The Red Flock

I thought I had a great idea. As is often the case, however, having a great idea is one thing. Making it happen is quite another.

We were coming close to the end of my sculpture class which, as I have written previously (in “What I Intend and What I Get”), has challenged me in new and sometimes painful ways. This was the second of only two projects created during the entire term, and it had only one requirement: it had to be kinetic. In other words, it had to move. Our teacher showed us examples of other kinetic sculptures, things that had motors and gears and parts that required lots and lots of welding, none of which I felt anywhere close to being capable of building myself. I turned instead to the other example of moving sculpture powered not by machines but by nature: mobiles. I loved the way mobiles were animated by nature, a gentle wind blowing the objects into different shapes. I’d studied the mobile sculptures made famous by Alexander Calder. I’d seen a few in person at galleries, and I’d always loved them.

This is when I had my great idea. I’d often been fascinated watching a flock of seagulls collecting and hovering over water. Although made up of hundreds of individuals birds, they created a vision of a larger, organized body. The swirling, snow globe of a flock of gulls was beautiful to watch. It was the graceful movement of the flock I wanted my sculpture to represent. How hard could it be to create a mobile simulating a circling swirl of birds?

Of course, it was very hard. I spent three weeks working on the project—twisting wire, adding weights, tweaking the design—and nothing seemed to work. After about 30 hours of struggling with it, I asked my teacher, Michael, to talk through what was and wasn’t working about the project. He was sympathetic and a good listener. He did not, however, give me any straightforward solutions. Instead, he offered two ideas for me to ponder.

Idea #1:

“None of your work is ever wasted.” Reassuring, especially since I had already invested so much time in a project that wasn’t working.

Idea #2:

“I sometimes find it helpful to listen to the art to find out what it is trying to say.” Listen to the art? What if it didn’t have anything to say? My mobile was absolutely silent, and didn’t seem to have anything to say to me at all.

I decided to start over, to see if I could find a project that was willing to be a little more chatty. I made the decision with a fair amount of panic because the project was due in less than two weeks. Doug and I walked through the aisles of several hardware stores, trying to come up with ideas. I was listening for all I was worth.

Silence. All I heard was the sound of time ticking away.

But then Doug noticed that our local Ace Hardware was selling an old hardware display. It was a huge plywood panel filled with about 300 different sample springs—different sizes, different shapes, different types. I decided it was speaking to me. I didn’t know what it was saying yet, but I bought it. I cut off all the springs and spread them out on our kitchen table. For a week I played with the springs, dividing them into different families, experimenting with their shapes. A full week, just playing and trying to listen.

I decided that I needed the springs to work with something else.  I bought a piece of plywood. I took a straight edge and a pencil and drew a bunch of randomly shaped triangles. Doug helped me cut them into pieces.

Then came a LONG period of experimentation, messing around with springs and triangles. I spent a lot of time talking myself out of frustration and panic, telling myself to listen to what the art wanted to do, telling myself that all the experimentation wasn’t a waste of time. It was like building a house of cards. Just when I thought I’d figured it out, the whole thing would fall to pieces. Slowly—ever so slowly—the sculpture started to take shape. I played with the force of the springs themselves to hold the wood together. I worked to find the way the shapes balanced each other. I painted the wood pieces and assembled it again. It held together by the power of the springs without fasteners or glue.

When I stood back to look at it again, I realized with a growing sense of amazement and joy that my sculpture reminded me of a flock of red birds.

Perhaps my idea wanted to express itself after all. Maybe, just maybe, all those hours spent spinning my wheels wasn’t wasted.

Just like Michael said.

 

The Things We Carry

Maybe it’s just me, but when I was little I was fascinated by air travel. It seemed like such a romantic pursuit to me. People actually dressed up to fly—men in suits, women in Jackie Kennedy dresses and matching sets of luggage.

I was in college when I took my first solo trip by plane, coming home for Thanksgiving after my first term away. I flew from Portland to Denver in the middle of one of the worst blizzards ever. We were in a holding pattern over Denver for three hours. It was not a romantic trip. My second flight was the next year when I flew from Denver to England, meeting up with my study abroad group in London. My flight was cancelled at the last minute (a very harrowing experience for both my mother and me) and I was rerouted through Chicago. I didn’t know how to read my boarding pass when we changed planes and I decided that my best resource was a very chic young woman sitting in the waiting area. She was stunning, wearing a wool dress with matching jacket and pumps. She was also kind, helping me figure out my boarding pass and chatting with me while we waited. She told me she was flying to London to meet her fiance who was a banker or something. I suspected she’d materialized from the pages of a novel. My suspicions were confirmed when she opened her toiletries case, a very smart hard-sided leather box that, looking back, was probably Louis Vuitton. There was a mirror attached to the hinged lid which she used to reapply her lipstick.

