Category Archives: Writing

Naturally, Reawakening

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mixed media + textNaturally

Following the steps of Nature, in my time I’ll go to sleep

and slough off my human stature, an appointment I must keep

whether soon or late or sudden, whether willingly or no,

taking nothing, I am bidden, as to dust–beyond–I go,

to a deep cellular cellar, shut from day and gone from night,

simple mote or something stellar, eternally both dark and bright;

I’ve no grief at this my bedding down to death as time requires,

but will go with no regretting to new lands and distant fires–

or to deep chasms’ silent spaces, nothing moving, nothing moved,

nothing touched by ills or graces or by sweetness I once loved,

for my thoughts will too lie resting, speechless, dreamless, all release;

all exemption now from testing, seamlessly wrapped up in peace–

So I’ll leave you, soft, in quiet

naturally inclined to sigh

with something of

relief, a sigh yet

not of sorrow,

when

I diemixed media + textReawakening

Winter now is past, forgotten swiftly as the melting snow,

as the things that children know slip away in quilted cotton

while they sleep: tomorrow, calling, beckons them to newer days

and to pleasures yet a haze on the edge of nighttime’s falling–

sorrow dissipates, as ices rimming rivers melt apace

in spring’s warm return to grace the Earth with all her sweet devices

Love, awake! The gentle keening of the season’s herald bird

is from barren branches heard, calling them to leafy greening,

calling from the snows of death all who have lain sleeping, dormant,

seasoned with dark winter’s torment,

to return to life

and breath

Little Mysteries and Big Adventures

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graphite on paperIt’s kind of odd, when you think about it, that we readers and writers and storytellers and listeners have such an affinity for mystery and adventure stories. Life itself is so full of both that it could be argued there’s no need to entertain or challenge, frighten or amuse ourselves by inventing yet more. But besides the obvious pleasant aspect of fiction that it remains under our control in ways that real life cannot, there is much more reason that the appeal remains just as strong as it has for ages.

For starters, it gives us a forum for posing questions and answers that can’t always be simplified enough to solve any real-world conundrum puzzling us. It’s both potentially a problem-solving process and a bit of creative play that can lead to greater flexibility and insight when we do get around to solving the problems with which we’re faced. If I can metaphorically bump off the villain that has been making my life such a trial, perhaps the metaphor can be extended to show how I can cope with him or her in actuality in a more legal and humane manner. If not, at the very least (assuming the real person behind the fictional stiff is fully enough disguised so that s/he cannot sue the socks off of me and make my life miserable in new and legal ways) I got the satisfaction of offing said offender in effigy. On paper I can exert all of the cruelty my heart secretly harbors, without ever lifting a physical finger, even that uniquely expressive one, against anyone at all.graphite on paperMostly, in the fictional world it allows a vicarious thrill for both creator and reader or listener that few of us dare or have the wherewithal to experience in three dimensions. Being a very ordinary person, I have little to no likelihood of the kinds of outsized adventures and brilliant insights that would make for a good, cracking read, but I’ll happily devour such stories and envision myself in their midst when it suits me. In fiction, I can do all sorts of athletic and impressive things that there isn’t the remotest chance of my accomplishing with my feeble skills and lethargic attitude, but there’s something rather bracing in even the imagined high-speed sculling through the black waters of a swift river, the steeplechase saddled up on a magnificent pedigreed mare, or the vaulting over crevasses with rime in my eyelashes and ice axe gripped in my gloved hand, when they’re well written.graphite on paperIn fiction, I can commit the perfect crime–or solve it. I can be the heroine of the story or an innocent bystander. I can follow all of the clues, absorb all of the details of the characters’ lives and loves, interests and actions, and guess what comes next or just roll along for the ride and see where it takes me. Sometimes, admittedly, I don’t have complete mastery of the fictional world because a tale becomes so gripping that I can’t put down the book and go to sleep, turn off the television and leave the room, or avoid re-reading parts just to see if I missed any exciting details. I should note that I am also often driven to this latter end by my dyslexic reading and the way it requires frequent repetitions of phrases and paragraphs to ascertain that I’ve kept true to the thread of meaning, so perhaps it’s not exactly a universal approach to reading! That is, as you would guess, a part of my reading process that makes me very slow to finish a book or article, even if in practice I am a reasonably fast reader. A bonus of dyslexia, conversely, is that things I have read before become new to me again almost immediately because the arrangement of words and elements of the tale might become slightly different each time through.graphite on paperWhich, in turn, is a good reminder of one of the other joys of reading: each of us brings filters, viewpoints, experiences, beliefs and interests that flavor each reading, for good or ill. We are so distinct in this that the best of friends and the most like-minded people can easily love or hate quite opposite stories and versions of them. And that makes the mere act of writing or reading a story that much more of a mystery and adventure in and of itself. All the more reason to keep writing and reading and telling . . .

