Push A Limit [David’s blog on KS Friday]

Posted on January 16, 2026 by davidrobinsoncreative

In one of the more absurd chapters of my life I was awarded a full-ride scholarship to a graduate program in costuming. As an undergraduate student in the theatre with a focus on acting and directing I’d spent a goodly amount of time in costume shops, sewing buttons, repairing shoes, badly hemming pants. It is fair to say that anything that involves fabric makes little to no sense to me. Many dear and patient costumers kept me busy during my required costume hours with tasks that I could not bungle. They found my level of competence (very low) and helped me succeed there.

My capacity to draw opened the door of costume absurdity. While interning at The Walden Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky, the director cast me as Oberon in a production of A Mid Summer Night’s Dream. She also asked me to design the costumes. She’d seen my drawings. I was delighted and drew characters with absolutely no idea whether or not my drawings could be translated into actual garments that people could wear. The very gifted head of the costume shop recognized my vast limitations and gently helped me make fabric decisions. I learned the art of the question from her. She knew what was best – and I knew nothing at all – so her questions were precise with the correct answer baked into the framing of the question.

One day a man came to audition actors for a graduate program. The audition room was lined with my costume designs. After the auditions he found me and asked me to interview with the tech faculty of the university. It was a crazy idea, a wild hare, but I did it anyway. At the time my ship had no rudder and there was nothing on my horizon following my internship. Plus, I believed there was no way, given my very very low costume competence, that they’d offer me a spot. But they did. And I accepted.

When Kerri resurrected her box of clothes-patterns it surfaced my long forgotten time in graduate school as a costume designer. I could draw and design everything. I couldn’t construct anything. More than once I reduced my professors to tears of laughing-disbelief at my attempts to sew. More than once I stopped them in their tracks with my capacity to imagine and paint. I began that year believing I was on the wrong path – I knew I was never going to be a costume designer – and I ended the year having learned that there is no such thing as a wrong path. Those good people, the incredible artists that surrounded me each day, helped me see and embrace my gifts. They helped me laugh at my foibles. They helped me understand the great creative power – and necessity – of pushing on a limit and stepping into an unknown. They helped me find my way.

LEGACY on the album RELEASED FROM THE HEART © 1995 Kerri Sherwood

Kerri’s albums are available on iTunes and streaming on Pandora

read Kerri’s blogpost about THE PATTERNS

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Filed under: Art, Creativity, Gratitude, KS Friday, Surprises | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Notice The World

Posted on September 23, 2017 by davidrobinsoncreative

my latest painting. another addition to The Beach Series.

It’s a constant source of the giggles for me now. So many things that used to seem so complex and unknowable, so serious and weighty, have morphed into utter simplicities. And, I’ve unwittingly accumulated or created shorthand phrases, adages, that encapsulate the simplicities.

Stephen used to ask me, “Why don’t people see how important art is? Why don’t people value the arts?” He is a prolific and gifted painter and, like most artists, was struggling financially. I used to sit around with other artists and actors asking the same type of questions. Why don’t they value us. Our conversations made us into a frustration-club, so certain were we that we carried in our art pouch the cure for the worlds’ ills. But the world, they, were not noticing us. No matter how great our play or heartfelt our paintings or how loudly we proclaimed and marketed our work or trumpeted our capacity to help people to think or feel more deeply – to change the world! – the community (they) seemed mostly inattentive (to us).

Art as castor oil. Non-profit non-prophet.

Wearing my corporate consulting hat, I taught this core principle for years: you can never determine what other people think or feel or see. And, it took years for this simple adage to penetrated my life – especially my artist life (we do, in fact, teach what we most need to learn…).

I still believe in the importance and great power of the arts but not in the same way I did all those many years ago. I actually believe in it more than I once did only now it seems so simple: ‘Do what you love…,’ so the saying goes. Do what you love because you love to do it. That’s all. The world (how’s that for a sweeping generality!) does not need to be saved or changed. Mostly, it needs less frustrated artists waving to be noticed while perpetuating the narrative that they are undervalued. The world could do with a wee bit less of ‘us and them.’

The simplicity: I would much rather root my energies, my focus, my creative powers in the love of it all. Frustration makes the well run dry. There is no us and them when standing solidly in the love of creating. The real power of the arts – the only real power of the arts – is to open access to the commons, the shared space beyond separations (real or imagined). At best, artists reach across boundaries, not create them. In the end, artists (I believe) are mirrors, not medics.

Kerri gave me this new adage for my collection (and I giggled): It’s not about the world noticing you. It’s about you noticing the world.

Filed under: Art, Creativity, The Direction of Intention, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

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