I was a lucky kid. My parents prized creativity and fostered it in my siblings and me. We didn’t have many store-bought toys (other than Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets and Legos) – we were encouraged to create our own toys and depend on our imaginations for amusement. If I ever went to my Mom and said “I’m bored” she would reply “How can you be bored, look at all these art supplies.”
One of my favorite past times was bringing Mom a stack of blank paper and asking her to scribble on them, then I would take the scribbles and try to find the creatures who lived in them. That’s the way I have always seen it: random patterns are the homes of undiscovered critters. I would spend hours as a child searching for and bringing to life these strange beings. As I drew I would imagine their lives, where they lived, who the loved, what they ate. As I got older I left behind the crayons and fantasy worlds for all the teenage trappings and angst. But I always kept the creative way of seeing things and approached problems like scribbles – trying to see them from different angles until a solution emerged. I didn’t realize until much later in my life how valuable a childhood filled with imagination and hands-on creativity benefited me.
I went on to have a career that involved visual creativity paired with technical understanding, but it was the way that I approached difficult situations that was most affected by my early life as a creative thinker. There is a character in every scribble, you just need to look at it the right way – also, there are often many different characters in a scribble, and you have to decide on the best one. This perspective can inform the way you approach people and obstacles. When you approach things with an eye toward understanding, using a lens of creativity, you have a better chance of solving problems and building rapport.
Shortly after my mother’s death I was reminiscing about that love of the “scribble game”, I was thinking it about it in my shower, which was made of travertine tile. This type of stone is variegated and has a lot of depth and different tones, much like clouds. As I though of my mom, I saw faces in the tile and this project was born. Upon emerging from the shower I took a wide variety of photos of them, then printed the photos out on regular copy paper and started to draw out the characters that lived in the tiles. Here is a smattering – there are so, so many more.
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