The Inexplicable Explained

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digitally doctored photoWhy She Does It

The able cataloguer’ll

Produce the worst of doggerel

Because strict order suits her taste,

The free or random seeming waste

To such refined and organized

Beliefs. Add that it’s hypnotized

Her not into the orthodox

Approach to meter; no, what shocks

Us is that rather than to hone

The wealth of poems to a bone-

Sharp, artful edge, she deigns to vent

Her verse as tidy excrement.digitally doctored photo

Thing that Does Things

 

There is a wonderful machine that’s spiffy, neat, and super-keen

 

Because its functions are so grand and great, but on the other hand,

 

It’s hard to fix when it’s abuzz, malfunctioning, or conked, because

 

It is so arcane, intricate and complicated, that we get

 

Bamboozled trying to describe what’s wrong, and end in diatribe,

 

For truthfully, we’ve not a clue just what this fine machine can do,

 

Or what its actual functions are, for it’s so complex and bizarre

 

That we, in our benighted state, prefer to simply think it great

 

And know that if we could have guessed

 

          what it is, we’d sure be impressed.

 

Her Eyes were Limpet Pools

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Am I reading the poetic maunderings of a youth regarding a romantic soul-searching staring match with his sweetheart–or is there somewhere a glorious spa for mollusks about which I ought to know? One little slip of spelling or pronunciation leaves me wavering in the dark. Which might be good, or might be bad–it’s all in the application of the moment. For lo, there can be such beauty and delight in Malapropisms and Spoonerisms and all manner of other happy tortures imposed on language. These joys are often best savored like a very dry aperitif by those intrepid souls fortunate enough to discover them, for the most frequent perpetrators of unintentional linguistic crimes rarely know the difference even if the error of their ways is pointed out to them by any well-meaning pedagogue or tiresome pedant.

P&I drawing

From one letter's change can spring a new breed . . .

Whoever chanced upon the bag of “Mescaline Salad” before sharing its portrait online must have been elated both at the pleasurable frisson of surprise and the consideration of whether his dinner greens might in fact be hallucinogenic. After all, a product-testing could conceivably explain the truth-in-labeling serendipity itself. The “Sliming Tea” I found on the weight-loss product shelf at a health food store seemed to me as though it might have been assisted in its production by this post’s titular creatures, but on second thought I was reminded of the effects such dietary aids can often have on digestive tracts en route to achieving their, ahem, ends. This led me to wonder further if the product was to be followed by consumption of yet another product I spotted in the refrigerator case, the “Steamed Mini-Bum”–or if it actually produced the latter item.

You see how marvelously, magically this all works. One good mislabeling–or indeed, inadvertent libeling–can lead to yet another, and each offers opportunities of the richest and rarest sorts for improving one’s health, wealth, and entertainment, not least of all by virtue of increasing the quantity of belly-laughs-per-hour in a day. Best medicine of all. For example, if I should accidentally ingest some of the aforementioned miraculous products, I wonder if I would have been more or less inclined to accept the printed invitation I once read to attend the special breakfast being served at “Our Lady Queen of Heave”, which I rather pictured as a chastely Catholic version of a fine Roman vomitorium at which attendees could enjoy communal pancakes-and-puking.

