The Young Creative
The Young Creative
The Beginning [1975-1980, Minneapolis, MN, Dekalb, IL, Stone Mountain, GA]
I was born in July 1975 in the middle of a decade of creative reuse (crafting with newspaper and aluminum cans!) bicycle mania and a generation with the Free to Be You and Me mentality. My parents Marjorie and Scott were a young nurse and social worker. My parents came of age at the end of the 1960s and they enjoyed playing music together. They both played recorder and my mom, piano, and my dad, guitar. Their record collection had Joan Baez, John Denver and Bob Dylan but also Celtic traditional (The Chieftains), medieval renaissance, baroque and classical, and working songs of the south. My dad created a binder of his favorite songs; many are about human suffering and difficult times or spirituals. Music was their creative outlet and a gift they gave to me, even though piano lessons and choir made it clear I was not interested in making music myself. My first years were in the city, and we'd walk to the library and play with neighbors on Beard Avenue in Minneapolis. My mom worked long shifts as a nurse, and used a babysitting co-op to save money on childcare. We were a one-car family and my dad would take me to preschool on the back of his bike. Play and creativity were always part of my early years through household art supplies, a trunk of old clothing, and a make it, not buy it ethic. My mom learned to sew from her mother and between the two of them, much of my earlier clothes were hand made and she also sewed creative quilts for our beds and made us faux cabbage patch kids. Halloween costumes were passed down or made, never store bought and birthday parties consisted of handmade crowns, games, and cakes. In 1980, my dad's college friend William Stansbery, a professional photographer, captured my family (mom, dad, sister Sarah two years older, and I) in this black and white outdoor portrait.The Artist, Collector & Trash Retriever [1978-1979, Minneapolis, MN]
My mom writes in my baby book a month before I turned three years old: "6/7/78: Carye does very well at drawing and coloring. Has already drawn "a people." At age four, my mom writes: "7/79: She likes to collect things in bags and containers and doesn't want Mommy or Daddy to throw anything away and sometimes retrieves papers out of the garbage."The Bubble, Straw, and the Shoe
Books and reading were important in my family and my favorite story came from a book of Russian fairy tales. The Bubble, The Straw, and the Shoe was a strange half-page tale—a bit on the morbid side—where a bubble, straw, and shoe must figure out how to cross a river. The shoe suggests the bubble carry them across. But the bubble says the straw should lay across the river and they can travel over that way. So they do, but the shoe breaks the straw and the bubble laughs so hard it bursts. I loved the funny illustrations of the personified motley crew. I also adored Richard Scarry books, Henry the Explorer and the Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein especially the whimsical doodles illustrating the poems.My Kindergarten ABC Book [1980, Stone Mountain, GA]
One of the few records I have of my early days of art is my kindergarten ABC book. Some of my drawings are intriguingly complex and others simple with no detail. Some pages I fill up with many words and accompanying drawings and others I only choose one word but then fill up the page with repeated drawings of the same thing. There isn't a consistent thing about it, but it's a curious look back into my five-year-old creative mind.Gods Eyes and Muppets [Early 1980s, Stone Mountain, GA]
My parents recognized that I like to make art so enrolled me in a summer day art camp. The camp had multiple rustic buildings spread out on woodsy pine tree hillside. I only have two big memories. The first is I became obsessed with making "God's Eyes." So simple: take two tree twigs and cross them and wrap colored yarn in a diamond formation. The second memory was making puppets using a folded paper plate for a mouth and then gluing spray-painted foam to create the head (all while listening to Hall & Oates Maneater which was on repeat that summer on the radio). The Muppets were big for me at this time so my puppet was very Muppet—bright orange with floppy orange ears and a 1970s style dress. We took a bus to a local mall to do a performance of our puppets on an elevated indoor stage to Raffi Music (Hall & Oates would have been better!).The Pom-Pom Stand [Early 1980s, Stone Mountain, GA]
My first official art business was a yarn pom-pom stand at the end of our driveway. Like a lemonade stand, but instead my sister Sarah and I set up our collection of pom-poms of different sizes for sale. I believe some had googly-eyes on them and were 'pets'. No photograph exists and maybe it's just childhood lore, as I don't remember if we actually sold any! My Minnesota grandma probably taught us how to make them using two cardboard rings, yarn and scissors but like the God's Eyes, once we knew how, we couldn't stop making them and I guess had so many we had to open a 'business'.Sister Drawings [Early 1980s]
To pass the time on long drives or trips to visit our grandparents, my sister Sarah and I would make drawings in little notebooks. Our favorite made up game was Fashion Critic. My sister would draw different outfits and I would comment on them with critiques like cute, ugly, and Oh, Sarah! We also loved to play Fashion Plates and had the 1978 kit with the tennis lady, bell-bottoms, vests, and long ruffled skirts or mini skirts. My favorite drawing my sister would make was of my orange cat Scooter with a happy face balloon. We were very influenced by Sandra Boynton animal cartoons and Hello Kitty which dominated our favorite mall stores.Computers and Cat Fantasy [1985, St. Paul, MN]
My sister and I were so excited when our dad bought us our first home computer, a Commodore 64 in 1985. We spent hours playing games and making dot art banners and even learned basic programming. We designed one game we called Rainbow where you had to try to stop the cascading colors on the color you called out. My mom enrolled me in a computer summer class. Logo, the turtle programming game, bored me pretty quick but I liked to write and once I was presented with Story Tree, a program that helped you write your own Choose Your Own Adventure, my fate was sealed. I would write the ultimate adventure about a world of cats called Cat Fantasy and was so prolific it grew to 100 pages! On the very last day I was working hard up against the end of day deadline to finish and print it out. I was very shy and failed to let the teacher know what I was up to and I finally typed the last The End, I was told. "Sorry, it could take hours to print out a 100 page story." I was given a big 4-inch floppy disc with the story safely saved on it. Except I never found the program again and I never got it printed out.
Young Painter, about age 4