A portrait in SS metal clay

A portrait in sterling metal clay

Fired and finished metal clay portrait with patina.

Fired and finished Sterling Silver metal clay portrait with patina.

Do the minds of creative people work differently than the minds of others? I know my mind isn’t anything at all like a mathematician’s mind. I knew this at a very young age….it wasn’t that I couldn’t do the math, I just didn’t want to do it. (You may be wondering what this has to do with the interesting woman featured on the cameos. Don’t worry, I’ll eventually get to the connection.)

At age seven I was pretty sure I would never need math, so when the other children were diligently working away at addition and subtraction, I was inventing personalities for all the numbers and using them as characters for my own amusement. I have creative friends that tell me they had similar experiences as children. My friend Kaitlin is a story teller, and instead of figuring out those ridiculous math word problems, she would write elaborate stories explaining where the people on “the train going 25 miles an hour” were traveling and why “the other train was going 100 miles and hour”…. never quite bothering to solve the actual problem.

I still like to make up characters and scenario’s for my own amusement, only now I write them out in a writing circle I attend and people think I’m a jewelry artist/writer (it’s mostly because of the company I keep and not because I have actual writing skills, which is evident in this blog.) One of the women in the group, Anne, often writes stories that she calls “polaroid chronicles.” The way these stories come about is ingenious. While Anne is out and about, she sees a person that catches her eye for one reason or another and she mentally snaps a picture of them. Later she recalls that mental image and makes up a story about them.

That was the inspiration for this cameo. I was at my grand daughter, Dylah’s first birthday party at a park and I noticed this woman pushing her children on the swings. Perhaps some day I will write her story but I really wanted to do was capture her beauty and strength in metal.

So tell me, do the minds of creative people work the same way as other peoples minds? Am I an artist because I have an aptitude for it, or do I have the skills because I’ve completed the Jewelry Arts program at the California Institute of Jewelry Training, done coursework at the Revere Academy, and continue to take jewelry making classes to keep my skills honed? Would I have put in hours of practice to learn and refine those skills if I didn’t have a love of art? After all, art was always my favorite subject from the very beginning, even though I wasn’t very good at it…. I really wasn’t! While other’s in my class were making cool t-rex’s and brontosaurus’ I  made a Pterodactyl that looked like a big, brown X. Fortunately for me my artistic abilities improved and somehow, through the persistence of my teachers, I even managed to pick up some math, English and history through osmosis!

 

Copyright © Mary M. Ehlers, Good Muse Designs 2014. All rights reserved.

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