Art? Poetry?

[0dan1]

I just wondered what sort of creative activities people here are involved in... not entirely sure if there's another topic about this. I am sorry if there is ><

Anyone write? poetry? draw? photography? =]

This is odd, but i have noticed that atheists i know are far more creative than religious people... =P

no idea if there is any grounding in that, just something i have observed.

But thats beside the point =]

Just interested, really =]

[MommaSquid]

I have no talent whatsoever, thanks for asking.   :?

We do have quite a few talented members here.  Hopefully they will share their stories and interests with you.

[McQ]

This is the perfect place to ask about that, as a matter of fact.  

And it is a great topic. I can't believe no one has thought about this yet! Nice one, 0dan1!

My family has quite a few folks with various talents. Some of them skipped a generation (mine), but my mother was a concert pianist. She also loved to paint and was very good. Two of my sons are very artistic. One is in a great art school in Baltimore, Maryland. The other is still young, but he is ranked (yeah they have competitions that place kids) as one of the best pianists in the state (Pennsylvania).

I have played percussion and acoustic guitar since I was about 8 years old. Mom made my brothers and I study two instruments. I'm not great, just passable. I also love theater and acting, and have been fortunate enough to be able to pursue that in addition to my real job.

I love to write, and got to write a screenplay for a short indie film, as well as some short comedy shows at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire.

But I really love photography, and have been gung ho with it for a while.
My photo gallery site is www.mcq.smugmug.com

So there's a start. How about all you other talented folks?

[rlrose328]

I'm a scrapbooker... I put photos on paper, along with metal charms, fibers, other papers, and miscellaneous embellishments, along with a substantial amount of typed journaling to talk about stories the pictures don't completely tell.  I always wanted to be creative, but no matter what I tried, it never really worked out.

I also write poetry and have used some in my scrapbooks.  I have a huge book of poetry that I wrote as an angst-ridden teen. Sad sappy stuff, that.

[Mister Joy]

I'm trying to get a couple of short stories published atm. I figure starting with short stories rather than novels is an easier way to build a reputation, although I have two novels under my belt (and a third that I'm working on). First is called The Good Host, narrated by a single parent librarian who's outwardly boring and uneventful existence covers some very perverse ambitions. The second is Noise. That's my favourite. It's another psychological horror, essentially, with traces of very cruel humour throughout. It's about an unhappy & slightly autistic American child growing up in Coventry (the ugliest city in Britain) who hears about the death of a deranged serial killer on the news and uses this to create an imaginary friend for himself. It follows on from there & everyone lives miserably ever after.

The one I'm writing now (very slowly) is called A Jar of Moon Beams. Another macabre tale but a bit more light-hearted than the previous two. It's supposed to be about a bloke who's just finished university but finds that he's wasted three years of his life to get himself nowhere, so he ends up finding a crappy job as a sales assistant in a small organic food store. His boss - who, upon first inspection, appears to be a typical vegan tree-hugging hippy - turns out to be a sexually promiscuous & thuroughly sadistic psychopath with a fetish for cannibalism. He befriends the protagonist but makes constant efforts to get him under his thumb (varying from obvious to very subtle). It generates an awkward working relationship, requiring constant negotiation and tweakage, as you can imagine. I'm not that happy with how it's going so far. Then again, I never am until they're completely finished, edited, et cetera.

My writing tends to be quite bleak & depressing. Even my protagonists aren't always that likeable, in fact they're often deeply unpleasant. I hate flawlessly moral people though & they're no fun to write.

Oh and I wrote a short school play once called Killers Anonymous (as in Alcoholics Anonymous but for mass murderers) for a house concert, which featured various characters from popular songs MacHeath/Mack the Knife from Kurt Weill's Die Moritat von Mackie Messer, o'course; Maxwell Edison from the Beatles song Maxwell's Silver Hammer (I was going to have the joy of playing this laid back, fun-loving chappie); Stagger Lee & Leroy Brown. There were three more but I invented them to account for other Hollywood psycho stereotypes. In the end, I decided not to give it to the drama department because I was occupied enough with GCSEs at the time.