Meanwhile, on the home front, I need only look at my voicemail transcriptions or activate the subtitle function on the television in order to enjoy the best garblings of garbage on offer. There, our friend Wyant becomes “why amps” and I, as Kathryn, get to become “Captain”; I really think Captain Sparks has quite a dashing ring to it, don’t you? Though it might be even better as it’s occasionally written, Spanks. But I have a feeling that Captain Spanks might receive communications less delightful or at least a tiny bit less polite-full than otherwise. Why, now that I’ve mentioned the name, I could even be getting a new reader or two who came here searching for one kind of play (‘swordplay’, if you will) and stayed for another (wordplay). Because that’s just how fantastically a misplaced consonant can change the path of one’s life. And don’t get me started on what can happen when something goes awry with one’s vowels! It can be a little disconcerting to get a message that one’s colonoscopy doctor (in this case, Dr. Panzer) on Wednesday will be “Dr. Cancer”, or discover that apparently the titration study for which one is scheduled might be a “castration study”, something that I think it’s safe to say not a one of us would show up for willingly (a quick return phone call to clarify, at the least, is required).

P&I drawing

Stranger Danger: the slightest misunderstanding or misinterpretation can turn a perfectly innocent phrase into a dangerous expedition into unknown territories . . .

In that case, it might be best to obey the Spoonerific actor who implored his mistress to “sift and shave thyself” and make a dash for the nearest door. Potentially life-and-happiness-hazardous typos aside, there is still a whole universe of fun to be found in the misadventures of the lettered sort. I know my dear husband “Dr. Splotches” (thank you, Google Voice) and I have found a great deal of amusement in the translation of previously-unknown worlds through the artful misplacement of a letter or two along the way.

I adjure you, do not trust overmuch in your Spelling Supervisor or Grammar-Magic software to save you from your worst self. The machine knows not of homophones, colloquialisms or, as mine has proven many a time, what might to you be perfectly commonplace words and terms–I love the alternatives my computer offers for any words it finds unfamiliar, but they’re not often appropriate replacements, sometimes especially for use in mixed company. Scientific phrases and jargon can trip up the masters, but beware your trusting it’s (not its) okay to let a computer impose its (not it’s) will on your verbiage. Even artificially intelligent characters (I’m referring here to technology, not to politicians, zealots, critics and other humanoids) can slip on the banana skins of word choice and phrase placement. The computer is the veritable Dogberry of the modern world and not to be trusted any further than the assumption of GIGO can go. So I will leave you with Dogberry’s farewell admonition, “Adieu: be vigitant, I beseech you.”

P&I drawing

At what point does an Adventure become a Misadventure? It might depend on whom you ask--and how the response is worded . . .

Thoughtless Thursday

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Since a number of Web Wanderers post wonderful Wordless Wednesday items, and I’m always behind the times in oh-so-many ways, I’m posting my own version a day late (and undoubtedly a dollar short), giving you here a highly abbreviated visual history of my life as an artist. Since I’m only middle-aged, I let it end at the Middle Ages for now, though you’ll notice from some of the costumes in the last frame that I’m looking for a Renaissance to appear fairly soon. Can’t hurt to hope, can it?

P&I

I was no prodigy, and I certainly took an early interest in shortcuts and easy techniques when it came to making images, but I did always have an eye for a good juicy and dramatic storyline . . . P&IAs I grew more seriously interested in art, I was also reaching an age where one wants to Fit In, so I did my part of stylizing my imagery and making it seem, I thought, more palatable to the critics (teachers, relatives) . . .P&IThen, of course, there was that awkward age when I started to think for myself, to develop my own philosophy of what my art should or could be, and what I wanted it to be. Presumably, the reason I lost my reason entirely. You just can’t make your own art without giving up at least a little of your already tenuous hold on reality . . .P&I. . . and here you find me, wandering from village to village in the vast land of Internet, telling my tales and making my pictures without much regard for the safety and comfort of those around me, but perhaps in that most of all being at last quite true to myself, the mildly crazed artist in your midst . . .

Tools and Techniques, Ingredients and Inspirations

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ink drawingSometimes the best way to get started with something new is to jump into something old and rethink it. Writing letters–really, reeeeeeally long and extravagantly detailed letters–to my friends and loved ones was a favored pastime for me in my youth, and only transmuted (rather than muted) over time. It’s not necessarily that I had so much to say, nor that it was terribly original, it was simply a pleasant way to keep my sense of the connection between us open and flowing freely. It was Relationship Anticoagulant for me, in its way. Most particularly because I happened to have friends and loved ones who indulged me by writing letters back in my direction.

