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Understanding Your Personal Creative Nature

Knowing and Flowing with the Authentic YOU!

By Chris Dunmire, CoachingYourCreativity.com

Why do you think it's important to understand your own personal creative nature? How about for the simple reason that knowing yourself and embracing your strengths, weaknesses, likes, dislikes, aptitudes, gifts, and talents is the foundation of a satisfying and fulfilling creative life.

Let me illustrate. In this chapter of my life, I do not consider myself to be a "fine artist", skilled at drawing, painting, or any other traditional pencil-to-paper type of art. This has no bearing whatsoever on my ability to be creative or express my creativity through writing or artistic means, however, it's just that I haven't gone through enough (for who?) formal art training and personal practice to be satisfied with my level of fine artistry skill. I'm a fine art dabbler, which may very well turn into a fine art DOer with a significant level of passion attached to it. I'm not there yet, and that's OK.

(Right-brained Tangent: Ha! The corny jokes are just lining up waiting to pounce on this one. "Hello, I'm Chris Dunmire, and I'm a sketchy drawer." [not a sock drawer, mind you, but if I could only get a HANDLE on my painting skills]...)

That being said (before the tangent), most of my visual art is produced in a graphic artist, illustrative kind of way. I have gone through a formal design school training program and do plenty of graphic design for work and play. I'm quite capable of producing eye-catching graphics, layouts and abstract, collage, and cartoony art, but ask me to accurately render that bowl of fruit in chalk pastels in that still life over there and you're going to get smiling fruit with googly eyes jumping hop-scotch squares instead. That's that playful, humorist nature of me that gets expressed through my creativity — and life — every day.

Though I've wrestled with my lack of representational knack for years, I'm accepting more each day that I'm drawn to expressing myself in large concepts with a twist of humor instead of in serious fine details. (Not to mention, these days there are myriads of ways to get that fine artist effect on graphics and photos without being that kind of artist.) For some reason, standing in front of a tree with canvas and paintbrush and reproducing said tree in its splendid exactness doesn't satisfy my continual creative quest and appetite for filtering life through my own sense of what's important to me. Why create what's already there? And yet, I'm extremely grateful to those who love and choose to do that, because that skill is necessary in our world.

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© 2007 Chris Dunmire, CoachingYourCreativity.com. All rights reserved. (03/17/07). Please do not duplicate this article elsewhere without my permission.

About the Author
Chris Dunmire is the author of the Dollar Bill Origami Money Plant and driving force behind the popular Creativity Portal Web site. She finds meaning as an artist, humorist, and creativity coach and channels her overactive imagination into multiple containers on display at ChrisDunmire.com.