On Sunday morning, while having my Latte Protein shake, I will watch a Tested YouTube video of Adam Savage answering questions from the Tested members. Over the past few Sundays, he’s been touching on a subject that kept popping into my thoughts. It’s about what my creative expression is.
I agree with Adam; we all need some form of creative expression to be a well-rounded individual. For the longest time, I have always considered writing as my form of creative expression. In the past few weeks, I have accepted that there are other things I do that satisfy my need to be creative.
Adam Savage sees his work in model making for movies and television props as a form of his creative expression. Then, the other Sunday, he talked about cooking an omelette. His tone of voice and facial features told me that in his mind, the way he created an omelette from broken eggs was a form of creativity.
That caused me to think back to a time when I worked on a team to prototype and put in operation a large industrial cooker for syrup. I worked with a PLC programmer and a couple of engineers. I was tasked with the job of taking this mass of stainless tanks, piping, valves, and electronics into an understandable written process that future operators could understand. When we had the syrup cooking apparatus pushing out product to a production line, they called the manual I created a work of art. At the time, I didn’t understand why they called me an artist.
With my recent move, I’ve been taking some sheetrock and mud and turning it into a respectable-looking wall. It’s not pretty, but it is something I created. It is far better than bare two-by-four studs separating two rooms.
A friend of mine some years back built several very beautiful, high-luxury homes in Georgia. They were his creative expressions. In his later years, he scaled down to epoxy coffee and end tables. As his vision diminished, he still created in the form of beautiful walking sticks.
I’ve written all the above to ask you what is it that you do where you take raw, maybe partially finished material and create something? I would like to read about your creative outlet.
