Artistic Imagination (3 minute read)

What was I thinking when I ordered that damn sculpture armature? The one that cost $180… and I really have no understanding of how to use it. I thought I could reinvent the wheel with it, and easily hollow-build a fairy standing on one leg. This morning, I had Michael take a video of me and the armature for an Instagram post. I gestured and ran my mouth about what an experiment it would be. I thought I would figure out how to use it in a unique way that would be so clever. That didn’t happen. It didn’t magically come together.

When I was a 10 year old kid, I had an idea about something magically coming together also.

It was the summer before 5th grade. We had been in Albany, GA for five months after my father’s work transferred us, and I hated it. We had moved from Nashville TN to a flat, hot, swampy place with mosquitoes. The house we bought had been vacant for several months, so the neighborhood boys used our yard for baseball… and continued to do so for a few weeks after we moved in. I hated them. I did make a few girl friends on the street, but I missed my girl posse from my Nashville community. (Especially my friend Char who lived down the street. Her older brother had a chopper, and we loved doing drawings of it with colored pencils.)

My mother had made a friend at church who came to visit and frequently brought her granddaughter along. This kid was 3 years younger than me, and we had precious little in common. I was an only child and I knew how to entertain myself. I loved riding my bike, and enjoyed the freedom of riding around the large neighborhood solo. I was also a voracious reader, and seldom complained of being bored. In fact, the 4th of July was coming up and I planned to decorate my bike and have a little parade down my street.

A slight damper was placed on my plans when I learned that my mom’s friend and her granddaughter were coming that day. That morning, I washed my bike, then decorated it meticulously with crepe-paper flowers. Since I had to put up with the little tagalong, I came up with the idea of making a patriotic poster for her to carry. I found a WWII poster in a history book depicting Uncle Sam, and used that as a guide. (As an aside, I loved making posters. I had made a poster about beautiful Nashville, Tennessee, to express my sorrow in leaving there.)

My sign proclaimed, “Uncle Sam wants YOU to have a Happy 4th of July!!!” My vision was that little Miss Tagalong would march quickly in front of me, announcing the coming of the single-bike float of the 4th of July parade. In my mind, I really believed that if I brought it out on my street, the neighbors of Whippoorwill Road would just know to throw their doors open, and clap and cheer from their front porches as I passed by. I could see it all in my head. I think I also imagined a patriotic soundtrack blasting loudly and magically out of thin air. I spent a lot of time living in my 10-year-old head that summer.

55 years later, and I still live in my head. This leads me to suspect that I have spent most of my life believing that my fantasies could come true. Wait a minute. I need to think about that statement. It feels like a sentence I just vomited out… and I’d be wise not to step in all that right now. There are folks that might like to use that against me.

But I think I’ll stand by it. Maybe, as an artist, it is my creativity in its purist form… wanting to bring imagination to reality.

Karen Adams. 2025