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 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.

What I Intend, and What I Get

Two stories.

1.

My sculpture class meets for six hours each Friday. It’s the third of  three art classes I’m taking this term, and the one in which I have the least experience. And by least experience I mean absolutely none. Nothing. Other than the Play-Doh I messed around with as a kid, I have never sculpted anything. I signed up for Sculpture-Mixed Media with the expectation that I would learn techniques to work with different materials—clay, wire, wood, paper.  I figured I would be given  specific assignments, as I was in both my drawing and painting classes, that could help me gain skill and feel some measure of success with each type of media.

The teacher for my sculpture class apparently had a completely different idea. Instead of opening the first class by taking attendance and figuring out who was  going to spend the term with him, he instead asked if anybody had seen any good art lately. Or even bad art. He didn’t get around to the class list until well into the third hour of the class. I scanned through the syllabus, frantic to figure out what I would be learning and how it would be taught, only to realize with ever growing panic that there would be two assignments all term, giving us roughly half of the term to work on each one. Aside from a brief research project on the work of a living sculptor, there were no other requirements. No supplies list. No schedule of techniques taught. No guidelines. We were instructed to show up the following week with sketches for our first sculpture and the supplies we wanted to use.

I was not only panicked, I was angry. How was I supposed to learn anything if the teacher didn’t seem to want to teach me. At the end of the six-hour class, during which I had learned nothing more than what tools were available in the wood shop, I approached him, asking if he could give me any further guidance. I explained that I was a rank beginner, and until I learned what types of materials were commonly used and how to use them, it was hard to know how to create anything. His response?

“What do you want to say with your art?”

Really? That’s all he had for me? How do I know what to say if I don’t know how to say it! I was seriously peeved and huffed my way home where I proceeded to vent for about an hour to Doug and Sarah and just about anyone else who would listen. After I calmed down, I decided that I would just have to figure it out for myself. As upset as I was, I was convinced that my teacher was a caring person who wanted to help me if I could formulate a question, but that it would be up to me to decide what I needed to know. I made a trip to the art supply store, wandered through the sculpture aisle and bought some wire and some clay.

But I also thought about his other question. What did I want to say? Since I plan to work with art in a therapeutic context, I wanted my sculpture to say something about my decision to go back to school, to combine art therapy with writing and teaching. I wanted to say something about what I’ve learned in my fifty years about where your life leads you, even if you are surprised along the way.

2.

This morning, I woke up early and checked my computer. My daughter Sarah had posted something to my Facebook page the night before. It was a quote from Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,  an influential voice especially for my children’s generation. This quote was from his book The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul:

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

How could she know that that was the message I needed today. Well, to be fair, it wouldn’t hurt me to be reminded of it most days. Where did I intend to go? When I was in grade school, I wanted to be an author/illustrator. I was an avid reader and a bit of a loner and found comfort in books. I  was captured by the notion that I could feel so connected, so understood by an author of a story, even one I’d never met. That’s what I wanted, to write something that would touch another person in that way. Over the years, I refined what I wanted in a career and in  life: that connection through meaningful work and meaningful relationships.

For the most part, I’ve been successful in achieving both. I’ve been able to work as a writer, a teacher and a counselor, all of which is meaningful to me. I have many relationships that enrich my life—my husband and kids, parents and sisters and in-laws and friends, the baristas at our coffee shop, my ex-husband’s family, my husband’s ex-wife. However, the path to achieving those things has been anything but smooth.  And I must say, I expected them to be smooth. I’d always imagined  I would marry and have children. I planned to have an interesting, challenging career that paid well and allowed me to wear nice clothes to work. I’ve had lots of intentions and five-year plans and ten-year plans, and for the most part, they worked. They got me moving and pointed me in the direction that I wanted to go. Without intentionality, I run the risk of wandering around in the dark, depending on chance to light my way. I’m a big fan of planning where I want to go.

