Category Archives: Writing

I’d Like to be Shakespeare, but It’s Too Much Responsibility

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white pencil on black paper

I'm much better at being the family curmudgeon than the curmudgeon that turns the family story into art . . .

Much as I always complained about it in my students as whiny entitlement, I too am consistently under the spell of that dream wherein one becomes Great without any sort of effort or even natural-born gift that should make it happen. I’d probably even be quite content with being a one-hit wonder, if for example it happened to be one of those comfortably money-producing sorts of a hit, because after all, it’s not the notoriety per se that appeals to me (as I still enjoy my dork-in-the-corner shy side’s privileges) but the benefits of the notoriety, i.e., exceedingly fat living supported by a steady stream of however-undeserved wealth. All the better if I can manage to convince anyone, at least myself, that it’s marginally deserved; hence, the one hit I’d gladly have.

Meanwhile, back in reality-land, I will go so far as to lay claim to having actually read work by a number of superior writers, studied art made by a talented-rogues’ gallery of artists, and paid some serious attention to what great thinkers and doers of all sorts in fact DO to make their hits just keep on coming. It’s fascinating to see who’s been prolific and who hasn’t, and perhaps more so to see who among those has produced higher or lower proportions within that of impressively high quality stuff. Not least of all, it’s intriguing, if sometimes only in a sort of sadly prurient way, to see who’s burned out our died young, and whether there appears to have been any connection between the productivity and its quality-quotient and that early “deadline” or not. It’s sometimes as though they were outfitted with a cosmic ending-detector that made them squeeze as much into and out of an unfairly short life span as they did.

My own plan is that, if that’s a requirement of greatness, I will be so unbelievably UN-productive and UN-talented and UN-dedicated as to live a Methuselah-like yet party-filled lifetime unnoticed by the gods of fame and fortune. Pretty sure I can do it.

But to be fair, lots of standouts have lived long, prosperous and even exceedingly happy lives, so my preference, my actual Plan A, is that I will get to have it all instead. There are footsteps worth following, and paths worth admiring but not wanting to touch with a ten-foot pole even when wearing full hazmat gear. Not that I wouldn’t look adorable in a hazmat suit, especially if I could find it in safety orange! With a fake fur collar!

But I digress.

If I am to succeed with Plan A, I am willing to concede that I might have to lift the proverbial bale and tote its concomitant barge. Sigh. So I do keep reading, writing, gazing, drawing, and otherwise studying and practicing whether I happen to be quite in the mood or not. It may be that my lucky stars will never get into the specific alignment required, the necessary coincidence never happen at just the right juncture, despite all of my best efforts–which would be a disappointment, given my inborn desire to enjoy all things in the least effortful possible manner and my determination to thwart that inclination in pursuit of productive betterment. But I do believe the only way to tip the odds toward, no, to actually make it possible for, any such confluence of desirable consummations, is to do the work. Pity, but there it is. So the old bum does get off her old bum. What else can I do but do?

This will not, I guarantee you, turn me into a Sure Thing. But it’ll pave the way, should any stars just get in the mood to align in my favor, and along the way, it’s kind of funny, but I find the more I work at the writing and art-making and, heck, even some other things at which I’ve been known to buckle down and work, the more often I find I can derive pleasure from the process itself. This is indeed a really fine thing; if I can’t guarantee that working hard will produce any tangible objects-o’greatness, at least I’ve figured out that I can guarantee it’ll produce some personal pleasure along the way. All else had better be considered bonuses.

Now, I am well aware that the whole idea of a one-hit wonder is fraught with a certain air of condescension among the cognoscenti. There’s more than a hint of disdain in the phrase, as though the wonder-maker were kind of a loser for not having followed up on the whole hitmaking process. I think that’s a horribly unmerciful judgement. Maybe even sour grapes. How many of us ever manage to produce a single notable achievement in our lifetimes? Talk about pressure! The response to a miracle of significant action or production, the thanks you get, is, “Cool–where’s the rest of it?”??