Yes, the telephone had already been invented when I was young. (I heard that!) My letters weren’t even delivered by Pony Express, let alone chiseled on stone tablets, though those would’ve made nice doorstops, once read. But as I have never liked telephone chitchat overmuch and have always had a slight tendency toward commentary that could perhaps stand a little more editorial restraint, and most of all because I am so defined by my visual experiences, a written, tangible and yes, correctable medium like a letter suited my personality more.

I think it was at least partly that that led to my downhill slide into essays, poems, short stories and the various other Dark Magicks of creative writing. Maybe I thought that developing my fictional skills would make my long letters more entertaining and excuse their verbosity. But of course, when the mystical world of the internet appeared before me, it was inevitable that I should embrace its friendliness towards the mass production of verbiage and the speedy transport thereof unto all and sundry. “All” being my actual known connexions and “sundry” being anybody else who was incidentally caught in the overspray. The latter being people who, if they foolishly responded to my wildly flung words, were likely to get sucked right into the vast vacuum of joining my poor captive audience if I could manage it at all.

ink drawingWhen I figured out how to put visual images along with all of the wordy wonders, then Boy Howdy, I was off on a new tangent. And you’ve all seen just how tangential I can become. Why, just the other day . . . oh, see, there I go again. The additional enhancement of putting pictures with stories need not be examined here. You and I know that the telling of a tale not only frequently requires images for completeness and clarity but sometimes is enhanced and enriched by the presence of visual cues that lead the reader to start thinking about the stories tangentially as well.

I was of course drawn* in immediately by artists’, photographers’, designers’ and other visually rich websites and blogs (*this pun’s for you, yearstricken). Then I felt the magnetic, hypnotic pull of foodie blogs, with their perniciously gorgeous food photography. Glorious gardens and magnificent architectural edifices reached out of the ether to grasp at my ankles as I passed. Tripping, I dropped into the well of travelogues and vehicle- and furniture-restoration sites and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh! It was the beginning of the end for this visually obsessed fool. Pretty soon I was swapping recipes and anecdotes, recitations and antidotes with all of my new Old Friends. I almost made a Freudian typo there and wrote Fiends, because of course I have been enchanted and enslaved by you all and am now helplessly in thrall, thirsting after the goodies you dangle in front of me on your every post until I succumb and retaliate with posts of my own.

ink drawing

So here we all are, the relatively new digital tools in hand, cooking up marvelous messes of every sort and, far from being penitent, diving ever deeper into the strange and cheerfully dangerous tangles of what we are collectively wreaking upon the unsuspecting of the world. What began as relatively innocent missives to sisters and schoolmates, great aunts and great mentors has evolved into a different sort of Post that explodes with the weird and whimsical, the frightening or florid or sometimes just plain fishy, and whether factual or fictional, wanders the globe and the magnificent bubble of nonsense surrounding it, and the old urge to write a letter is made new again.

Now, I’ll readily admit that it’s every bit as possible to create fodder for the dustbin as it was all those centuries ago when I began writing my small-world tall tales and detailing them with quaint and creaky little scratches of “art”, and I’m quite certain that there’s no more sense and treasure sneaking in the hidden corners of my productions than there ever was. But I do find that the wider range of correspondents who really do have something to say in return, and the pleasures of the process of learning and using new and different tools for the conversation, immensely entertaining, energizing and inspiring. And I’d say that’s a paint pot of a different color.

ink drawing

Mrs. Sparkly’s Ten Commandments, I Mean Ten Questions. And More.

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photoI am “It”. No, really, that’s not just my Godzilla-sized ego talking: I’ve been tagged, and I didn’t even know there was a game going on. So very like me to be caught unawares. Least I was wearing more than just my “underwears”!

Among the activities in which the denizens of Bloggervania indulge are those through which we unmask various bits and bobs of our selves for mutual edification or at least amusement. This can be dangerous or great fun, depending upon whom you ask what, but then that’s the way it always goes, isn’t it. The promise of a nice sunny afternoon swapping gossip over a cuppa suddenly turns into a sword-fighting bloodbath. Oh, no, that was the murder mystery I was reading last night. Never mind!photo

Here’s what I got asked, followed by my to-the-best-of-my-knowledge-true answers.