The problem with my five- and ten-year plans, however, was that they didn’t allow for the times when my life didn’t turn out the way I’d planned. I hadn’t counted on being a divorced, single mother. When I remarried a wonderful man with two kids of his own, and later had another child, I hadn’t realized that the most interesting, challenging job I could ever encounter was being the parent in a blended family of four kids with three different parental structures. Two of our children spent the school year living out-of-state with their mom. I hadn’t foreseen that the only time we had together as a  family would be in hotel rooms in another state, or during summer vacations in our home. We needed one parent to be flexible and free enough to manage our non-traditional family structure.  I was working as a college counselor, a job that paid reasonably well and allowed me to wear nice clothes to work. Still, we reasoned that since Doug worked for his own business, which was harder to quit than my job at the college, I would trade in my briefcase for a diaper bag. Beyond the rationale, I knew in my heart that I should be the one to manage the home front.

And so I stepped away from the career I’d imagined—17 years ago. In the meantime I’ve cobbled together different work experiences, none of them as structured or as well-paid as the one I left. I worked part-time for Doug’s company,  volunteered at the kids’ schools, and started my own company helping people write their own stories. None of it looked the way I imagined it when I was a shy ten-year-old hiding out in the school library, imaging a connection with a distant, unknown reader. I couldn’t have predicted any of it. It’s an odd mess of experiences and lessons I’ve accumulated, filled with plane flights and parent-teacher conferences, conversations with old soldiers and young moms. I never could have planned it, but it is, after all, absolutely what I needed to do.

3.

My painting and drawing classes are full of intention. In each, I have a syllabus which lists the weekly assignments and a teacher who guides me through it week by week. I have supplies I am taught how to use and I see examples of how my work ought to look when I’m finished. I like this way of working and I’m comfortable with it.

My sculpture class is another way of working. I am learning to throw off the guidelines, toss out my expectations, and get down to the most basic question: What do I want say with my most basic form of art—my life? What materials,  experiences and techniques will  help me to say it?

I’m making a tree out of wire, one strand for each of the 100 years I hope to live. Its roots are planted in a worn, well-read book , it’s branches stretched from a twisted trunk, reaching upward, outward. I’m not exactly sure how I’ll do it.

4.

I want to go back and talk to the little girl I was and tell her that I am, after all, writing, reaching out to connect to distant, unknown readers. Every Friday.

Tempted by New Doors

We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. -Walt Disney

My daughter Kate posted this quote on her Facebook page  yesterday and I loved it. No matter whether you are a 20-year-old journalism major like Kate or a 50-year-old writer and mom like me, we can all still be pushed into new adventures, tempted by new doors just by being curious.

The timing of Kate’s post was especially good for me. Curiosity, along with a maddening compulsion to feel forward motion in my life, has led me to step out on a new path this week. And what a week it has been…..

A few months ago, I decided to return to counseling, work I did early in my career but which I hadn’t practiced in a formal way for about 17 years. Still, I didn’t want to do the exact same thing, and felt compelled to try another approach. Open a different door, if you will. This time around,  I wanted to be able to incorporate my love of art. Although I have a degree in counseling, I looked for programs that would lead to certification as an art therapist. It turns out that one of the few accredited art therapy programs in the country just happened to be in my own backyard. It also offered a certificate program for people who already have masters degrees in counseling. How cool is that?

So cool. It felt like a perfect opportunity, one that resonated deep inside. I decided to apply for the program starting next Fall term.  There were a few hurdles, of course. I learned that I  must first complete 21 credits of studio art classes in drawing, painting and sculpture in the next nine months. On the other hand, being forced to take lots of art classes seemed like a very good problem indeed. I signed up for three classes this term at a local community college. I got my parking pass and my Portland Community College I.D. card, and started classes this week.

All in all, it’s been amazing. So many weird and familiar emotions came rushing into focus. First-day-of-class nerves, the excitement of having a supply list to fill, the strangeness of having a set schedule to follow after years of a free-lancer’s flexibility. The only part that really surprised me, however, that came close to driving me crazy was the chatter! And I’m not talking about the hordes of students the ages of my children. I’m talking about the chatter in my own brain.

Coincidentally (or maybe not so coincidentally) my yoga teacher this week talked about how we often feel tempted not to stretch ourselves or expand our abilities, how we can feel tempted to play it safe. She called it “talking yourself out of your own success.”

Hoo boy! Does that ever sound familiar, especially this week. For example, I walked out of my first painting class with a homework assignment. The first step of my first project was to take a close-up photo of my face and hands in black and white which I would later paint on a larger panel.