In spite of the danger, for as I’ve said I would be mighty impressed with myself if I could accomplish one really amazing thing in my lifetime of toiling as artist, writer–never mind as daughter, sister, friend, wife–I will keep on plugging along. Because I can’t, finally, figure out how to stop it. Because Twain and da Vinci and Shakespeare and Morisot are dead and so I don’t have to compete with them, only my yesterday’s-self. Because it’s worth doing even when only the process makes it worth doing. Just because.

mixed media portrait on paper

. . . because I Will do it . . .

If Strunk and White were Couturiers

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graphite fashion design drawings

Everything old is new again . . . again . . .

Fashion Week has just ended in New York. I tremble with the thrill of it right from the top of my Philip Treacy Toilet Seat Hat to the scarlet soles of my agonizingly tall Louboutins. Even the non-Twittering world is atwitter. Oh, okay–having confessed to you my dark past as a wearer of safety orange fake fur, I can assume you might recognize me as somewhat less than slavishly devoted to following the dictates of the clothing cognoscenti.

Despite being by nature shy and introverted (yeah, I can hear your gasps of astonishment over there, but it’s quite true), I’ve always gone my own way when it came to dressing myself. It may have begun as a bit of a defense mechanism against my self-consciousness on wearing plenty of hand-me-downs or an instinctive rebellion at recognizing my own mousiness. Whatever the cause, I started fairly early to accessorize with an eccentricity of sorts. Eccentricity is always easier to defend than failure to conform, even if the expression of each is wonderfully similar to the other. Uh-oh. Does that mean they’re a variant form of conformity?? What a disconcerting conundrum! Excuse me whilst I swoon on the divan for a moment, won’t you? There. <Fanning myself coquettishly.>

Now, I can look back on my youth and say that there was a time when I would have made an excellent Goth. Pillaging tendencies aside. Naturally as pale as an iceberg and mum as a mummy, I could’ve slipped into some painful-looking post-Victorian getup and been right at home, but the trend, had it existed, would’ve seemed far too participatory for such a wallflower. More logical that I wear my black veil inwardly and merely retreat into wearing rather sober but unostentatious girl-sized menswear; Dad taught me how to tie a proper Windsor knot and I got my grandfather’s beautiful classic fedora off the top shelf of the closet. I even snagged a great pair of period wingtips at my favorite thrift store and earned my one bit of style critique in them from a little child standing near me in a shop one day who tugged on her mother’s sleeve and said in a bemused stage whisper, “Mommy, that lady’s wearing men’s shoes!” If I felt more girly on any occasions, I might as likely have gone for something a bit librarian-ish as any frilly stuff. I was better suited to be prim and buttoned down, what with having a figure that always tended more toward Long Island Iced Tea than a Hurricane.

I might have enjoyed the Steampunk look, too, for its winking humor and skewed sense of history, but not only did it not exist as an entity yet, it would likely have competed too much with my general cloak of invisibility. I didn’t want to be noticed, but I also didn’t care to blend in with others so much as with the scenery–a much safer perspective to be a non-participatory observer and sometime critic, naturellement.

5 mixed media drawings

More clothing and costumes from thirty years ago . . .

The other day I read an entertaining article written by, an art critic assigned by his paper to cover the menswear shows of Fashion Week. Clearly, he felt himself in the role of anthropologist far more than that of design interpreter. That, of course, is precisely the issue with observing fashion nowadays. You’re likely to see either a parade of such haute-landishness as can be “worn” by (or somehow installed upon) the models nowhere but on a runway, or else garb so lacking in imagination and originality that you’re hard pressed to term it designed. The latter was evidently the case in the realm of menswear at this year’s shows as witnessed by the poor critic-reporter.

Everything new is old again. Perhaps it’s simply in response to the extremes of the couture fantasyland that we get such reactionary tameness and dependence upon stuff that’s most generously interpreted as retro when it simply lacks imagination. I am far from disliking the traditional or the historically referential (you did read the paragraphs just preceding this, no?) but it does seem just as slavishly conformist and uninventive to show mere color and cotton-content variations on the uniform of the day than to play with the range of possibility.