1.  Describe yourself in seven words.

I can do it in 1: Rich. Okay, here are six others, but they’re all extrapolations of the first: loved, happy, curious, privileged, encouraged, playful.

2.  What keeps you up at night?

Brain-spin. I’m a very good sleeper generally speaking, but if I don’t quiet my mind by bedtime and shut down the wacky-factory, there’s no telling how long it’ll keep me too busy to sleep.

3.  Whom would you like to be?

The best version of me I can manage. Too much work to figure out how to be anyone else!

4.  What are you wearing now?

Jeans and a comfy shirt suitable for doing chores between bouts of typing.

5.  What scares you?

Other people’s drama.

6.  What are the best and worst things about blogging?

In my circle, we all seem to experience the same basic risks and rewards: the risk of losing ourselves completely in the effort and time of dedicated blogging, and the reward of working amid and coming to respect and love such stellar folk as populate the blogging community. Come to think of it, that pretty much encapsulates what I think is good or bad about any activity for which one has a passion.

7.  What was the last website you looked at?

Retire Early Lifestyle, a travel, food, culture and off-the-beaten-path-living journal produced by the only friends I’ve acquired through online conversation before I began blogging, and a site that is simply a joy to visit.

8.  If you could change one thing about yourself what would it be?

Let go of fear.

9.  Slankets, yes or no?

I have three perfectly excellent reasons to Just Say No to Slankets: 1-The skill a perpetually freezing person develops for dressing in layers more numerous and impressive than those boasted by the best millefoglie, 2-A really cuddly husband, and 3-What, I need to make a bonfire out of my money because I don’t know how to wrap up in a plain blanket to get warm?

10. Tell us something about the person who tagged you.

John comes from good stock. By that I mean that he has great familial roots, and that they are such natural foodies that he learned early to appreciate and make excellent soups, among many other classic Italian dream-foods. He documents all of this, and much more, on the wonderfully warm, witty, artful and delicious pages of From the Bartolini Kitchens, all while being himself ever the debonair gentleman-about-town and as sweet as fragole.

Whom are you going to tag to join the quiz?

I hope I’ve not “double-tagged” anyone. I’ll just go alphabetically here, for fun:

  1. Antoinette at cooking-spree
  2. Bella at winsomebella
  3. Cyndi at cfbookchick
  4. Dennis at thebardonthehill
  5. Eden at litrato-ngayon

photoMy blogging friend Antoinette, she of the wonderful aforementioned site where you can learn from her expertise how to put “Love on the Table” but more importantly, the myriad ways she expands that love into a multitude of life’s little nooks and crannies, all with a measure of mindfulness and gentle good humor–this lady asked me yesterday the perfectly innocent question “how . . . do you do this?” Since the bellissima Bella (also tagged above) soon thereafter made a comment that begged the same question, and I have fielded a few inquiries in a similar vein over the last six months of blogging, I am going to take the self-indulgent opportunity to spout off a bit on the topic today.

Many folk simply wonder how it’s possible for me to post a new and (mostly) different essay, poem, story or combination of them, illustrated with my own art and photography, every single day. They politely edge up to the corollary question of whether I don’t have a big closet full of old stuff that I’m just pinning up in public as I go. If it’s any consolation, yes, I have been producing things like this for a rather long time. Yesterday’s post (https://kiwsparks.wordpress.com/2012/01/11/what-were-you-born-in-a-barn/) is a perfect example: the cow sketch is from some doodling in a notebook nearly 30 years ago (and digitally doctored yesterday); the rooster and hens scratched their way into my sketchbook last year; the birds were among many sketched multi-panel proposals for a set of organ pipeshade carvings around 7 or 8 years ago; and the pastel of the Cheviot ewe and the Highland cow is from about two years ago.

Some of the illustrations I use (photographic or drawn/painted) are completely, hot-off-the-pencil new, a few are practically archeological finds from my vast trove, and some are oldies that have been digitally “remastered” (dolled up or changed) to fit the occasion. Almost every visual image requires some tweaking or re-formatting for the blog medium or to better reflect and expand upon the text in some way. Regular readers will have noticed that I am not averse to using the images’ captions to try to intensify the relationship and relevance, ‘specially if the connection was a little tenuous or artificially-imposed at the start.

