September 9

We are all artists—some of us are declared, accomplished, and publicly esteemed artists. Others of us are the private kind, making artful homes and artful lives and shying away from the public practice or pursuit of our art. Some of us—officially “not artists” and “without a creative bone in our body”—are artists nonetheless because creativity is in our blood. In our DNA. There is one and only one label that seems useful to me in discussing ourselves. That label is “creative.” I have been teaching for over thirty years. (And making art for longer than that.) I have never, ever encountered a person who was not creative in some form. Most often, people are creative in many forms. It is the excess of creative energy, not the lack of it, that is what makes people feel—and get labeled—“crazy.”