I always sort of felt that that old bible of American English usage, Strunk and White‘s venerable Elements of Style, ought more accurately to be named Elements of Structure, enumerating as it did the foundations and underpinnings of good form that make good writing a mode of communication no matter how artful the window-dressing of a writer’s style. In the same way, I’d love to see the mavens of fashion, if they really want to be both clothiers and designers, challenge themselves more often to do something truly original upon the foundations of those practical structures dividing the wearable from the merely showy. How far can they push those seemingly infinite possible variations when making new and different combinations, groupings and overlaps of color, texture, shape, drape, weight, trims et al.? The haute couture runway is grand entertainment and supremely good theatre at its best, but it’s so divorced from the world of wearable design it’s as though Messrs. Stunk and White had taken copies of the Canterbury Tales, Ulysses, Huckleberry Finn and Ginsberg’s Howl, and having imbibed a quantity of the aforementioned mixed drinks, looked at each other and said “By cracky, that’s some dandy use of the English language; we could all learn from it,” then jammed it all into the bookbinder’s equivalent of a Vitamix, bound it in gilt-edged leather, and pronounced it the perfect how-to for would-be wordsmiths.

mixed media costume parody

Mostly, if I get too involved in trying to be trendy and fashionable, I'm just the class clown. Not that there's anything wrong with that . . .

Now why is it that suddenly I’ve got this urge to write my blog in iambic pentameter while wearing Chanel and handmade cowboy boots?

Pass me that Iced Tea before I faint again.

Correct Me If I’m Wrong (and I Never am . . . )

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spurs & windmill photos

EVERYTHING is research, no? Put on your spurs, head into the wind, and file this, baby!

I think of life as one big information-expedition. Whatever we do or sense or observe gets filed for future reference. Some things are instantly obvious candidates for the Circular File, yes, but everything else should potentially be of interest in one fashion or another. Call it ‘learning from experience’ or fodder for future tall tales to the great-grandkids or simply useful stuff to know, I can’t think of anything that doesn’t, shouldn’t or can’t inform the future self if stored and processed thoughtfully.

Anu Garg‘s wonderful resource website and newsletter A.Word.A.Day (http://wordsmith.org/awad/) is full of marvels: offering the etymology of a word (or more) each day, it seeks to broaden not only our vocabularies but our exposure to and, hopefully, understanding of the history, culture, politics, religions, biology, biography, and so forth–not only of our immediate surrounding population and geographic areas but all of the world’s intertwining ones as well. In addition, the site includes quoted wisdom, pathos and humor from great thinkers and writers. Today’s quotation was one that especially resonated in me:

A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art. –Jorge Luis Borges, writer (1899-1986)

I’ve long felt that, whatever other good bad or indifferent qualities I impute to my life experiences, they shape not only how I think and act afterward but also what directions my creative life is bound to take. I have not even remotely achieved the Buddhist ideal of absolute presence in the moment or a fully and minutely examined life. In my case, though, I attempt most to apply that special rigor to the sensory experiences of my existence, since it is the use of the senses in interpreting and expressing my thoughts and ideas as art that gives me my best self-expression in its broader meaning.

Thankfully, my immediate circle is famously patient with such things. When my partner and I go for a walk, he is enjoying the movement and the tour through a place. I am spending some of the outing walking right along with him, but it’s usually interrupted from time to time by my stopping to investigate and/or photograph whatever intriguing distraction has caught my Miss Magpie eye. I call our walks ‘interval training’ on my part, because while my spouse has continued at his regular pace and I’ve been playing amateur researcher-inspector-scientist, the gap has widened from arm’s length and I must either speed up a little or hit a dead run to catch up for another bit of close-up strolling. Whether it’s now stored in my digital memory as a snapshot or not, whatever caught my attention is filed as quickly as possible–preferably while I catch up to my walking partner, since he may well have continued our conversation without noticing that I’d dropped behind and it would make for some disconcerting non-sequiturs indeed if I interjected with commentary on the beetle wing I just hurriedly stuffed in my pocket or the Art Deco cornice I paused to photograph.