[SteveS]

The only 'artistic' field I was ever involved in was music.  I grew up playing clarinet (classical) and saxophone (jazz).  I was in my school bands up through high school, but then quit playing as a member of any organization.  I did play open mikes in college with the clarinet, playing jazzy stuff or pop "interpretations".  We had a few guitar players, an electronic piano player, me, and a few vocalists that we shifted in/out on various evenings.  It was fun.  We used to get together in a dorm practice room to work out our stuff.

Improvisation did not come naturally for me, but after hacking around for a while I could place some instrumental fillers and take a few solos, but I wasn't going to really impress anyone - just enough to not embarrass myself completely!  It was a great time though, and a lot of fun.

Now I occasionally play my cheap keyboard and I'm trying to learn to play it better.  I did come into the possession of a very old Wurlitzer organ (two manuals and 1 octave on the foot pedals) that has a cool sound - I'm (slowly) learning to play parts of some of Bach's excellent organ music on it.  Again - I'm not going to impress anyone, and someone who can "really" play will blow me out of the water - but I do enjoy it.  It sounds nice and I enjoy the challenge of coordination that it requires.  I just don't have a whole lot of time to devote to practicing

[Simone]

I sing, dance, doodle, study, act, rant (lmao), nothing too out of the ordinary.

[pjkeeley]

I write, I also play bass guitar (and sometimes blues harp) in a band.

[donkeyhoty]

Oh and I wrote a short school play once called Killers Anonymous (as in Alcoholics Anonymous but for mass murderers) for a house concert, which featured various characters from popular songs  MacHeath/Mack the Knife from Kurt Weill's Die Moritat von Mackie Messer, o'course; Maxwell Edison from the Beatles song Maxwell's Silver Hammer (I was going to have the joy of playing this laid back, fun-loving chappie); Stagger Lee & Leroy Brown. There were three more but I invented them to account for other Hollywood psycho stereotypes. In the end, I decided not to give it to the drama department because I was occupied enough with GCSEs at the time.

If you wrote something like that here in the states you might just be referred for psychological counseling.  You know because, obviously, people with imaginations eventually shoot up schools.

[Mister Joy]

They don't really mind murder and mayhem in our schools. Some of the stories I've exhaled in the past have been purely to see exactly what I could get away with - making every effort to muster the most perverse, practically pornographic material imaginable - and through my extensive research it turns out that anything goes except for satirical criticism of the education system itself. That isn't taken lightly at all.

[Steve Reason]

I like writing poetry and photography. I think I'd be a fairly decent lyricist. What I really want to do is learn how to play piano. Music is my greatest love. I used to paint, which I was tolerable at. But I can't draw worth a damn. Oh yeah, I can juggle!  

[Tom62]

I love to draw and paint. Unfortunately I haven't been doing that for quite a while since most of my energy nowadays goes to my wife and my open source Java project.

[McQ]

I like writing poetry and photography. I think I'd be a fairly decent lyricist. What I really want to do is learn how to play piano. Music is my greatest love. I used to paint, which I was tolerable at. But I can't draw worth a damn. Oh yeah, I can juggle!  

Juggling....always good at parties. You never know when it will come in handy!

[McQ]

I love to draw and paint. Unfortunately I haven't been doing that for quite a while since most of my energy nowadays goes to my wife and my open source Java project.

Tom, it's always a good thing when your energy is directed toward your spouse. It keeps me out of a lot of trouble!

[lacey_sawyer]

I write a lot of poetry. Here's a poem I wrote when my husband and I were nearing a divorce:

THE ROAD TO NOWHERE

Inventorying the depths of hell,
Along the road to nowhere.
Sheltered only by the canopy of impending doom,
We pass hand in hand in motionless grace
Through mountains of fear and valleys of doubt.
A path that once took us to heaven,
Has become a long and perilous trek
From the gray of purgatory to the black of the night.
Our cries echo through the halls of eternity,
As does our pure and broken love.
A fork in the road and we part ways,
On our relentless search for nothing,
On our roads to nowhere.
There was nothing I’d rather have,
And nowhere is where I’d rather be,
Then by your side and in your heart.
Now nothing is what I have,
And nowhere is where I’m going, alone.