Rich Aubin
"My Dad the Creator"
by Danielle Aubin
The most creative person I know is my Father. My Dad is a creator. For the first third of his life my Dad was a musician and a pre-med college student. He traveled around the country with long brown hair in a pony tail illegally living in warehouses and sleeping in his car when necessary (which apparently was often). He ended up falling in love with the arts and learned glass blowing, metal arts, architecture, painting and printmaking in colleges spanning from Louisiana to California (not very surprising considering his “home” had wheels). He eventually settled in California and he had to start making money so he could eat so he settled on being an electrical contractor. So he eventually had to cut off his hair (although some of it got ripped out from an incident with a table saw which I assume sped up the process) and met my Mom.
They eventually got married which I guess wasn’t all that creative but they did buy a house. Not really a house more like a shack in west Marin on a road that was only half paved and surrounded by trees infamous for landing on people’s houses. Then they proceeded to get into ferocious debt with my father’s most creative idea yet, to design and build a real house. He drew up the architectural drafts and went over different designs in his mind. His brainstorming eventually led him to the final result, a three story wood shingled home with a master bedroom upstairs and a basement below. After 6 months of living in a one story shack, my Dad started to build.
A couple years later my Dad had built most of the house but ran out of money which left the upstairs master bedroom without flooring (just floor boards) and the downstairs basement with concrete floors. Aside from the unfinished elements, the house was beautiful. My Dad created a living room with at least a 20 foot high ceiling and huge windows overlooking the wilderness outside. After that, my father busied himself with supporting his family and building smaller things on this side like a bunk bed for my sister and a wooden dresser for me. Later on in life my parents left my father’s created home. They moved to a rented place without the possibility of my Dad’s creative architectural skills. When all looked like the era of my creating Dad was coming to a close, something remarkable happened. His days rapidly filled up with art classes and my parent’s basement filled up with paintings, encaustic wax portraits, prints of all shapes and sizes, sketches and even some inventions related to his work (some even patent worthy).
I cannot think of anyone more creative than my Dad. Even if he stayed in the Pre-med program at his school, he still would have been a creative person. I have never met another person so driven to create as if it is the only way for them to share how they feel or leave their mark on the world. It is a form of communication and to my Dad it would seem the most important one. My Dad went to school to become a doctor, left with an art degree and ended up being an electrician for most of his life. Now he is an artist again...
or maybe he always was.