r e t s a c t s u J
! t I Do
Warren Draper We humans are creative creatures. Give a child some crayons and a piece of paper and it won’t be long before he or she has created a wondrous world of possibilities (don’t forget the paper though, or they’ll create that world on your wall). Creativity is in our bones. It’s as much a part of the human condition as opposable thumbs or liking pictures of kittens on Facebook. And yet modern life seems to actively discourage this innate creativity. The globalised marketplace of the third millennium encourages us to be consumers, rather than creators. But if we were to tap into our own innate creativity and put it to good use, we would find that it not only offers each of us the ability to enrich our own lives, but that it is also capable
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of adding to both the local and global economies in ways which are far less destructive than the current state of affairs. The greatest obstacle to living a more creative life is a widely held belief that creative people are an elite breed. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve heard the phrase, “I’m not a creative person.” We might not all be gifted painters, musicians or sculptors, but each and every one of us has innate creative talent in one form or another. More often than not, we say we’re not very good at something when we haven’t even tried doing it, or we try something briefly and say we’re not very good because we haven’t mastered the necessary techniques yet. My wife is always telling me that she isn’t
very ‘arty’, but within a few weeks of attending a Tavern Cake College sugar craft class at Bentley Community Library she was creating intricate and beautiful sugar flowers as fine as any professional. Some of the most interesting Donny doers we’ve come across only found their talent through sheer necessity. Shabby Shack’s Claire McPhearson started upcycling furniture because she had bought an old period house and wanted to fill it with pieces which were already “engrained with memories.” As someone who had always loved design and hated waste, she had found the perfect vocation. After selling her first pieces on eBay she started a Facebook page and things boomed from there. Using a local company such as Shabby