“You see what you know” – it is a quote by Frank Stella but I heard that first from my boss, who I also consider a mentor at work and then out of the blue I heard it from my teacher at university now where I am taking a Master in Fine Arts, specialisation Sculpture.
A little bit of background here
I’ve got an engineering degree in “Automation, Information and Control Technics” which doesn’t have anything to do with my career path as higher Management in Marketing & Sales. Additionally, these two have nothing to do with my lifestyle and hobbies and especially with the latest educational step I took – a Master in Pedagogie of Fine Arts specialisation Sculpture.
So here I am at the age of 40+ starting something out of the blue which requires a completely new set of skills. I always thought one can’t do it if you are lacking “talent”, so I am very eager to see where this one takes me.
How I started handcrafting
I believe at one point a lot of us start looking for something to fill in a particular need to either improve or just fill in some emptiness in our daily life. For me it was a period about 10 years ago when I first started papercrafting. Somehow I had the need to create something with my hands and to challenge myself to see if something decent can come out of my hands when doing something so out of my comfort zone.
To be honest, looking back at that time now, my first attempts weren’t amazing but in time one can clearly see the learning curve and the improvement.
The real thing that stuck with me is that nice place where your brain goes into creative mode and you forget the outside world for a while. Sometimes the “while” can be as much as a day even.
Several years later, while on maternity leave, I tested out jewellery making and it stuck with me somehow. The colours, the creativity, the fact that you need to be good with your hands and the diversity of options you have in the choice of materials. I even started selling some of these as my personal experiment in branding and marketing to gain some insights on how it could be done.
The road to the Master in Fine Arts
As you may guess, I reached a place where my enthusiasm for creating somehow was dwindling. I thought it was just me being tired, or the lack of time or just “life happening” but after a while I recognized that what I was missing was a challenge. As this wasn’t my main way of making money, for me it really doesn’t matter if anyone buys the things I create or not. Most of these I create simply because I like it
So creating one and the same things as nice as they were, didn’t bring me the same rush anymore. The way I saw it, it was just crafting one and the same things with a little bit different theme. No challenge, no “wow” effect and this mainly because I didn’t have substantial knowledge to achieve it.
I reached the moment where I have all my stuff put in the cellar and didn’t do a thing until a friend of mine who is one of the teachers in the University of Fine Arts in Plovdiv said: why don’t you just come and get a master in sculpture with me?
Now, I wouldn’t lie to you: my first reaction was that I am not good enough to even get into the university but my brain started working over the possibilities.
A few months later here I am – a happy student at 42 in the University of Fine Arts, challenging my mental capacity and looking up words about art in dictionaries (and yes, I do that regularly). I’ve got a smile on my face, a bucket full of “mud” in my bathroom that I regularly keep soft enough and I get my hands dirty on a regular basis to try and make something out of it.
And guess what…it feels amazing!