Inspiration and L-Shaped Scars

 

It happened so fast.

I was leaving my painting class on Monday. In addition to all of my painting gear (supply toolbox, an extra bag with my palette, my school tote) I had a large (28″x30″) wooden box Doug made me to carry my wet paintings, with my most recent project inside. Not only that, my teacher had handed back two of our previous paintings to carry home. This was good news; I needed to photograph all of my work this weekend for my Marylhurst portfolio, due next week. I was getting them back just in time. The bad news was that my arms were full. Sarah had borrowed my car and was coming to pick me up. Although she pulled the car up to the curb so I wouldn’t have to walk all the way to the parking lot, I still had to schlep a lot of stuff down two flights of stairs and out to the car. Of course, I was in a hurry and moving too fast. Plus, it was raining.

I reached the car in one trip. Worried that my paintings were getting wet, I leaned everything against the car as I opened the back hatch door to our Subaru. Something about the movement of the lifting door knocked over my wooden painting box. It landed on top of one of my finished paintings, cutting a 2″ by 2″ L-shaped hole in the middle of my canvas.

I was just so sick. Sarah heard me gasp and ran to join me.

“Mom, what happened?”

“My painting . . .” I was close to tears, but there was nothing either of us could do. The damage was done. We loaded everything up and got back in the car. I was impatient to get home, to BE home so I could try to find a way to undo the damage I had done. I forced myself to drive the speed limit.

Not only was this  one of three paintings I still needed to photograph as proof of my painting skills, it was also my favorite of all the artwork I’ve done. It was an interesting assignment. We’d been asked to create a composite image of different faces. We could either create a new face, Frankenstien-like, by cobbling together images of different eyes and lips and noses and ears, or we could create a collage of different people. When I started working on the assignment weeks ago, I thumbed through countless magazines, looking for interesting images. I was frustrated to discover that most of the people in my magazines were 20-something, caucasian, and apparently born without pores or wrinkles. There were very few men. No people of color. No one over about 27 years old. It was really disheartening. And these weren’t exclusively glossy fashion magazines; these were a selection of travel and lifestyle publications. I suddenly had my focus. I wanted to paint a portrait with as many different skin tones I could find and that I could reasonably paint. I tracked down the photograph of a striking African-American woman, a laughing asian girl, and a middle eastern woman, her eyes peering out from a bright orange scarf. These faces I layered over one of the airbrushed image of a model with  pale white skin and pink lips.

The painting came together almost without effort, almost like magic. I didn’t so much paint it as watch the faces appear under my brush. I loved mixing the different skin tones, looking for undertones of purple, green, blue, coral. I spent three hours painting the first ebony-skinned face. The second face came in 30 minutes, the third face in 15 minutes, the last face, 10. Both the process and the outcome amazed and delighted me. I fell in love with these four women while painting them.

And then, I wrecked it. An L-shaped tear marred the cheek of the African-American face, the one that had taken me hours, not minutes, to paint.

When I got home, I dropped my bags in the doorway and sped to my computer, searching the Internet for “How to repair a tear in a canvas.” Mercifully, there were several sites that offered suggestions. Some of them advocated techniques that were probably used by Da Vinci and Michelangelo and involved rabbit skin glue or something. But there was another site that suggested gluing another piece of canvas to the back with good old Elmer’s. After pressing the area with a heavy book (I continue to find uses for my 2,096-page Riverside Shakespeare), I went back the next day to repaint the area. I started tentatively, dabbing paint lightly, trying to match the color. It didn’t work. The original brush strokes, which had come from somewhere deeper than my hand, were freer, more graceful. Now, it looked awful. A tale of woe spun itself in my head.  I had not only ruined this painting, I had lost the connection to whatever force had helped me paint it. I’d screwed it up and couldn’t get it back. I’d also ruined my portfolio. I set down my brush and tried to imagine how long it would take me to paint something else, anything else.

As often happens, it was only when I gave up trying so hard to fix everything, to make it happen right now that I found a way to pick up my brush again. What was the worst thing that could happen?  Ruin the painting? Oh wait, I’d already done that. I decided to see if I could just focus on the color and texture of the woman’s face, to see if I could find the undertones of purple, of blue, of green.

