Lets Get Creative – Hungering for Creative Experience by Cynthia Julian

In my creative journey recently, I have been traveling down business lane, reviewing options for producing prints of my art work and methods for sharing them with the world.

I am aware of the irony involved in this undertaking. As with many aspects of life, opposing forces must be held in tension on the journey.  I make art work by hand as a way to keep creativity and individual expression alive in the face of the homogenizing force of our visual culture’s global communication systems.  Yet, ironically, those very systems are the mechanism to share my individual creative expressions!

I recently read a Facebook a joke about art journaling. The gist was “why buy something for $7 when you can make it yourself for $76 worth of art supplies? It’s funny because it is true. Many people ‘liked’ the post but one responder hit the nail on the head when she commented that what we are after is not the product but the creative experience. Certainly, there is an art journaling market that has risen in response to this internal hunger.

Keeping a visual journal, or art journal, is a sanctuary for creative expression, a way to nourish the soul. It is one way we celebrate and express our lives and make our individual voices heard. We record a view of our lives, creating an individual cultural product in the process.

The photo above is an example that I created this week to commemorate the delight I felt at once again being blessed with heat, new tree leaves, the color of green, and the miracle of shade after a long cold winter. Summer felt like it had arrived in mid-Spring so I took time to lay in the grass, admire the green, and soak in the life giving energy of the sun.

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Cynthia A. Julian: artist, writer, teacher, woman of faith  and contemplative practitioner. It is my nature to create. I ‘discovered’ mixed media art journaling about four years ago. I practice art journaling because I find it satisfies my hunger to create and results in unique expressions of my life’s journey. Visit my website This Creative Journey, where this article was first posted to see a portfolio of some of my creations.