Making as Meaning

Meeting Ourselves Through Creativity & Expression

Creativity is often the first place we meet ourselves without distortion.

Where one person loses time, absorbed by the gravity of their own concentration, another is physically overcome with frustration and rage. They could swap projects and have their moods pivot entirely.

A person’s form of expression becomes a kind of diagnostic tool, revealing not just passions but values, anxieties, and fears.

One painter may broad-brush a rapid interpretation of a scene, colours and shapes unrecognised in the source. Another painstakingly steadies themselves to pursue the intricacies of accuracy, coaxing detail from a few careful bristles.

Two remarkable talents in the same medium, each style revealing an opposing character of mind.

Their output orients their direction, their personality, in a way a conversation never could.

Hindsight tells us what they were reaching for and who was holding the brush.

I’ve been dabbling with oils lately, and it has reiterated something of my own character back to me.

I had never used oils before. It seemed a messy business, with the heady smell of turpentine and the inevitable smears of colour spreading across every conceivable surface. That felt like a game for the less fastidious.

When I was dragged to a class for something to do, the teacher was not instructing in the traditional sense but acting as the observed, someone to quietly mimic. So my first experience began. The adult had not deviated from the child. I sat watching and painting in silence within the hum of wittering excitement.

When the teacher took a break to peruse his students’ efforts, he paused behind me and asked, “Have you done this before?”

The compliment made the already uncomfortably cosy room shuffle their chairs to take a peek.

The chameleon strikes again, and I was met with a barrage of uncomfortable comments. What they saw as skill, I saw as process. And they always say: trust the process.

My life has felt like a series of processes others describe as talent. As a consequence I have felt both fortunate and fraudulent. People spend years honing skills, and I arrive appearing to bypass the appropriate level of growing pains.

For years I felt I was hurting feelings with apparent ability, until I realised autism was at play.

An observing mind dissecting the world and its methods into a paint-by-numbers way of living.

I was jealous of real talent, those whose souls leak onto life’s canvas as if possessed.

As a child I repeatedly upset my siblings’ hobbies simply by having a go, only to be paraded as if I had a gift, crushing the child who had actually taken the classes and done the work.

The truth was always there: I didn’t have the education or the compulsion. I simply memorised the map. It made me look like I knew where I was going, despite it being my first time in that particular wilderness.

I wasn’t smart or talented in the way I believed others to be. I was playing a different game entirely.

Creativity reveals us to ourselves eventually. Each mark, each choice, each hesitation is a subtle admission of who we are. In the end, the work becomes a mirror, showing us the shape of a mind we have carried for years but rarely seen clearly.