The Art of the Mess

To Tidy Or Not To Tidy

Behold! Little Bean’s craft desk!

What’s the common denominator between Little Bean and Einstein, Mark Twain, Steve Jobs, Picasso, Jason Pollock, Francis Bacon and Marc Chagall?

Give up? They are all brilliantly creative! That is, if brilliantly creative can be determined by how messy your studio or work desk is!

Because honestly, Little Bean’s craft desk gives Einstein a run for his money!

But there’s some science behind all this. (At least that’s what I’m going with!)

According to the American Psychological Association, a study found that working in a tidy room encourages people to do socially responsible, normatively "good" things like eat healthfully and give to charity.

Sounds good, I guess. But wait!

The study also found that working in a messy room helps artists be bold and try new things, and come up with creative ideas.

So on one hand, eat healthy! On the other, creative cool stuff!

Acclaimed British artist Francis Bacon’s studio as left upon his death in 1992. Very similar to Little Bean’s craft desk! Photo: Perry Ogden

She’s not exactly at Francis Bacon’s level yet, but keeping her crafts contained and somewhat ordered HAS been an issue. I’ve caught her doing the actual crafting sitting on the floor because her crafting table is overflowing and doesn’t have room up there. Add in all the rocks, books, notebooks and craft scrap and, well, you get the picture. She’s definitely closer to creative than eating healthy.

My wife insists there must be some medium where she can be tidy AND creative and I imagine that’s true. I don’t recall my childhood room being a disaster, though perhaps my mother would disagree? And my writing desk today is certainly neat and tidy.

But then again, creating words is an entirely different form of creativity than building costumes from scratch, which is what she does. So we’ll see.

Meantime, we work to keep her giant mounds of felt and string and beads and glue from tumbling out the windows. Einstein would likely approve.