Hobby Equals Creation- Find a Hobby to Stimulate Creation!

What’s your favorite pastime? For America, Baseball is regarded to be a favorite pastime. For me its reading, organizing old photographs, watching cooking shows, listening and discovering great music, and the list goes on. It’s through my moments of pastime that I am sometimes stimulated with a great creative idea. If ever you’re stuck in a creative block, a good way to awaken the muses is to simply start with something small. Last summer I was humbled by being asked to teach a course on “How to be Creative,” based off of my writing from this blog. During my time in teaching the course I discovered two specific comments that were mentioned periodically during the class. 1. Most people did not consider themselves to be the creative type or 2. The projects that they were working on were mostly that of a hobby. Now as an artist I have heard of this word hobby often used almost as an outlet to sort of separate a person from being considered an artist. To be honest the word “hobby” sometimes rubs me the wrong way, as if one has to be privileged to be an artist and if your work has not been seen, well then you’re just simply a hobbyist. Now don’t get me wrong there is nothing wrong with having a hobby, but I don’t think because you paint privately, or perform music privately, etc., that it makes you any less of an artist.

There are two types of artists in the world in my eyes, those who regard themselves “professional artists” and those that are just simply “artists.” The “professional artists,” are ones who choose to showcase their work and try to make a living off of their work. Then there are the “artists,” the ones who showcase a talent within the various types of art. Those whose work would be regarded as a “hobby,” well I say use that “hobby” as a footstool towards creation. Use it as inspiration for a creative project, for example I mentioned earlier that I like looking at old photographs. A cool creative project that could come from that could be trying to re-create that photographic moment into another creative, artistic project. Turn the photo into a painting or use that photo to inspire a newly written song. Or you can upload that photograph into Photoshop and re-edit it into a new visual piece of art. See, hobbies can be works of art, and are great introductions to new innovative creative projects! Here is my impromptu idea for the week: Choose one of your favorite hobbies and create new artistic projects from them, remix your hobby into a piece of creative hour art.

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”
- Carl Jung