In addition, I do have a (digital) reserve of hundreds and hundreds of picture + text images like the ones I used on Tuesday (https://kiwsparks.wordpress.com/2012/01/11/its-foodie-tuesday-and-i-havent-eaten-yet/), set up like book pages, where I guess without knowing it I was practicing a variant of the sort of combined word and image that I’m now putting in this blog. I try not to dip into that storage much, if nothing else to prevent my getting lazy or stale or not producing anything strictly new. There is a remote possibility that they will someday in fact be used to produce actual books, but realistically, publishers are inundated with stuff they find much more relevant and exciting, and like most artist-types I hate the drudgery of trying to sort out the whole business end of book production. Hence my standing on this soapbox handing out free samples daily. And I thank you all for coming by Speakers’ Corner (though since I live in Texas I suppose I should pretend it’s in Rawhide Park) here for visits so I don’t die of neglect and boredom.

digital compositionThe prose of my posts is never older than a few days (and that, only if I happen to have gotten a day or two ahead in writing), but nearly always written on the same day the posts go online. The poems are a mix of old and new. I started wading in poetic and essayist waters as a mere stripling, and as long as twenty years ago spent a twelvemonth writing five poems a day for discipline. Yes, mostly short forms! A couple of years ago, I did a one-drawing-a-day year, and I’m gearing up to get back to somewhat more regular drawing and art-making, so hopefully I’ll be posting more ‘fresh produce’ soon, but having unused images in storage takes an nth of the pressure off of the blog production. As it is, the process takes me several hours of the day to get through both creating the post itself and the related correspondence.

graphite drawing + textAnd it does take time. I wouldn’t be able to do this other than extremely sporadically if I had a “real” job, that’s for sure. Working from home, I can keep up with laundry and cooking and housekeeping and that sort of thing without losing the flexible hours it takes to do this. That’s the big issue for me: I have a husband who values my art and writing enough to have supported my leaving my previous employment and kept us in financial safety with his own work, and that is a rare and fabulous gift indeed. Or a cruelty to you, if you happen to think I should have kept it to myself. But then, I like to think you’re all smart enough to not show up here if I weary you with my nattering.

Having noted that, I suppose it’s time to address the Why of it all. But that’s embedded in the whole Who-What-When-Where-How of it all, isn’t it. I do this because it gives me joy to play with words and pictures, and because I’m not necessarily cut out to do something else, and most especially because by sharing stories I find new marvelous and inspiring friendships and loves, and renew the best of those I already have, all of which serve to infinitely reinforce my knowledge that I am Rich.

mixed media collage

Gold, Mine (detail from a mixed media collage)

Writing-itis

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photo

Scriptorium

 

Worlds of iridescent gleam

all spring up glinting at the call

insouciant pens make, or they seem

to do: transform a drafty hall

into an arras-covered way

transecting palace corridors–

or granite boulders, flecked with grey,

to gravestones marking mythic wars’

highest heroics, men of myth;

or remnants of some long-forgot

mysterious monster’s kin and kith,

frozen in time upon the spot;

One peep at some dark road reveals

where mullioned windows lend a flash-

quick view of Heaven; one more steals

a different twitch of the eyelash–

a glimpse of Hell–its portals there

right in the same dark road just viewed

as commonplace by those who wear

mere men’s eyes to the interlude.

The glasses worn, instead, by scribes

can coalesce the simplest things

into the marvels of their tribes,

into the wealth of queens and kings,

into kaleidoscopic joys,

playgrounds of sound and touch and hope,

can turn mere scribblings and noise

into a length of golden rope

binding together known, unknown

and things not yet imagined still,

telling those tales their pens have grown

out of pure nothingness and nil

to shape breathtaking, worthy lands

and characters of dash, to cleanse

the mundane world with authors’ hands,

the swordlike flourish of those pens.

photo

Pardon my purple prose . . .

