Creativity - Three Parts

1 - Yesterday at 12:30, June 27th, 2025, I was driving to The Station Cafe' (Eiland Arts Center) on Chestnut St. in Merchantville, NJ to meet a NEW friend, Tamarie Bitgood, who is president of the Salem County Arts League. We met through Loren Dann who is a founder of the South Jersey Artists Collaborative (or Collective) the group that will be renting one of our buildings at Woodbury Friends Meeting.

The radio program I was listening to as I was driving on 90.9 fm was on creativity and the speaker was talking about two parts of the process: inspiration, and "Flow" He spoke of the neutral, relaxed mind that allows new ideas to spontaneously emerge. I have certainly found that to be true. But I also derive a great deal of inspiration from input, from magazines, stories, objects. I read a book on Flow once by the famous reseacher/author Mihaly Csikszentmihaly: Flow, the Psychology of the Optimal Experience. published in 1990.

My best description of what FLOW feels like when I experience it is that I lose all sense of time and of myself and I become one with the activity whether it is writing or painting. It feels like surfing the wave, a smooth melding of action and thought. Hours can go by and I won't notice. It is a calm center.

2-At our lunch, Tamarie brought two of her ART JOURNALS to show me. I had three pieces of art in the latest show at The Station on the theme - Travel/Collage. I have wanted to make Art Journals and get into the ArtBook field for years but I couldn't seem to find the inspiration. I have kept journals since the 1970s and have hundreds in a big trunk in the attic but they are mostly narrative. My prose mind takes over and very little art ever gets into the journals. I wanted to change that and get away from art that needs to go on walls as I have no wall space left and I don't sell or move enough work and I don't want piles of it gathering dust in the attic. I felt the best solution to continuing to be creative visually was to turn to Art Journals. Tammy's were beautiful and mind-blowingly complex, and she had mastered the combination of idea and image. Her work far exceeded anything I had ever seen in the many magazines I had bought hoping to be inspired: Somerset Publications.

3-The way the creative process works for me: I have, in my living room a one hundred year old Singer Sewing Machine inherited from my Great-grandmother Catherine Sandman Young who made her living by sewing from her teens throughout her adult life. She and my grandmother made uniforms for the Schuylkill Areenal in piece work which allowed them to mind the children and make a living at home. The Sewing Machine, to my mind is a great tool of women's survival and labor. There were so few decent ways for an immigrant/poor woman to make a living in the 1800's, mainly cleaning or, if they were skilled, sewing. Since all clothing had to be made by hand before the industrialization of that industry, many women were employed in the task. Men did tailoring and women did sewing and haberdashery.

That sewing machine is an inspiration to me and it is also an item of beauty. When I think of the era of home-sewn dresses, I can see the fabrics, the trims, laces, buttons, beads, and the spools of gem like colored threads. How beautiful!

Because I have also sewn in my life, both my own clothes in my 20's and my daughter's in her toddler years, I have an inside experience of the art. So at some point, I began sewing as part of my artistic output - I made the other symbol of women's experience: the handbag/market bag. The first one I made was when my daughter was one year old in 1984. I sewed panels like quilt squares with a pocket in each panel and then I sewed the together like a book with a shoulder strap so she (my daughter Lavinia) could carry it and sit and pay with the toys in the pockets.

My first artistic piece I made was a set of 4 'pocketbooks' of 5 panels each and a painting in each panel behind a clear pocket. It was 2019 and the two hundred year anniversary of Women's Suffrage celebrated in a show at The Station called BRAVE 100.

I expanded from that idea and did a set of 12 pocketbooks/market bags which I put up at Woodbury Meeting and then gave away to friends. My latest was a piece I called Ireland Market Bag, a black bag with pockets on the front with clear panels and in one panel a portrait of my daughter at Bunratty Castle in Ireland, and in the other pocket, some memorabilia (a set of Ireland postcards in a ribbon, a boarding pass, a set of Irish stamps) that I had saved from a vacation we had taken to Ireland when my daughter was in her mid teens. I called it "functional art" because you could hang it and look at it or you could use it to carry things from the market or the post office or wherever. I really liked sewing those bags, using my mother's Singer Sewing Machine which was, according to my sewing machine repair man, the best model ever made. My great grandmother's sewing machine, an electric cord model, I have never tried to get to work. It is so old.

This Ireland Market bag connected all of it, the female experience of sewing and shopping, the art of painting, and my experience of travel, especially since Ireland was the country of origin of the maternal side of my ancestry, the McQuistons. It joined my German female ancestor Catherine Sandman Young, to my Irish ancestor Lavinia McQuiston, and carried on my daughter's name which has flowed down through 5 generations of women on my mother's side and was my mother's middle name as well. That to me made this piece my most perfect artistic creation.

Happy Trails!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

ps. Tam's books and my bag have inspired me to do an Art Journal on women's tools, starting with sewing notions!