6.2 Multi-talents: A Wizard of a Solution

 
 Photo: Comedy on Tilt Troupe, Lake County, California

by Janet Grace Riehl with Stephanie Farrow

A wizard appears before you. He offers the tantalizing gift of creative talent in more than one field. Do you accept?

The blessings of the wizard’s gift would be:

• An expanded palette with which to paint your creative vision: language, movement, sound, visual art and media, theater.
• A choice to rotate your gifts or bring them together into new form.
• Wowing your friends in cocktail conversations and parlor games.

The curse of the gift would be:

• Confusion. What to do first, where, and when?
• Overwhelm by and fear of so many choices.
• The responsibility of deciding how to shape the extra freedom of expression.
• The possibility of never getting anything done because of starting so many creative projects without finishing them.
• Having to learn to say “no”—and mean it.

The wizard promises more freedom and choice. But the gift comes with responsibilities and obstacles to match. Choosing and directing the freedom multi-talents bring, may make you feel like you need magical powers of your own. You’d have to learn to welcome limits, rules, and boundaries in order to sort, shape, and determine the scale of your projects. You’d have to make friends with constraints as a way to make the best use of your freedom.

Freedom requires a container, and that container is structure. In art school I learned that setting criteria, goals, and deadlines helped me create a body of work for my senior show. I set the theme early on of investigating the vessel. Then I yielded to intuition as my hands made a flotilla of boats from the constructed world, pods from nature, and the intimacy of the body. To install a cohesive show I had to decide which objects to include, how to arrange them, and how viewers would interact with the world inside the room. In short, I used structure as my guide and my support.

In the end we must become our own wizards. We must know what our powers are, understand how to use them, and live within the limits of our human reach.

This is the second in a series of five posts on multi-talented creativity. Pose questions about practical creativity; give ideas for future cycle themes; and join in the dialog.

See the Creative Catalyst archive at http://bit.ly/9z1BQv.  Learn more about our audio book “Sightlines: A Family Love Story in Poetry and Music”at http://bit.ly/aZVd1e.