We recently connected with Ronald Gross and have shared our conversation below.

Ronald, appreciate you joining us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

Well, it’s been my pet project for a few years now and that is the “power of the crayon”. It came about a few years ago due to limited space I have to create within and just having kids around, I had to pivot from painting bigger pieces to drawings on paper. I was experimenting with tools like pencil, ink, and watercolor, but crayons really spoke to me. These colored wax sticks took me back to my childhood and the countless hours I spent drawing with them. I had an epiphany. I realized that crayons are the perfect tool to convince people who think they are not artists to think otherwise. To help with this, I developed an Instagram crayon journaling challenge called Crayonuary that I host every year. Seeing transformation in people who start to realize that drawing every day can be life-changing, holds a dear place in my heart.

Ronald, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’ve been creating art all my life. It’s been my religion, my therapy, and my salvation. I can’t go a week or two without it, there’s an unseen energy that compels me to create new art. I believe we are all born with the art of creation and that it’s essential for our spiritual growth. I don’t believe it’s just fine arts that move us, motivate us, and save us in some cases, it can be any craft, be it building cars, cooking, gardening, woodworking, playing music, dancing, etc.

I have this wonderful experience all the time and so do my wife and kids, who are all artists and exercise their craft all the time (their work can be seen at lindachido.com). It’s this notion that I want to share with the world.

Now granted I went to art school and learned art and craft on a more intensified level, but I always had a need to draw or create. My high school notebooks are littered with doodles and looking back I realize it was a form of meditation and a tool to relieve the stress I was experiencing in my teen years. I now do it almost every day and if it works for me, why can’t it work for others?

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

My goal is to expose as many people to the idea of self-artistic expression and how to use that as a daily practice for better living. The practice of daily crayon journaling, I feel is the simplest way into this.

By now you’re probably asking why crayons? Try to think back to when you were a young child. For most of us there was someone who gave us a box of crayons, be it a teacher, a parent, or a caretaker, and told us to simply draw. There were no expectations put on us, and we were free to express ourselves in marks, lines and colors. What we don’t realize was that even back then, we were making artistic choices like what color to draw with, drawing squiggles versus straight lines, and where to place the lines and marks on the paper or whatever other substrate we were given to draw on.

But then all of that changed. Our crayons were taken from us and replaced with a hard-leaded pencil and we were told to draw precise lines and make no mistakes. We were given a pencil with an eraser so you can remove a blemish or a misplaced mark. I think it was this moment in our lives that turned most of us to the idea that we are not artistic and away from self-expression. I believe introducing crayons back into the fold of the psyche allows us to go to that place of freedom of expression and start to draw again.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The most rewarding part of being an artist is two-fold for me. First, it is fulfilling the need for self-expression and a way for me to work out things that are cluttering up my consciousness. The freedom of creating and the joy of being in that space. The second is showing others my creations and seeing the joy that it brings them or at least inciting a conversation or feeling that they can experience from it.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://twelvesquared.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/im12squared/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/12squaredart
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ron-gross-b4042b1a1/
• Other: https://www.lindachido.com/ron-gross