I’d like to say that it came out perfectly, that it looks as good as new. It doesn’t. There is still a faint depression in the surface of the canvas I can feel if I run my finger over it. If I hold the canvas in a certain light, I can see the L-shaped scar. But wasn’t that what I was trying to say anyway with my painting? That women don’t all look airbrushed, wrinkle-free and young? Some of us have  a few L-shaped scars that take more than a patch of canvas and a little Elmer’s glue to repair. Sometimes the scars show. For better or worse, this is what I will turn in next week with my portfolio.

This was also a lesson in trust. I need to believe that whatever inspiration I received  when I created the painting in the first place wasn’t just a freak accident, a one-time event. It  will come again. There will be other paintings. There will be enough.This is, in fact,  my new painting mantra. There is enough—enough paint, enough time, enough inspiration, enough support.  Enough.

 

The Content of Experience

It was exactly five weeks ago today that I left my first sculpture class in a snit. I was so upset I wrote about it in a blog post (“What I Intend, And What I Get”) decrying the fact that my teacher wasn’t going to provide me any structure for the class or our projects other than one simple but important question: “What do you want to say with your art?”

For the past five weeks, I’ve worked with that question while learning how to bend wire, shape foam, and saw wood. Today, we turned in our projects and had our final critiques. I thought it was a good time to share the outcome of that process.

After playing around with a number of ideas in my sketchbook, I decided I wanted to create something that would reflect where I see the bend in my life. Having just hit the 50-year-old mark, I can reflect on the forces that have molded my life into the shape it is now, as well as look forward to what I want to do with the next fifty years of my life. If I were fortunate enough to live for 100 years, what would I have to show for the time? In the back of my mind, I remembered a music video of a song by the group Five for Fighting. It had the word “fifteen” in the lyrics and I remembered that it followed the stages of a boy’s life, from the time he’s fifteen, then through the decades of his life. It wasn’t the progression through the years that made me think of it, however, but the image of an enormous oak tree with a spreading canopy I remembered from the video. I vaguely recalled the boy climbing the tree and knew I had the image I wanted. Not the boy. The tree. I looked up the video to make sure I wasn’t misremembering, and there it was: an old oak tree, beautiful in all its gnarled, twisted strength. It was only then that I noticed the name of the song: “100 Years.” Apparently there are no new ideas, just new people who think they’ve thought of them for the first time.

I liked the idea of the tree representing both my past and my future, with roots grounding me to my experiences and branches reaching toward opportunity, but I wanted to illustrate what my life has been grounded in. That idea came quickly as well: books. Although the whole “Book of Knowledge” idea could become cliche, in my case it seemed absolutely accurate. I honestly don’t know what my life would have looked like without the inspiration from books.

Knowing what I wanted to do, and knowing how to do it were two entirely different things, however.

I started with the “book” element. After talking with my teacher, I decided to create it out of plaster and he gave me a quick plastering tutorial. First I carved the shape into a block of purple insulation foam board, which was . . . what is the technical term? . . . fun. The only thing that was more fun was to cover the shape with plaster. Remember when we were in grade school and covered an inflated balloon with strips of newspaper slathered in glue? It was a lot like that, only I loaded my plaster on strips of used dryer sheets. I can’t tell you how excited I was finally to discover a use for those things.

Once it all dried into a somewhat lumpy mess, I  sanded and filed the thick plaster into a more refined “book” shape, I decided to cover the plaster surface with excerpts from books that have been important to me. I didn’t want to rip into my actual books, of course, so I scanned pages from about two dozen books, including work by Wallace Stegner and William Stafford, Madeleine L’Engle and Nathanial Hawthorne. I copied out a soliloquy from Hamlet and a quote by Martha Graham. I had the dictionary pages that listed the definitions of the words “story,” “psychology,” and “art.” I scanned the chart from a book on optimal experience called Finding Flow, which came from a chapter called “The Content of Experience.” When I read that phrase, I knew I had the title for my piece of art. This, then, would represent the content of my own experience, and what had gone in to making me, well, me.

Next, to create the tree. I started with 100 lengths of aluminum wire, one for each year of my potential life. They were mercifully soft and bendy and I could twist them with my fingers. Because aluminum is so soft and bendy, however, I used a length of brass rod as structural support for the wire, which I shaped into a more graceful, natural tree-like form with the aid of two enormous, wrench-like tools that were almost too heavy for me to lift. I felt mighty and competent bending the stubborn rod to my will. After achieving the shape I wanted, I twisted the 100 pieces of wire around the rod, creating a web of roots, a strong trunk, and reaching, supple branches.

