Making space to create.

“In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.”

— E. M. Forster

On a rainy Saturday afternoon in southwest London, Claire and I found ourselves inside the studio of Wendy’s Workshop, a ceramics cafe located on Ham Parade.

As Wendy herself got us set up with paints, supplies and, most importantly, lattes, we tried to remember how exactly we’d decided to come. Claire thought maybe she’d said she wanted to make pottery; perhaps I’d then suggested a less involved alternative, recalling trips to paint-your-own-pottery studios as a child; either way, here we were.

The brightly-colored walls in their various shades of neon held wooden shelves filled bottom to top with objects–all blank canvases that came in the form of plates and bowls, tea cups, fairies, squirrels and other figurines, dinosaurs and even a bulbous piggy bank.  Claire selected a small pitcher to pour olive oil with, I chose a mug, and before we knew it, we’d been there three hours–three hours!

“It’s amazing, being creative just takes your mind off everything else,” Claire said as she finished up her third coat. “You just forget about it all.”

And she was right–for three hours any thought of flatmate troubles, work stress, global unrest, and myriad other concerns fell from our shoulders like a coat on an unexpectedly warm winter day. We were just a half-hour bus ride from our flat, but we might as well have been worlds away.

In that way, our foray into the world of paint-your-own-pottery had been a bit like travel; the chance to slip out of our normal routines and engage our minds in a different way.

As director Cecil B. De Mille says:

Creation is a drug I can’t do without.