I was entranced. I figured that someday, when I was a real grown-up, I would fly to London to visit my hypothetical fiance, and I would carry a beautiful travel case in which my jewelry and makeup would be carefully arranged.

I did make it back to London many years later. I actually got engaged on the trip. Somehow, the beautiful travel case didn’t materialize, but the allure of owning one never went away. Little did I know that it would take a painting assignment and a trip to the Goodwill Outlet store to make my dream come true.

Our final assignment for my class was to do a painting on a 3-D object. It could be anything, as long as the meaning of the object was reflected in the painting. Feeling stumped, I visited the Goodwill Outlet store in town, a huge warehouse with giant, rolling bins crammed with assorted cast-offs: clothes, tools, appliances, toys. I wandered the aisles until I came across a Samsonite toiletries case. It was burgundy, hard-sided, and the latches still worked. The lining was clean and intact, and it even had a little mirror attached to the lid. It wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t Louis Vuitton. But after handing over three dollars, it was mine.

The idea for the painting came quickly. I was intrigued by the idea of the things we carry through life, the things we choose to take with us on our journeys. Then I thought about the project I had done recently, writing the biography of my client, Jack Jouett. For three years, while working with Jack to record his story, sort through photos and memorabilia, and research his history, I felt I had taken a journey through his life. I would paint the case to reflect my travels.

First, I removed the handle and the mirror and taped off the hardware. Then I painted the case itself, covering the surface with gesso and several thin layers of paint in crimson, turquoise, buff white and a fun paint made with stainless steel. The surface was hazy and atmospheric.

Next, I wanted to add some images. Jack has great photographs, including some taken in the 1940′s when he was a young man living in the Virgin Islands. He’d gone on a sailing trip with some friends through the Caribbean, and the photos from that trip are some of my favorites. I copied the pictures onto photo transfer paper in my laser printer, cut out the photos I wanted, and layered them on the surface of the case.

One of the themes that continually emerged while working on Jack’s story was the idea that he kept circling back to places he’d lived before. Not only had he circled the globe, the events of his life continually carried him back to favorite places:  New Orleans, Washington, DC, China, the Virgin Islands. I decided to stencil a number of different circle designs on the case itself. In many places, the stencils obscured the photographs, hiding them behind paint. I decided this was fitting. Most of the details of Jack’s life were buried by time, as they are for any of us, and working with him was a process of searching for the images that made up his life story. Finally, I covered the surface with a thinned down glaze of burgundy paint, further obscuring the details, but softening any remaining hard edges.

Here’s how the project turned out.

The photographs are visible if you look closely.

And another detail . . .

We had our final critique this week, and my class was intrigued by my project. Not surprisingly, they were even more intrigued by Jack. Of course, I was happy to talk about him and the things I learned circling through his life.

And my travel case? I’m definitely keeping it. It is perhaps the most practical art project I’ve ever done. I could use it to hold my art supplies. It would be a great storage bin for photos or keepsakes. I might even load it up with my makeup and jewelry when I take a trip. Whatever I do, it will remind me to pay attention to the things I carry with me.

Before and After

Ten weeks ago, I walked into Art 131—Introduction to Drawing, one of the first college classes I’d taken in 25 years. I was nervous, both about being in a classroom again, and also because for all of my very vocal enjoyment of art and a general sense that I was somewhat creative, I have never been very confident in my drawing ability. I do fairly well at Pictionary, and can create a reasonable likeness of most cartoon characters, but to draw something real from observation? This is the primary reason that most of my artistic endeavors tend toward collage or abstract designs.

No more. I was finally committed.

The first day of class was spent learning about supplies—the difference between vine charcoal and compressed, what erasers and paper to buy, what kind of portfolio we’d need—so we didn’t have to face our skills, or lack of them, that day. But that changed quickly. When we walked in the second day, the teacher (a wonderful guide named Vicki Lynn Wilson) had filled the center of the room with a giant still life: a mannequin in roller skates, boxes and vases, an umbrella, a large wicker headboard and piles of other . . . stuff. We set up our easels, opened up our shiny, new drawing supplies, and Vicki gave us the entire class period to do an uninstructed drawing. No rules, no help. Just an hour and a half in a quiet room to draw what we saw. She wasn’t being mean; she wanted to gauge the skills we brought to her class.