The chatter started when I tried taking a photograph. I heard a steady stream of questions from my inner critic. Let’s call her Madge.

“You don’t want to use that photo! All of your wrinkles show.”

“Wow, did you realize that your nose was that big?”

“You’re going to have to draw that. Don’t you think that’s a little complicated?”

See what I mean? Chatter.

I finally just picked a photo and took it to my next class. After many years of hearing this voice in my head, I recognize Madge for who she is:  the critical, fretting perfectionist who has dogged me since grade school. I imagine her as somewhat frumpy and fashion-challenged, wearing glasses and a cardigan and sensible shoes. She’s sort of a cranky librarian sort. For years I fought against her, thinking that she saw it as her job to keep me from accomplishing my goals, and it was my job to thwart her. Over time, though, I’ve come to see that she really does mean well. In her own maddening way, she is trying to keep me safe, to protect me from pain or disappointment. She’s not trying to “talk me out of my success” because she doesn’t want me to succeed. She would just rather that I didn’t risk getting hurt in the process. And there are times when her voice is actually useful to me. She’s probably the one that reminds me I should get to bed instead of playing another game of Angry Birds, or encourages me to schedule the root canal I’ve been putting off.

Once I figured out that this voice was a legitimate part of me and not an enemy, I was able to treat her words with much more compassion. But that doesn’t mean that I automatically needed to listen to her. I could decide if her words were helpful advice, or just an attempt to talk me out of taking a risk. If I decided if it was the latter, the trick was to politely but firmly thank her for her concern and then tune her out. I don’t have to believe everything I think.

I had many opportunities to chat with that voice this week. I marched back into my painting class, armed with a black and white photo of myself, wrinkles and all, and a 24″x”24″ panel. The teacher, recognizing that many of us might be nervous about drawing our images freehand on the panel, gave us a helpful tip: Subdivide the photograph with pie-shaped wedges and do the same with the panel. Then transfer the lines and shapes from only one pie wedge at a time.

The intent behind this technique is to force one’s attention away from the verbal monologue about the process, instead focusing on the pure sensory information. Is that line straight or curved? Is that a circle or an oval shape? How long is that line compared to the one next to it?

Before I could get to any of these questions, however, Madge started in:

“Aren’t eyes supposed to be almond-shaped?”

“That doesn’t look anything like a fingernail. Are you sure you’re doing this right?”

I was ready for her. I divided my triangles into smaller triangles so I was working on even smaller portions. I folded my reference photo until I could only see one section at a time. Still Madge persisted.

“Wow, you have a lot of wrinkles around your mouth. When did that happen?”

It called for more severe measures. I turned both my reference photo and my panel upside down so it would be much harder to identify what all the different “parts” were. Finally, she settled down. Finally, she was quiet. Finally, I was able to get into the rhythm of  drawing and get lost in the beauty of a dark line against a light background, to enjoy the relationship between two curves. The rest of the class was almost a meditation.

That doesn’t mean that I won’t have to work to keep Madge from trying to talk me out of my adventure. I’m sure she’d be happier if I played it a little safer, didn’t risk failure or disappointment or embarrassment. She will probably remind me that I’m decades older than other students. She might suggest that it would be nicer to spend an afternoon reading a good book or going out to coffee with a friend instead of sitting in a classroom. And sometimes she makes a lot of sense. After all, she’s known me my whole life, and wants me to be happy.

But there’s another voice I want to listen to. It’s the one that’s curious about new opportunities, and wonders what’s behind that door….

 

If I Wait and Watch

I love crossword puzzles. There is something so satisfying about a quiet hour spent with a cup of coffee, a crisp new crossword puzzle, and a sharpened pencil. I try to finish a  puzzle almost every day and have done so for years. As a result, I’ve developed a bit of a reputation for being good at crossword puzzles.

My husband, Doug, thinks I’m a crossword puzzle expert. He credits my ability to a well-known love of words and an entrenched habit of reading. He assumes that a person who works a puzzle quickly is someone who knows the answers to the clues before they begin. The execution of the puzzle is basically writing down what you already know.

