Scissor Happy

At age three, I got my hands on my first pair of scissors. They went straight to my hair and made a rainbow shape in my bangs. I have a vague memory of staring in the floor-length mirror and being haloed in gauzy afternoon light. No angels were singing, but my heart thumped with pride at the transformation I made with my own little paws. As I wandered into the living room though, my mom’s look of shock let me know I had crossed a line. What followed was a stern talking to and a new understanding that “we don’t do that.”

That didn’t stop me, however, from doing it again when I was four. On a dare from my friends Chris and Mikey, I not only cut my bangs straight up to the hairline, but also made holes in my She-Ra, Princess of Power, nightgown. I loved that nightgown, but loved the thrill of the dare more. This time it was Debby, my mom’s friend (Chris and Mikey’s mom), who discovered my new do. She shrieked when I entered the kitchen, mortified that this had happened on her watch. She then mortified me with, “Wait ’til I tell your mother.” Somewhere in my brain, the wires of ‘thrilling,’ ‘creativity,’ and ‘terror’ must be braided together—an inner hairdo.

It’s only in writing this essay that I realize how obsessed I was with both scissors and hair growing up. All my barbies eventually sported crew cuts, their shiny nylon locks tossed in the trash. My My Little Ponies lost their pink and purple tails. After being called ‘gorilla’ in sixth grade for being hairier than most other girls, I used scissors to cut away all the fur from my arms (shocking my mom, once again). Fast forward to a bleak New Hampshire winter night junior year in college. What started as a “little trim” to procrastinate on writing a paper ended up with me lopping my tresses from the middle of my back into a self-given pixie cut. The next morning, I went to the barber to have my head shaved. It was the only way to even it out.

But hair wasn’t the only object of my scissorly attention. Latch-hooking, paper cut-outs, and collage all captured my creative focus over the years. In all these instances of clipping, shortening and taking away, I was making room for something new—a fresh look, a surprising combination, an emotional response and connection with others.

Recently, I’ve found sweet satisfaction in blending painting and collage together. It started about a year ago when I was using glassine paper as a disposable palette for acrylic paints. Once the paint dried, I was left with bulgy blobs of color in raucous combinations. At first, I’d just throw the psychedelic palette away. But always with a little twinge. It felt like a waste of a ton of gorgeous paint! Finally, it occurred to me I could cut out the shapes of color and move the pieces around on the canvas like a paint-by-placement kind of thing. Talk about freedom!

I suddenly felt more playful and daring in how I brought colors together. Combos I might’ve thought tacky before suddenly popped and shimmered in my mind. Neon pink next to soft-serve brown hovering next to squiggly lines of black? Mmmm. Hmmm.

Once the color cut-outs were glued down, I’d then paint around them and over them, placing them in a larger field of color and introducing rhythm with dots and dashes. As a coherence emerged, I started to see natural forms suspended in intangible substance—the visual world infused with invisible force. These pieces seemed to explore what it would look like if we could truly see the pulsing of the world that sustains us—the force that keeps the green leaves unfurling, the tides turning and the blood coursing in our veins.

Once I finished one of these paintings, I’d have another palette filled with color…which was then the start of a whole new piece. I could do this forever!! An infinite kaleidoscope of dazzling hues giving birth to each other.

Maybe this, in a nutshell, is what creativity is—the unceasing flow in which life generates life; ideas generate ideas; and love generates love. Perhaps this is why practicing creativity is a key element in the constellation of happiness—we become, for a moment, a vessel of life’s infinite generosity.