About

My name is Dave Rowley and I’m originally from Sydney, Australia. I’m currently living in Seattle with my wife Tina and our sons Finn and Fred.

For big chunks of my life I envied ‘Creative People’ and wished I could be like that.

I tried a whole range of creative pursuits, but I always compared my art to other people’s art, and it always fell short.

I felt like an uncreative, uninspired failure.

My biggest problem was that I listened to people who criticised, dismissed, and even laughed at my creative dreams.

Then I took those criticisms, dismissals, and the laughter and gave them all a home in my head.

I still did the art thing, but for a long time most of my art making was hidden from the world, like a shameful secret.

If you were close, like family close, you got to see it but no one else did.

Everything changed when I got a job as a Youth Project Worker in a Drug and Alcohol agency. This was a community organisation and the people I worked with believed in my creativity and encouraged me to bring that to my work.

Well, they kind of pushed me too.

Over the next seven years I got to do some amazing things.

I was sent on workshops and conferences on using art-based techniques in community education and got to partner up with actors, graffiti artists, musicians, dancers and circus trainers in my work with young people.

Because I was a Drug and Alcohol worker, the Young People who got sent to me were often labelled as problems and were pretty resentful at being identified in this way. Of course they were.

Once we began working together, and they realized they could just drop everything and throw themselves into being creative, amazing things happened.

Seeing such incredible shifts in the young people was a revelation to me. I wanted that for myself too, and decided to immerse myself in creativity, and make that the guiding force in my life.

I spent the next few years taking as many different workshops and classes as I could–Painting, Drawing, Butoh, Playback Theatre, Clowning, Movement Classes, Impro, Writing / Poetry groups.

I wasn’t great at any of these things, but that just made it better. Every little thing I got right seemed like a mini-epiphany, and every little thing I got wrong was just something I hadn’t got right yet. I learned the joy of just hanging out with my creative self.

One thing I found out is that I don’t actually care if I’m not the greatest cartoonist, writer, actor, or dancer (just as well!).

I’d love to be really good at even one of those things, but it’s not necessary.

Not even close to necessary.

The whole reason I got so little joy from creative activities in my earlier life was that I was always playing the comparison game.

When I worked with young people and saw those great shifts occurring, it wasn’t because they just found out they were spontaneously brilliant at some art-form.

It was because they were fully engaged with something new and alive, and it touched something new and alive in them.

For a few hours, or moments, they got to drop off all the bullshit expectations that were being placed on them, and claim permission to just be themselves.

Even if being themselves was a bit prickly and awkward.

Prickly and awkward, I can still relate to that.

Other things I learned:

I want to keep trying new and creative experiences and learn more about myself as a result.

My idea of creativity can expand to include relationships, parenting, self-care.

It’s possible to dive deeper into my life through a daily creative practice.

I want hang out at my creative edges, and help other people do that too.

I believe we are all inherently creative and that it’s important to dive into that as a way of being fully engaged with life.

I believe it about me and I believe it about you. Even if we haven’t met yet.

In which case–Hi! I’m Dave.