GirlMeetsArt » Uncategorized http://www.girlmeetsart.com the evolution of a visual artist, the blog of Chris Raymond Thu, 13 May 2010 21:43:25 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 For love of the game http://www.girlmeetsart.com/uncategorized/for-love-of-the-game/ http://www.girlmeetsart.com/uncategorized/for-love-of-the-game/#comments Thu, 13 May 2010 21:15:50 +0000 car57 http://www.girlmeetsart.com/?p=350 Before he died, maybe 6 months ago, my Dad suggested that maybe it was time for me to give up playing basketball. After all, he noted, I’m in my 50s and I have chronic back pain. I play with a brace on my left knee, because I blew out my ACL four years ago and couldn’t pay for the surgery to reconstruct it.

I announced to him that I’d stop playing when I couldn’t walk. (An aside: my Dad worked for 30 years in a hellishly hot steelmaking plant, and he never was sick—in fact, he never had a headache! When he retired, he got a stomach virus for the first time in his life, and bemoaned to my Mom that now that he was retired, he was going to die!

Well, he made it another 30 years or so. But I recalled our conversation about my quitting basketball after reading Chris Ballard’s Point After in SI, about his 71-year-old Dad continuing to play pick-up games against men half his age, despite two knee replacements and a bad shoulder.

As Ballard notes, “But giving up a game isn’t merely giving up a game.” Exactly.

For me, playing pick-up games against other women is my mental health outlet and a creative outlet, too, when I think about it. Over the past 10 years, my game has gotten better, as I have challenged myself to improve my passing and dribbling skills.

I take true joy in making the perfect pass down the court, a pass that takes imagination to see and creativity to try, and seeing it reach a teammate right in stride for an easy score.

Photo of my Dad at Bethlehem Steel Plant

Rest in peace, Dad

]]> http://www.girlmeetsart.com/uncategorized/for-love-of-the-game/feed/ 0 The curse of comparison http://www.girlmeetsart.com/uncategorized/the-curse-of-comparison/ http://www.girlmeetsart.com/uncategorized/the-curse-of-comparison/#comments Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:05:57 +0000 car57 http://www.girlmeetsart.com/?p=33 Women Of Design: Influence and Inspiration From the Original Trailblazers to the New Groundbreakers. I’m not in it. A friend of mine saw my stuff on this blog and said, oh, you should sell your stuff on Etsy. So I went to Etsy and saw literally hundreds of awe- and envy-inspiring pieces, and thought, I can’t compete with this. So, boy, what a way to depress myself right around the holidays. In today’s instant-connection world, it’s far easier to set the world’s best as your own measure. After all, you can easily view thousands of wonderful crafts, paintings, websites, logos, prints, etc. etc. in an hour’s time and even more easily find yourself lacking. At least before the web, if you avoided bookstores and magazine subscriptions, you could more easily fight off that internal critic. When I changed careers to become a designer, of course I dreamed of getting my work in the design annuals. Being written up in design magazines. And while I have gotten some awards for my work, it’s fair to say that I am not a household name in the design industry and that’s not likely to change at this point in my middle-age life. The point of this post? To remind me and any of you out there who have the same depressing thoughts that if you don’t learn to take pleasure in the process of creation, you will be at the mercy of the curse of comparison. That curse paralyzes you from starting anything new because, well, “it’s not going to be any good, so why bother?” So in the spirit of giving—and to be nice to myself—I remind myself that the creative process should be its own reward. ]]> http://www.girlmeetsart.com/uncategorized/the-curse-of-comparison/feed/ 4