Welcome to art for all, the Sketchbook Skool podcast. I'm your host, Danny Gregory. I am a sketchbook artist and I'm the author of a dozen or so books on art and creativity. I like to make things and I bet you do too. This need to make something can be a tenacious itch, clawing its way to be released into the world. You can try to forget it like an early summer mosquito bite refusing to scratch it. Aiming your mind elsewhere. Hoping it'll just go away. If you suppress it too often. Well, maybe you'll succeed in, in dulling your senses in refusing to heat that shrill in our call, you have managed to wrap yourself in a cocoon impervious detached. Congratulations. You can focus on what's important undistracted for now. Sometimes the reason you ignore that call is because you haven't yet found the right way to scratch it. Not every medium is right for every artist. For some reason, maybe it's physical or aesthetic. We may need to keep shopping for awhile until we find the right instrument. Bassoon players are somehow different from conga. Drummers dancers are different from printmakers. You need to find your perfect groove. A few years, I visited creative growth in Oakland, California. It's an amazing hive of artistic activity or coming from people with various disabilities. I'll never forget the energy in that room with dozens of artists. Working all day, every day, making paintings and sculptures and ceramics and mosaics and prints. It was overwhelming and beautiful creatively. These people seem to have no disabilities or challenges. They've all found their groove. When we visited the American visionary art museum in Baltimore, I re-encounter heard an artist who I'd met at creative growth a few years before. Judith Scott was born deaf and mute. And with an IQ of 30, she was also a twin. When she was seven, she was sent away to an institution. She was separated from her sister who wasn't disabled and because of her low IQ, Judith wasn't given any training of any kind she's hooked. She has sat there and, and festered neglected. Alone. And for 35 years in the institution, her sister Joyce managed to spring Judith and bring her home to live with her. And soon Judith started going to creative growth, but at the start she could not connect. She had no apparent interest in drawing or painting, just doodling, aimless, scribbles, and a little more. She didn't speak. So no one knew what she needed to take off. Then one day Judith wandered into a class given by a textile artist named Sylvia 70. She saw the skins of yarn and spools of thread, and suddenly she found her passion. But instead of following the projects that Sylvia was leading, the rest of the class through Judith began to make our own sort of art, something radical and new. She wrapped objects in yarn and cloth binding them together into cocoons and nests and complex interconnecting forms. Much of our arts seem to be about connection and twins, binding together networks and forms into a powerful, and non-verbal emotional message. I can look at her work for ages, following the colors and lines and somehow feeling something so sweet and strong and comforting. I'm not the only person who responded to Judith's art. Her work is in the permanent collection of several museums. And it's been the subject of books and films and gallery shows. She made hundreds of amazing pieces in the last two decades of her life. Judith passed away in 2005. She'd live to be 61, which is extraordinary for a person with down syndrome. I like to believe that her art and her sister's love kept her going. I love Judith story because familiar to me, you can identify with what it must've felt like to go from being abandoned in institution to suddenly seeing the light. Discovering what's medium voice are complex and expressive and how easily she might never have found her medium and remained mute and locked down. Judith didn't have the ability to wander through an art supply store museum to troll the web and to find her groove. True love. Doesn't just appear. You have to keep your eyes open and look out for it just because you don't yet know how to scratch it. Don't ignore that itch. Thanks for joining me today. I'll make something new for you again next week until then Danny Gregory.