Certainly I have found the digital mini-camera a boon when it comes to those fleeting moments of ideation and inspiration. More often than not, it’s long after the fact that I find the meaning and particular interests in whatever had diverted my attention, frequently because, upon seeing the photograph I’d hastily taken, I’m now noticing something new of interest. That’s usually when I spot similarities of appearance or type, or affinities that put this new tidbit into the context of some story I’d intended to tell or that make it a ‘good fit’ for grouping with other found treasures in my endless stream of visual-mental comparisons and meta-matches, these usually leading to yet another story or stream-of-consciousness ramble. Thus go the meanderings of the trackless mind.

The special appeal, for me, of such unplanned and serendipitous findings is that nothing goes to waste. There are no Wrong Answers in this class. Mistakes and griefs, misfires and tragedies, ugly things and scary things and unbelievably stupid things all have as much possibility for conversion into a good story or a fine piece of art as any happy or pretty thing can have. Even MY mistakes and griefs. With a bit of perspective, at least. So, whenever I can unfurl from the fetal position after having been hit by or created a disaster, I teach myself yet again to spring up with the cartoon-like enthusiasm of those eensy-weensy Olympians popping over the vaulting horse, throw my hands triumphantly in the air, and yell, “I meant to do that!” and then do my best to incorporate the most useful elements of what’s left of me after the experience into an even better me.

Or at the least, into a pretty cool piece of creative art.

aquarium photos + text

It takes some courage, to be sure . . .

And it’s particularly helpful to remind myself that, even if I’m not quite up to that task, maybe the Artist character that I play could do it . . .

Another Kind of Safety

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tree hollow + text

. . . always lurking . . .

It’s not only in the comforting arms of cute-and-cuddliness that I feel secure. While yesterday’s post can hold no shocking revelations for anyone who knows the least bit about me, today’s will have no greater surprises when I say that I am also in love with the dark. Not just literal, opposite-to-light dark as in nighttime and dense drawings made with compressed charcoal and velvety mezzotints. Meta-darkness. Scary stories and crumbling skeletons, underside of reality, unsolvable mystery, doom and despair darkness. Never fear, I am still Miss Goody Two-Shoes and hate the danger and pain that all of those sorts of darkness represent in their actuality.

What I love is the frisson of flirting with darkness through art, at a safe arm’s-length remove, and especially so when I am the puppeteer controlling all of the fun. It might be handled with flat-out gleeful ghoulishness or it might be with a much more lighthearted and jocund approach, depending on my mood, but I’ve long been a known prowler in the territory of haunted houses and haunted hearts.

digital painting

I can sleepwalk these halls or crawl them with wakeful deliberation, but one way or another I always revisit . . .

So whether you diagnose me as a creepy would-be villain or see me as I tend to see myself, a collector of peculiarities and curiosities and the dark inner well in all of us that incubates such things, invents such things–and finds some catharsis in the vicarious observation and manipulation of them. That shallow wading in them and climbing over and out of them unscathed, therein lies entertainment, perhaps–but certainly catharsis and yes, another kind of safety.

night in the park + text

. . . and as she sidled out the door at last, she said in a very soft voice, "Good night" . . .

My Moon is Always in Retrograde. I Mean, It is *I* that am Retrograde. Whatever.

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I’m not stuck in the past. I just revisit it in my heart with great constancy. I’m not a hopeless romantic. (I’m remarkably hopeful, in fact.) But yeah, I’m as squishy on the inside as they come. The upshot of living with this particular combo of symptoms is that I revert with incredible regularity to making very old-school, gooey, straight-up-rhyming poems on beyond-perennial–millennial?–themes. I fall back on making Pretty pictures and comfort-laden images. I’m very girly like that, very old-lady.

Just another bit of my naturally silly bent, don’t you know.

leafy shade photos + text

. . . so I let the treacle trickle . . .