Next came the task of putting the two elements together, connecting the roots of the tree to the book, actually piercing the surface of the pages so the roots could dig in. I spent an entire afternoon playing with the branches, creating the canopy of the tree.

Finally, I mounted the whole thing on a board I painted black, providing the “table” the on which the book could rest. Finally, it was done. I figured I had spent a total of about 30 hours on the project. Here’s the finished piece that I took to class today for my critique.

So what did I learn from the project?

• That working in three-dimensions is a revealing experience. All sides of the art piece are important and say different things. It gave me a much different perspective on . . . perspective.
• That sticking your hands into thick, creamy plaster is a delicious experience.
• That you are as powerful as the tools you know how to use.
• That you should never wear black pants on the day you are carving purple insulation foam.

Most importantly, however, I practiced working a little bit ahead of myself, throwing an idea out in front of me, and trusting that the information, tools and materials I needed would somehow show up for the job. It took one hissy-fit, a fair amount of trust and patience, and about 30 hours of messing around to figure out my first sculpture. I’m happy for now.

At least until next week, when we start our next project. I’m not making any promises.

A Still Life of a Still Life

I’m so excited about the assignment in my painting class this week. We are supposed to paint a still life of objects that somehow represent our lives. There weren’t many “rules” other than that there needed to be three or more items, one of which was some sort of photograph of ourselves.

I’ve always liked and admired still life paintings. In college, while on an overseas study abroad program in England and The Nederlands, I visited world-class museums for the first time–the National Gallery and the Tate in London, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. I was overwhelmed and in awe as I wandered in front of art by all the masters, but I developed a special place in my heart for still life paintings. I still have, hanging on my living room wall, the framed print of a Dutch still life I carted home in my suitcase thirty years ago. The artist was not well-known, and I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know his name. I do, however, see his still life almost every day of my life. I included a photograph of it at the start of this post, so now you’ve seen it too.

Traditionally, a still life, as you probably know, was an artistic depiction of commonplace items, either natural—such as flowers, fruit, shells, food, stones—or crafted—such as books, musical instruments, jewelry, vases, pipes or dishes.  Many of the items carried symbolic meaning and and the paintings themselves often served as a source of enrichment or focus of meditation. One particular subset of still lifes, called vanitas, included items that focused the viewer on the transitoriness of life. Images of human skulls, overripe fruit, wilting flowers, insects, hourglasses, and candles (sometimes with their flames extinguished) would serve as a meditation on the fact that, well, life is short.

There are many wonderful examples of still life paintings.. Here are a few:

One by Paul Cezanne. He called it Black Marble Clock, but I also see a coffee cup and the remains of a meal.

 

 

 

 

 

This one an example of a vanitas still life by Pieter Claesz. Notice the skull and timepiece.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another one by Picasso. I see a violin, a journal and some fruit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I set out to create a still life for my own painting, I went to my journal to think about what I wanted to create. In doing so, I had my answer.

Most mornings, I crawl out of bed in the dark. I stumble downstairs and nearly blind myself with the kitchen light so I can see to start the coffee maker. While it brews, I feed our dog, Abby, and take her for a brief walk down the street. She is almost as bleary-eyed as I am. By the time I return, my coffee is ready and I head for my favorite chair in the living room, a comfy wingback by the fireplace with an ottoman and everything. I light the fireplace, light a candle, and drop into my chair. I sip my coffee and pull out my black Moleskine journal and my favorite Waterman fountain pen. For the next half hour to 40 minutes, I write or sketch in my journal. Sometimes I’ll meditate, and sometimes, I’ll just sit quietly and listen to the whirr of the furnace, notice the smell of my coffee, or watch as the world outside my window lights up with pink sun. I am still. This is my still life.

It seems like such a little thing, really, a short time spent quieting my mind and my pace long enough to listen for the voice that tells me where I should go, what I should do. But this still life of mine is crucial for my sanity, my sense of contentment, and my confidence. Plus, I think my family notices that I’m less crabby after I’ve taken this time to breathe.

It was, therefore, a no-brainer to decide to paint a still life of my still life. I pulled together the necessary elements: coffee in a cup, a candle, my journal and fountain pen. I grabbed a couple of other objects that are also meaningful to me (see my blog post “The Symbols We Live”). I also included the picture of myself as my instructor requested. I draped a couple of table cloths over a box on my kitchen table and set up my little tableau. Doug was gracious enough to use his photographic skills to take a picture of my collection. Here is the result.

