I went to Spain to learn to draw. I realize this is a long way to go to pick up a pencil and I feel guilt at the sheer luxury of it all, but when my local art teacher organized a trip to Spain, I jumped at the chance.
Once upon a time I was creative, then I went to medical school. Years of memorization, exams, grueling hours and high stress, gave me a muscle-bound left-brain but my creative right brain went into a coma. For years following, it slept and then, after 20 dormant years, my right brain woke up, hungry. Realizing that the right brain is half of my available resources, albeit mostly ignored and starved, I decided to feed it. After all, I once was creative and when I opened myself to the creative process in the past I felt balanced, more in touch with the world and more alive.
I put away the medical journals and started reading fiction, something that previously elicited endless guilt, because I was not learning facts. It didn’t take much reading, however, to realize how poorly educated I was; force fed and stuffed with 10 years of university science but hopelessly ignorant about everything else — literature, history, religion, politics, poetry and philosophy. With an appetite for a free-range education, I undertook and continue, my deprogramming and reeducation.
Immersed in the reading universe, I marveled at the ability of star writers who could move the reader through a constellation of emotions. I wanted that ability for myself and so I struggled to write, emulating those who traveled into the black hole of their being to craft stories anchored in truth and honesty. From them, I learned that the best writing originates in such a place.
I discovered that words formed but a single letter in the alphabet of creative experience and that art was another, so I took up watercolour painting. I cannot express the feeling of creating your own picture. It is the embodiment of who you are, what you see and feel, manifest on paper. It is hard work, with pitfalls, but once in awhile a painting will speak to you. It was in the process of painting, that I noticed my right brain had started to sing.
I have been painting for the last year but I struggle with the drawing that precedes the rendering of the paint. I understood that adding a new letter to my creative alphabet —drawing — would expand my capacity to create and express, so I signed up for Spain. A beautiful country, like- minded Vernon people and a big distance from the responsibilities of everyday life, provided the right setting for my right brain to blossom and enough distance to ignore the scolding my left brain never tires of administering when I am at home.
Did I enjoy sketching in Spain? Absolutely! I will never be a great artist but the creative process fulfills me. My left brain will always be dominant because that is who I am, but exercising my creative right brain has made life so much fuller. We all have creativity; it is a beautiful present we have always had, but many have forgotten to open. If you decide to open it now, it will keep on giving. If you opened yours early, you are one of the lucky ones.
Dr. April Sanders writes on a variety of topics for The Morning Star. She is a physician at Sanders Medical Inc. Vein and Laser in Vernon, B.C.
