Create: Day 70
April 10, 2011 
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Day 70
Have a Moses moment.
Grandma Moses painting, Sugaring Off, 1955, sold for over a million dollars.
No, not the Biblical Moses…Grandma Moses. Everyone’s heard of her, the spry coot famous for her paintings of old-time American country life (who,also, incidentally, influenced The Beverly Hillbillies character of “Granny,” aka Daisy Moses).
Anna Mary Moses, before she was the Grandma Moses, gave birth to ten kids (five died), and was a farmer’s wife. She made a little money on the side by churning butter and selling home-made potato chips to neighbors. She loved to embroider, but had to give it up when she got arthritis.
And it was only because those 70-some-year-old aching fingers couldn’t hold a needle that she picked up a paintbrush.
She was selling her paintings for $2 (small size) and $3 (large) at a local drugstore when a collector happened across them.
And then? Fame. Fortune. And an amazing output of 3600 canvases in the thirty years until she died at the age of 101. In 2004, one of her paintings sold for $1.2 million dollars. In “My Life’s History” Grandma Moses wrote:
“I look back on my life like a good day’s work, it was done and I feel satisfied with it. I was happy and contented, I knew nothing better and made the best out of what life offered. And life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.”
There’s more to this lesson than the idea that you might find fame and fortune well into your seventh decade. That’s not, after all, what Anna Moses was looking for.
She simply loved creative expression and when she could no longer express herself through embroidery, she switched to another medium.
How many of us might have groused, at age 70, that we were to old to learn another art form? How many of us never even try a creative endeavor that’s new?
Today, make a list of creative ventures you’ve never tried, and decide to give at least one of them a go. Write a song, tell a story, pick up an embroidery needle. If you must, wait until the next Creative Sunday to do this. But please, don’t wait until you’re seventy or eighty. The world may need more than 3600 of your paintings.
Here’s an interesting website, that offers lists of things people have done at your age. Check it out: Museum of Conceptual Art
Create Month 3
What to do so far:
In case you missed a day, the reminders below are clickable.
Turn unproductive activity into creativity.
Kill the angel and tell the truth.
Try ephemeral art.
Take a road trip.
Implement the 7 habits of creative people.
Don’t wait for inspiration.
Avoid online undermine.
Create somthing new at any age…success might follow.
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