I love how this turned out and am excited to paint it. One of the most enjoyable parts of the whole project, however, was assembling the objects. A still life provides so much room for symbolism and metaphor, which makes it a perfect exercise for art journaling. Creating a personal still life and taking a photograph of it, even with a simple camera like the one in most cell phones, is an illuminating art journaling exercise. It’s creative, playful, and usually requires items that you already have around your house.

Try it for yourself. Make a still life of any aspect of your life. Maybe it’s how you like to cook, or your passion for golf or  water polo, or your role as a parent. Or, like me, you can do something to represent your own “still life.” Take a picture and print it out if you can. Paste it in your journal. You can spend a few minutes writing about the objects that appear in your arrangement. How do these objects speak to you? What are they saying?

Listen.

Bartering for Loveliness

There’s an advantage to being forthright about your passions: people find opportunities to feed them. This week, my daughter Sarah, while doing an English assignment, came across a poem by Sara Teasdale she thought I might enjoy. Not that she cared at all about the poem, of course. She just thought I would like it.

And I did. I wasn’t that familiar with Teasdale’s work. I knew she was a poet because I’ve come across her name frequently in crossword puzzles. But knowing the spelling of her name is about as close as I’d come to reading anything by her.

The poem was “Barter.” The first line is a stunner:  “Life has loveliness to sell.”

It’s an intriguing idea. We all want lovely, meaningful moments in our lives, but what cost would we pay to get them? Teasdale offers an answer: anything and everything. The last stanza of Teasdale’s poem reads:

Spend all you have for loveliness,

Buy it and never count the cost;

For one white singing hour of peace

Count many a year of strife well lost,

And for a breath of ecstasy

Give all you have been, or could be.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the cost of following one’s passion. It’s been a while since I’ve been stretched this thin. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve had a lot on my plate. In addition to spending time in art classes and on art homework, I made a commitment to speak to a group of people about writing life stories, which took a fair amount of time to prepare for. Plus, my application for the art therapy program at Marylhurst was due last Tuesday. It had about 10 different parts to it, including three pieces of writing. And, of course, I wanted to keep up with my weekly blog posts.

In addition, Sarah had swim meets each week for which Doug and I were timers. Then the sump pump in our basement broke when we were having record rains in Oregon. Last week, Sarah hurt her back diving and needed to see the doctor. Then our college student daughter Kate called and said she’d like to come home for the weekend (hurray!)—and that she’d like to bring five friends with her. “Absolutely,” I said, and tracked down air mattresses and towels and stocked up on pizza and chips. Not to be left out, Sarah said she’d like to have two of her friends join the slumber party. Doug and I looked at each other. Two more people wouldn’t make a difference. They were all great kids—all nine of them. I didn’t want to say no, regardless of how busy I was.

And that’s the point. All these demands that threatened to overload my life were things I had invited on purpose because I loved them. Well, that’s not strictly true; I could live without the sump pump repair. But all the rest—art classes, art homework, writing, teaching, parenting—are types of loveliness I would happily spend all of my emotional and physical capital to obtain.

There is a cost, of course. I had to let some things go. Actually, I had to let a lot of things go.  Here’s a partial list:

• Cooking (Not necessarily a bad thing, in my case). We’ve eaten a lot of Costco casseroles.
• Cleaning my house (Poor Doug. He’s been vacuuming like a wild thing.)
• Reading for pleasure. I can’t tell you the last time I got lost in a good mystery or read a magazine. This is quite a departure for me.
• Sleep
• Getting my hair cut. I finally raided Sarah’s stash of elastics and bobby pins just to keep my hair out of my face while I’m painting.
• Shopping for anything—groceries, dish soap, cute shoes.

So, I ask myself, is it worth it? What am I hoping to gain from  my crammed schedule, the barely-keeping-up-with-everything pace, and my shaggy hair? My answer? I’m getting the loveliness life has to sell. There was a moment last weekend when I was sitting in our living room working on a drawing assignment. I was deeply absorbed in my work, but occasionally I’d catch a conversation between Kate and her friends discussing their classes, their friendships, or their futures.  I heard the laughter of Sarah and her friends from the other room. Doug was in the kitchen, mixing another batch of dough to turn into cinnamon rolls or a loaf of ciabatta bread, which I would later eat with too much butter.

These are the moments worth having, for which I will barter quite a lot. The ironing and dusting can wait. We can eat Costco casseroles. I’ll catch up on sleep when I can. I’ve paid for these moments, and I plan to enjoy them.