awesome) Sylvia Plath calls DOUBT an enemy of creativity. I think confidence can lead to repetitive work. It is the agonizing scalpel of doubt that compels us to keep trying, to keep exploring, to keep experimenting.
The way I interpret this quote is more about self-doubt preventing us from attempting to create. But I agree that confidence – or complacency – is what leads to stagnation.
And I agree totally that she was awesome. It’s such a shame that the pain that made her such a fabulous poet is what ultimately led to her death 😦
Oh now.. this is really way cool Peep! Love and yet jealous at the same time…. *ponders*
pfft. nothing to be jealous about. Just gimme the love! 😀
kiss kiss kissssss and lots of love, erm or would you rather have a chicken and waffle Lays? *brushes crumbs off chin* Happy weekend! ❤
lol I’ll take a pass on the Lays 😉 Hugs and have a wonderful weekend, lil Cao ♥
❤ you too!