Recently I went out for dinner with my big sister and we started talking about art. I am an arts student and naturally started on the topic of my latest project. I talked more about my class until she interrupted me to pay me a compliment, telling me how she thinks I am creative and that she wished she was as creative as I am. Now, if you have an older sibling you may understand my emotional reaction. I was completely elated. Growing up with three siblings, things tended to get competitive. My older siblings would always congratulate my younger sister and I on our successes, but would make a point to remind us that whatever we could do, they could do better. Now that I’m all grown up (kind of, anyway), hearing my sister pay this compliment brought on an immediate sense of an inflated ego.
Once I got home and finally stopped blushing, I couldn’t help but think of this compliment. I fixated on it, trying to dissect what it truly meant. In art class, I had never felt particularly “creative.” Most of the time, I felt like an imposter; like I did not belong. At the end of the second art class that I had ever taken, my professor emailed me a final critique. This critique was meant to discuss where my art practice is going, where it should be going, and so on. In the email, my professor very nicely suggested I drop out of the fine arts program. I stayed in the program, but this suggestion haunted me the following year. Frankly, the suggestion wasn’t unwarranted either. I had been obsessed with fulfilling the role of a creative individual, which added weight to what it means to be creative and did so with the assumption that I was not inherently creative or capable of natural creativity.
The suggestion from my professor followed me for this past year of my life. The suggestion followed me in every artwork that I created until I got to the point of giving up. I stopped caring about trying to be creative and when I did this, I started making artwork that wasn’t afraid of judgment. I figured that I couldn’t be an artist and so I might as well just make stuff to finish up the semester. I didn’t feel particularly creative while doing it, but looked back and saw that I was practicing creativity rather than being creative.
While my sister’s compliment was said lovingly, it made me upset the more I thought about it because creativity often feels like it’s this blessed essence you were either born with or not, but a professional painter is not automatically more creative than any other person. This artist may happen to use creativity more often than the average, but the creativity is still there for anyone to grab onto. The compliment upset me because it suggested that her creativity was lesser compared to mine.
I am grateful for the compliment my sister gave me, but I wish I could rewind time to tell her that everything she makes is creative.