Artist’s Date
I visited “Bountiful Botanicals: A Botanical Art Worldwide Exhibition 2025” at the Belconnen Arts Centre – this was a collection of impressively detailed illustrations in watercolour and coloured pencils by many artists.
Reflections
The theme for week 2 is “Discovering a Sense of Proportion”. The word “proportion” in the chapter title is often used in a negative or constraining way. But here, it suggests that we may want to use our sense of proportion to see larger opportunities.
The chapter discusses identity and how we can be affected by the way we’re seen by people we’re close to. Friends and family can (perhaps unconsciously) impose an identity on us with their assumptions and words. And we can end up limiting ourselves if we place too much weight on the views of others.
I’ve been thinking about this chapter for a while and wondering how useful the concept of identity is for people who want to be creative. As Julia Cameron notes in many places, we can all be creative. And I’ve found it’s more helpful to ask myself “Am I creating?” than to ask “Am I a creative person?” For some people, having too strong an identity as “an artist” can be detrimental – it becomes an excuse for self-indulgence or for expending more energy on maintaining an image than on creating artwork.
But then I remembered the name that Julia Cameron gives to one of the key activities in the book: the “Artist’s Date”. Not the “Date for people creating art”. And I don’t think this is just for brevity. Taking ourselves on an Artist’s Date is a way to give ourselves permission to do something that might otherwise seem self-indulgent.
Perhaps, as artists, we can adopt identities in a playful, exploratory way to benefit from different perspectives. Also, we could test this as one of the pairs of opposing ideas from Navigating Ambiguity: “My identity shifts creatively/I don’t focus on my identity”. Can we hold both of these ideas in our mind at the same time? Is the tension between them productive?
Related
Introductory post: “Walking in this World” diary: introduction
Previous post in this diary: “Walking in this World” diary: week 1