It was absolutely nerve-wracking. I fussed with my supplies and readjusted my easel for a full five minutes just to delay putting pencil to paper. And  it got worse from there. I didn’t know where to start, how to start, which tool to use. I stared at the still life and sketched. Stared some more and erased what I had drawn. Lurching, fumbling, I somehow got through the time until Vicki asked us to stop. When I looked at my drawing, here’s what I saw.

I was miserable. The drawing confirmed what I already believed: that I didn’t know how to draw. Mercifully, Vicki collected our drawings to keep until the end of the term. I’m sure she knew we’d be tempted to destroy them. I sure wanted to.

Fortunately, things got better. Over the next ten weeks, we learned how to do observational drawing in stages. We worked through each of the elements of design,  learning about line and composition before moving on to perspective,  shading and value. We worked in white charcoal on black paper, black charcoal on brown paper. Eventually we learned color. Week by week we built on previous skills, bringing in our drawings for the class to critique. I became familiar with the tattoo artist who worked with detailed precision, the grandmother and high school teacher who drew images from her home, the  young man who asked intriguing questions and was uniquely drawn to color. I felt connected to them somehow because I saw so much of their art. It felt like I’d seen something of their soul.

Which I had. And week after week, they’d seen mine.

For our final project, we were given free reign. We were to draw objects that were meaningful to us and said something about who were were. We could use any color paper or any techniques. We could work in black and white or in color. I decided to do a drawing about living my life as an explorer. I picked my favorite traveling boots, the leather satchel I found at a market in Italy and which I now use as my school bag, and the journals I kept on a study abroad trip in college. I threw in my favorite fountain pen and and amethyst crystal I’ve kept on my desk for ages. I set up my still life on a table in my laundry room and worked on it for about twelve hours over the course of ten days.

Today, we hung our artwork for the final class critique. This is what I pinned to the wall:

So what did I learn?

I don’t have to figure everything out by myself.

I suppose, in theory, I could have learned much of this on my own from reading books or watching countless YouTube videos. But then again, I got to be 50 years old without ever actually learning how to draw, so there you go. I’m sure it is possible to learn through trial and error, but having someone else share their expertise with you, provide you with structure and ideas, and give you feedback in real time is priceless. It takes a certain amount of courage, energy and resources to expose yourself and your work to a teacher, and even to other students, but as it turns out, this commitment is amply rewarded. Resources abound. There are people out there who want nothing more than to help me.

Break big ideas into smaller ideas.

I figured out pretty quickly that my problem with my first, uninstructed drawing was that I was trying to do too much at the same time. It was like having a pile of building materials—bricks and cement and 2×4′s and nails—and mixing them all together to build a house instead of focusing on them one at a time. Start first with overall composition. What do I want in the picture and where? Then add the shading and the detail. You don’t have to do everything at once.

Take the time.

This was, far and away,  the most important lesson. It takes time to learn how to do something. I spent four to ten hours on my drawing homework each week, and at the beginning of each drawing, it looked like crap. In fact, it looked like crap for about the first two hours I worked. If I weren’t willing to spend at least two and a half  hours when I sat down to work on a project, I would never know what I could do. Yet if I sat with it long enough, working with  patience and trust, I was inevitably surprised by the objects that began to appear beneath my pencil. Honestly, it began to feel like magic. There I would be, sitting in my laundry room with my hands covered in charcoal, James Taylor crooning on my iPod, and suddenly beautiful things emerged from my paper. A jug of tulips, a drinking glass, the weave of a basket. I’d check my watch and hours had passed in what felt like twenty minutes. This was the payoff.

I’ll say it again: learning something new takes time. Mastering something takes a lot of time. They say that it takes about 10,000 hours of deep, concentrated practice to gain mastery, and I think being willing to spend this kind of time trumps talent any day. The trick is to pick something that you don’t mind spending 10,000 hours doing so that the time spent is, in itself, the reward. I’m thinking that being able to make art is worth a 10,000 hour investment in my life.  I’ve already started. Between my three classes this term, I’ve probably spent 300 hours on art since January.

Only 9,700 hours to go.

I can’t wait.

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.

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