The Only Useful Retrospective Operates on a Pivot

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If examining history–on a grand scale or on a very tiny personal one–doesn’t ultimately result in turning around to move forward from that study, it is of no use. I find the obsession at the end of a calendar year with reviews, retrospectives and rehashes sometimes entertaining and even intermittently informative, but at the end of the day (or year) what I want is to know: where do I go from here?

digital image

What lies in the past remains in its ghostlike remembered forms . . .

There are plenty of fine reasons to revisit what has gone before. It’s meaningful to honor those things, events and especially people we hold dear when they are no longer part of our lives. We can recognize past mistakes, uncover gaps in our experience or behavior or education. We take inventory of what we have accomplished, what we have gained, how our world has expanded, and those valuable objects and attributes that have accrued to our accounts over the past part of our lives. But if it stops there, it can serve no great purpose in the long term, I think.

The deeper honor for recognizing losses must lie not only in coming to terms with them–acceptance, if possible, but if not, then some sort of détente that makes us able to separate that grief and pain from the necessity of not only continuing to live but to grow and thrive. It is no gift to those causes and persons we have loved if we do not continue in our own new ways to seek and become those things we admired in them, to share them with the rest of the world that missed the chance to know them in their own right. If we dwell on mistakes and do not seek amends for them, no one is made better, least of all ourselves. Failure that leads to learning, improvement, reconciliation or higher goals for the future is in fact a beautiful and curable disease. Real progress–growth–almost never comes without the forerunner of Failure. Most of us miraculously able to accomplish something grand on the first try can’t replicate such an accomplishment or even ‘get’ how to achieve the next one, because there has been no passage through the great human experiment of trial and error, of practice and repetition to drive us to the point where we can deliberately and even repeatedly do such fine things.

Certainly, recognizing the great and good things that have been granted us in the past is given its true value and meaning both by our showing appropriate gratitude and then by our turning to the task of making wise and joyful use of whatever wealth we have, whether it’s a piece of bread we can share or it’s the Nobel Prize that sets a foundation for a whole new field of research or it’s a solid investment that paid off well so that we can afford to reinvest in the company or it’s being experienced enough to teach a kid how to ride a bike. Having something of value isn’t really all that impressive if it sits and collects dust while we too sit and collect dust. Unless, perhaps, one is a connoisseur of actual Dust. That is another Issue altogether.

Meanwhile, here I am at the end of another calendar year, taking inventory with everybody else and wondering what it means for my future. What, after all of that, do I want to do with my baggage, good and bad? There are some specifics, I suppose.

I have been a slug, growing more and more sedentary and finding more and more plausible (to me, at least) excuses for doing so, and I intend to get fitter. Not as fit as in my days of hefting a 60-pound bag of Quikrete on my shoulder or scrambling up a scaffold three stories to haul five gallon buckets full of paint up for work. That Me is long gone. But I am going to find a much fitter 50+ me, and that will be satisfying work. As I’ve grown more dedicated to writing in the last year or so, I’ve shelved my previous commitment to practicing drawing regularly that was satisfying as a process and led to some equally pleasing improvement in agility and technique and even end product. So I’m going to re-balance my work to engage in creating more visual art again, whatever the mode or medium.

There, I’ve said all of that out loud, in public, in front of all of you grand people whom I admire for so many attributes that I won’t be able to replicate, and I know you’ll hold me to my promises, because you’re that kind of encouraging and inspiring folk and, yes, a little bit intimidating in your gifts. And the more so in your accomplishments, because after all, that’s what I’m really talking about here: not what we already are, but what we strive to become, however gradually and through whatever study and practice and love of progress it takes to close in on those horizons.

A bit of challenge? Oh, YESSSSS. So it will always be. Mysterious, sometimes frightening, certainly adventure-filled in many ways. But that’s what the past should be teaching us to do. Today was made possible by all of the yesterdays that shaped me, coupled with the will to move forward from them. Tomorrow will be made that much more possible by adding what I’ve learned and accomplished today and letting it help to push me another notch onward. If looking backward thoughtfully can do that, I can barely imagine what looking forward will do. But I’m going to lean into it and see.

digital image

The way ahead is always somewhat unclear; that can be part of the joy if I let it be . . .

“Mama, Where Do Baby Ideas Come From?”