As tempting as it is to let him believe that I am just unusually smart, I felt compelled to tell him the truth, which is something that those of you who regularly work the puzzles already know: crossword puzzle solutions are a result of a very specific set of skills which can be learned and practiced. While it helps to be fairly literate and to have a broad scope of interests, you will seldom know the answer to all of the clues. At least I don’t. I’m rocky on my geography and bad at Latin terms. I rarely know the names of famous sports figures or heroes of Norse mythology. The point is, it’s doesn’t really matter. You approach a puzzle without having all the clues, because there are other ways of knowing. And that’s what I love about crossword puzzles, and what keeps me coming back to them day after day. I get regular evidence that I know more than I thought I could know.

Doug asked me recently if I could teach him. For the past couple of months, we’ve sat down with the daily puzzle together. Slowly I’ve shared with him all the “tricks” I know. There are many other techniques, I’m sure, but here are a few for starters:

1. Some words are frequently used. They’re words like jai alai, oboe, sro (short for “standing room only” in a theater), or err. If you work puzzles long enough, you will start to recognize these regulars as old friends.
2. Just because you don’t know the answer to a clue, doesn’t mean you have to. You can also learn the answer by working all the crossed words. That’s why they call is a crossword puzzle! Don’t know the name of the largest lake in Australia? Filling in the perpendicular clues may tell you that it’s Lake “Eyre.” In this way, I’ve learned many wonderful, esoteric facts, like an etui is an ornamental needle case, or that the Hawaiian state bird is called a nene.
3. Understand that sometimes, the clue and the answer will be–how can I put this nicely–just really lame. I once struggled with the clue “a bit of foamy soap” only to learn that the answer was “sud.” Seriously. Never in my life have I encountered a singular sud. But there it is. Crossword puzzle writers have down days, too.
4. There is usually a theme to the puzzle–often a quotation, or a common structure, or a witty play on words. Figure out those, and you’ll make a lot of progress.

All of these are just tricks, however. The most important thing I’ve learned is not to spend too much time on any one clue. Trust that if you look away and work on something else your brain is still trying to come up with the answer.  Trust your marvelous mind to work on the problem without you consciously directing it. Let it show you what it knows.

This last lesson is the most exciting to me, because it has huge implications, not just for crossword puzzles but for other creative ventures in general. When approaching a creative problem, I’ve learned that there are two basic steps. They are:

One:  Show up for the work.

If I don’t pull out the crossword puzzle every day, I won’t learn anything and I won’t get any better. So do a crossword puzzle every day. Write a blog post every Friday. Paint one picture a week.

Two: Wait and watch for the answers.

You don’t have to have all the answers before you approach a creative project. In fact, it’s probably better not to have all the answers. Whether I’m writing a short story about my childhood, sketching a landscape, or figuring out how to arrange furniture in my living room. I will get further if I can find a way to be quiet and listen, and will often observe that my brain knows more than I can rationally explain.

This point was brought home to me this week. I was flipping through an old art journal from 2007, and on a page sandwiched  between a smudgy pastel design  and a watercolor sketch of a pineapple, I found that I had copied out a passage from a book, taken from a novel by Peter Pouncy, Rules for Old Men Waiting. I remembered the book fondly. It is a lovely story about an aging historian who, struggling with his wife’s recent death, decides to create a set of rules by which to live out the rest of his days, the most important of which is to “tell a story to its end.”

The passage which struck me, both in 2007 and this week, was his description of  how to tell his story. It’s all about listening, and it gives as good an explanation as I’ve ever seen for how to solve a problem, finish a crossword puzzle, or record the story of a life. Although written in prose, it is so lyrical, so dense, I’ve copied it out here as a poem.

I said to my soul, be still,

and watch the small trickling beginnings ease towards flood.

Let the story declare itself,

and the characters and events take me down among them

and draw the words out of me.

I have tried to possess myself in patience,

I have gathered all the hungers of my past in readiness,

to spell out the missing syllables of my life.

In the morning watch I shall wait,

and the quick, brown, wordy fox will come out of his hole,

sniff the air, and begin his narration.

It is only natural.

Sooner or later, if I watch, it is bound to happen.

Then I shall fill my book with profitable wonders.

I don’t know about you, but I find great comfort in these words. They remind me that I don’t have to be the smartest person, know the most facts, or master Latin conjugations. I just have to be still, to be patient and watch for the wonders that will reveal themselves to me.

Next Page →