I was chatting to one of my onlinies about creativity and blocks, and she said something that made a little light go on in my brain.

“I looked at my writing,” says she, “the way I looked at a pre-schooler’s macaroni necklace, something that no one would ever pay me for…”

A pre-schooler’s macaroni necklace

Yes! This perfectly encapsulates one of the tangles I have in my relationship with art, particularly visual art. I am intensely twitchy about standing up and saying, “Hey, I made this, and I think it’s good.”

(It’s less of an issue with my writing, although it’s true that it did take me until age 37 to send an actual novel draft to an actual literary agent.)

Objectively, I can see that many of the pieces I make are at least as fully resolved and well crafted as some of the stuff that’s out there in the world with price-tags attached.

Yet somehow, to go from there to imagining my art for sale seems like a mighty, groin-straining kind of leap.

When I look at my work, to tell you the truth, the dominant emotion is often embarrassment – I feel anxious about what would happen if anybody saw this piece and knew that I thought it was good enough to sell.

As if I were some kind of professional.

Far safer to keep my art in the domain of hobby, diversion, innocent and sloppy self-expression.

Like the woman said. Macaroni necklace.

Much to chew on here. (Chewing on raw, grubby macaroni, yes. Let’s hope the paint is non-toxic, at least.)

So what’s my point?

As adults, we mostly act in areas where we pretty much know what we’re doing. Our skills have developed to the stage where we’re no longer making macaroni necklaces.

As artists, it’s easy to fall into the habit of getting good at something and staying there. It’s comfortable, knowing you can do what you set out to do.

It’s safe.

However, if we want to develop as artists, we need to explore territory where we’re no longer sure of ourselves. We need to be willing to make messes, to try something grand that may not come off.

Kids do this all the time. It’s beautiful to watch.

No wonder so many grown-up artists talk about trying to recapture the freedom of a child. They want to integrate their adult experience and expertise with the immediacy and confidence of a child’s creative energy.

In that context, the macaroni necklace takes on a new dimension.

Children learn by doing

They don’t learn how to make art before they make art.

So, for instance, my kids have always dived in and made books and songs and films and maps, often set in their intricately realised paracosms, and they’ve drawn comic strip series and built everything, ever, out of Plasticine and Lego.

I have learnt so much from them – about process, about creative risk. They have modelled for me the proposition that mistakes are an opportunity to explore, that failure is a milestone, not a thousand-foot drop.

As they’ve grown older, they’ve inevitably begun to adopt the prevalent attitude of our culture (mistakes are bad, mm’kay?), and started judging their macaroni necklaces by harsher criteria.

Perhaps, later on, they will work to regain the artistic freedom of their childhood.

(Or, you know, they could become alienated, emotionally frozen, right-wing stockbrokers and keep me in my old age.)

But for a little while more, I still get to enjoy the gorgeous tide of creative work as it rises around me.

And try to do likewise.