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graphite and colored pencil on paper

Ingvar Lidholm

Well, Honey, when a mommy artist and a daddy medium love each other very much . . . .

I can’t imagine that there is an artist or creative person alive who hasn’t been asked many and many a time where he gets his ideas or what inspired her to make this piece of artwork, write that song, take whatever photograph or choreograph any given ballet. In many cases, the answers are hard to condense into sound-bite-sized, manageable pieces for the occasion, because much creative endeavor is the tangible end result of a whole lifetime’s experience and train of thought, and we all know how often and how easily that particular train gets rerouted, redirected, diverted and derailed along the way.

But in general, most of us can point to pivotal moments that shaped our thinking, whether on an individual project or about our artistry as a whole. We can cite particular persons and their artistry that inspired and enlightened us and informed our own work as we grew. And for many of us, even we who are relatively late bloomers, a lot of the fodder for this inspiration begins early in life and creeps up on us subliminally to a certain extent.

I’ve already mentioned my long-ago irritation at being ‘bundled’ with Edvard Munch because of my Norwegian roots–and, of course, how ridiculous I realized that irritation was once I discovered that contrary to my belief, the more I got to know his work the more I actually admired it. Now, naturally, I take it as high praise (if perhaps hyperbolically so, though I’m happy to take it anyway) when my stuff is seen as meriting any such comparison.

My personal Style, if there is one, is defined more by a tendency toward slightly aggressive lines and bold coloration and faintly eccentric leanings when it comes to subject treatment than by any distinctive media, techniques or actual subjects. My affections in art are too fickle and my attentions too fleeting for me to be easily contented with any defined set of materials and topics and applications. But I find ideas and encouragement and guidance in the work of many painters, poets, draftsmen, printmakers, essayists, storytellers, architects, boat-builders, jewelers, botanists, lycanthropes . . . dear me, have I wandered again?

Part of the trick in pinning down who has been an influence on my work and where I’ve gotten my inspirations and ideas is that I’m very much a holistic, integrative and analogous operator, so in true Liberal Arts fashion I pull my many threads together from many divergent and possibly unrelated sources. The only consistent thing is that I try very hard to steal from the best.

My gifts are not musical, but I love music. So although my piano skills are fit only for personal amusement and my singing limited by spasmodic dysphonia and lack of practice to in-car singalongs and serenading my spouse with occasional outbursts of bent versions of formerly-familiar songs, I often work with music as my inspiring accompaniment. My paintings could be said to derive more from Aretha Franklin or Felix Mendelssohn, The Real Group or Tomás Luis de Victoria, than from Munch or Vincent van Gogh, though both of the latter have lent me many of my ideas about brushwork and coloration. My writing is more directly writing-derived, perhaps, but all of the favorite writers that spring to mind (Ogden Nash, Vladimir Nabokov, Dr Seuss, JRR Tolkien, S.J. Perelman, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Tomie dePaola, Geoffrey Chaucer) are on my hit list because of the lyrical, even musical, qualities with which they treat poetry and prose. I love children’s books as much now as I did when an actual child, because the best of them of course comprise a perfect and literal confluence of verbal and visual imagery, something that becomes more deeply ingrained in me by virtue of drawing the senses together. And in that way, my writing is often led to incorporate certain textures and moods and colors or to carry a particular ambience by either pictures (real or imagined) or simply the weight of a visual experience I’m hoping to evoke with words. I’m no synesthete, but all the same I do depend on the interaction of all my senses to shape each of the creative works I’m developing.

I did once make an entire exhibition devoted to portraits of people (mostly historical figures) who had had influence of some significant sort on my art and my creative life, and perhaps the most telling thing about the gallery besides that I had deliberately filled it with nothing but portraits (a form I’d studiously avoided all along in my artistic journey until then) was that very few of them were of visual artists. Most were of composers, singers, and writers. A few were agents of social change, a couple were people I actually know, and a handful were influential in the philosophical or spiritual realms. The writers and musicians ruled the room. I doubt that would change hugely if I were to do such a survey of inspirational influences again. I do know that there would be a new character added, but I’m not certain how exactly I could represent in a portrait my network of online muses in blogdom.

acrylic and graphite on canvasboard

Igor Stravinsky