Creative Expression Is More than Just Art
By Glenda Winders
Original run date: June 29, 2025
Several years ago, as a too-young widow looking for a way to fill the evenings and weekends in my silent house, I came across an ad for a drawing class at the San Diego Museum of Art. I felt a sense of excitement, but I didn’t enroll right away.
Like many other now-adult children, I had been shut down by an art teacher who gave me a bad grade because my picture didn’t look exactly like hers.
For all the years after high school I contented myself with art history classes in college and going to art museums in every city I visited. As I looked at paintings and sculptures, I always felt the same urge to create that had motivated me to write stories from the time I learned to read. Actually doing it, however, never seemed like a possibility. That same teacher had told me that my problem was I had no talent.
I kept thinking about that class at the museum, though. If I failed miserably, the threat of a bad grade going into my “permanent record” no longer existed.
If I discovered that I didn’t like it as much as I thought I would, I could get up and walk out. Meanwhile I would have something to occupy my mind besides grief. I signed up.
“I know from experience that it will make you feel alive.”
The first night of the class I went to the wrong room and met two other people who had made the same mistake. The hilarity that ensued bonded us and gave us a bright beginning to an enjoyable experience in which each of us learned to draw without worrying about whether our pieces looked like the instructor’s or what anyone else would think. When I left San Diego, I joined a watercolor group in my new city, and when I moved again it was to a house that had a loft over the garage with big windows that I turned into a studio.
My own path toward creativity has led me to three conclusions: 1) The degree to which a person has or does not have so-called “talent” doesn’t matter, 2) You don’t have to draw or paint to be an artist and 3) creativity doesn’t have to be about art at all.
Three people I know took up playing a new musical instrument during the pandemic and have kept at it ever since because it brings them so much pleasure. Another friend cooks fabulous meals using ingredients she has grown herself. There is something out there for everyone — knitting, cooking, gardening, inventing, writing and the list goes on. The medium I landed on was collage, which nearly every day takes me out to my sanctuary to cut and paste as much as I want.
This path also led me to the book I just finished reading, “Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us,” by Susan Magsamen, founder and executive director of the International Arts + Mind Lab, Center for Applied Neuroaesthetics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Ivy Ross, a chief designer at Google, among several other accomplishments. The findings of the many studies they quote support everything I already believed and a lot more.
The pair cite papers by renowned physicians and scientists who have concluded that beyond providing gratification, creativity can actually promote healing and extend a person’s life.
They tell about soldiers who make masks to achieve some relief from their PTSD, burn patients whose treatments are less painful when art is involved, and people working their way through tragedy by drawing and writing. Their myriad examples indicate that people who do something creative each day are kinder and more generous, more open to embarking on collaboration and creating community. Children who grow up in homes where creativity is a value are better adjusted and happier.
The authors’ research also led them to deduce that it is never too late to begin. Senior citizens receive the same benefits as adolescents once they find the creative endeavor that lights them up. The book is a plea for everyone to add this new component to their lives.
To get started with a creative practice, they suggest beginning to notice what is going on in the environment around you, a pastime that has all but disappeared for some demographics with the advent of technology and social media. That idea led me to a book called “The Art of Noticing: 131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, and Discover Joy in the Everyday” by Rob Walker. In it he suggests exercises such as to look out a window, listen for a sound, keep a nature log, take a different route, misuse your tools, imagine simple objects as art, sketch a room you just left from memory, speak to a stranger, spot something new every day and 122 others. Walker also produces a blog that he says is “for people who want to stay interested in life.”
A drawing teacher I admire is Danny Gregory, so when I saw that he was offering an online course called “Start Your Sketchbook Journal,” I signed right up.
To my delight, the subject matter he teaches is learning to notice and sketch one’s surroundings for 31 days. I thought I was already pretty good at being aware, but at day 16, I am already amazed at what I have found to draw. My sketchbook is filling up with pictures of something on my desk that has emotional significance (in my case a fig candle that came in last year’s holiday box from England), a small gift from the world (an art display in an office where I was waiting for an appointment), a drawing that can tell a story without words (a house in my neighborhood having new windows installed) and many others. It turns out the discovery alone is as much fun as the drawing.
So I join the authors of these books (and many others on the same topic) in hoping that anyone who doesn’t already have a creative practice will find one. I can promise that it will make for positive changes. I know from experience that it will make you feel alive.
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Glenda Winders is a novelist, freelance writer and copyeditor for Napa Valley Features.
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Life is a series of night and day, long days and long nights, and cherished moments. “What is art but praise.” You sketched an inspiring story.