The New York Times recently ran an article about companies snapping up young creatives with incentives like club memberships and flexible hours and locations. They featured a young woman who worked at Legoland, building Lego villages and Lego people. As an older creative, it caught me being a little jealous. I would love a job like that. I remember playing with a playdoh baking set with my kids, and wondering about the people, clearly adults, who made the perfect playdoh cakes and cookies on the box. What a great way to make a living.
Nobody offered us jobs like that. Older workers had seniority. We didn’t get the club memberships and flexible hours and creative license. Or did we?
The incentives were different. Maybe the gray bearded men selling wood carvings at the same festivals where I sold my enamelwork would have loved to be approached by the agent I signed with. I didn’t think about them. I only heard a woman wanting to place my work in gift galleries, and I signed up. I didn’t consider that maybe my Best in Show at Raleigh’s First Night umbrella parade came from young creativity. The judges were my contemporaries. My work probably spoke to them. I didn’t really think about peaking early and aging out until my best year at Centerfest. I had begun that show on the outskirts far from the stages and food, while more established artists were assigned booths on well trafficked streets. I once had a booth in a parking lot that everyone skipped. But I began moving in closer. My final year, I had a spot directly in front of the arts council, and across the street from the food court. It was the best location in the festival.
That same year, my friend Eddie, who was an amazing potter before I ever went to art school, and who always had good spots while I was still on the edges, was assigned to a block that people didn’t even realize was part of the festival. He’s still a wonderful potter. My favorite mug, my Day Off mug, is one he made. But he doesn’t do festivals now, like so many of us who used to set up our wares together, back before the internet. We found other ways and places to sell.
This got me thinking about creativity and age. Certainly, years of doing any art means you get better at it. So why the myth about youth?
Think of toddlers making up songs in the bathtub. There are no rules. They don’t have to make sense, the voice and tunes can be completely random. There is no story told in three verses a bridge and a chorus. So in a sense, the toddler has complete creative freedom. Most of us (excluding family of the toddler) would rather listen to the real song. But then, if the writer reaches a point where all his or her songs sound alike and tell similar stories, people start looking for something new. He is dated.
I have lots of enameled parts of earlier pieces in my studio, and they can’t touch what I do now. So why the hangup with youthful creativity? I think the answer lies somewhere between the toddler singing and the perfect songwriter. When you get really good at something, it’s hard to try something entirely new, something at which you won’t be perfect. It’s too easy to make the same art over and over when you know you can do it well. Once we achieve a high skill level, we set a high standard for ourselves, one that doesn’t leave room for experimentation. We box ourselves in.
So for all the older people thinking you have lost your edge, you haven’t. But you aren’t the same age as the agents and show judges and the employers. They think creativity belongs to the young because they have no gray hairs. So don’t worry about them. Do something new and imperfect.
(The piece in the picture is a recent experiment. I don't plan to perfect it.)
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