Truth is, I don’t think niceness and sugariness are inherently awful. I know that there are a large contingent of folk, especially arty persons, that get one whiff of this kind of stuff and, well, immediately start to have a reverse-peristaltic episode. The very idea of brushing against the edge of soft-and-cuddly fills many hearts with repulsion. It certainly skates dangerously close to spitting in the face of serious art criticism. Ask John Singer Sargent and Norman Rockwell and, you know, anybody else whose technical prowess and ability to connect both with their clients (yikes! The dreaded commercial success!) and audiences (ewww, what’s with these guys making conventionally attractive artworks and the general populace falling all over themselves liking the stuff??).

And I have to confess to being an outspoken critic of some practitioners famed for precisely the kind of glutinous old-fashioned stuff that I happily turn around and perpetrate myself. The bottom line is not “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like”–it’s just “I know what I like”, period. Because one fan’s treasure is another fan’s trash. When I’m producing creative work of any kind, if it isn’t for a specific commission–in which case, it is my desire as well as my contractual duty to produce something that pleases and meets the needs of the client as agreed upon for the occasion–then I’m doing what I feel like doing and can’t be much bothered with whether anybody else will be attracted to it. When I’m making gushy and flowery things, accolades and smooches from the art establishment is far, far from my otherwise cheerily occupied mind.

hosta photos + text

. . . so I just lie back in my cozy little hammock and indulge all of my candy-coated urges . . .

You may have noticed I have virtually no self-restraint; I’m so very not interested in being appropriate and meeting the Exacting Standards of those in the inner circle of the aforementioned establishment. Who, by the way, seem to me to feel a deep compulsion to Not Like stuff on principle if it emits the teensiest odeur of safeness and comfy likeability. Yeah, I’m that backward. There’s a healthy dose of the upstart pipsqueak in me. Nothing I like better than living my life in the shadow of the really important artists out there, secure in the knowledge that my obscurity gives me license to just do what I jolly well please and make photos and poems and stories and drawings and paintings that just give me personal entertainment and amusement and a very traditional sense of happiness. And then I pop up out of the shady tall grass and make a silly squirrelly smirk at the more elegant and impressive real world.

garden, swans and squirrel

Here's laughing at you, kids . . .

A Word from My Sponsors: Mes mots, ils n’ont sont pas si bon, mais…

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graphite drawing

I am so often, despite my appearance of nonstop yammering, at a complete loss for words. Like many, I suppose I am quite capable of being both concurrently simply by spouting whatever bits of detritus pop into my mind without regard to their needing any sense or substance. Perhaps I’m a born politician and simply haven’t responded to my vocation properly yet. And for this you may all be unspeakably thankful.

The Unspeakable brings me right back round to my theme: How I should love to be like the exquisite Dorothy Parker with her seemingly bottomless font of ingenious and witty and always-apropos bon mots. I wish I could think and speak like the inimitable icons of word history, like Martin Luther King Jr., Clarence Darrow, Mae West, Sir Winston Churchill, Sojourner Truth, and their glorious cohort. Oh to be so majestically, yea magisterially, glib and yet brilliant. I’m more often just stuck.

But then when I think about it with a tad of detachment I must suppose that behind the majority of all that ingenious wordplay was a whole lot of careful and long-studied word-smithing. In fairness to all of us ordinary mortals, it might be said that a goodly part of the skillful framing of ideas and passions into mythic, unforgettable expression in words comes from dedicated and relentless craftsmanship. It’s shaped by a process of editing and critiquing and fine-tuning, whether with others’ assistance or in scholarly solitude, laboriously penned on paper in a leather-lined study or scratched with stone on a jail cell wall or recited until gleaming with polish while staring into a mirror.

Sure, someone gets lucky with the off-the-cuff potshot once in a while, but most of those stirring word pictures that stand any test of time were painstakingly crafted to meet the need of the occasion. No long-remembered story or speech is likely to spring from the woefully un-gifted or the sparklingly talent-free breast of even the most patient and committed worker, I should think, but I suspect in addition that a majority of those poetic bursts for which even the most spectacular of natural linguaphiles are best known come from a constant internal kaleidoscopic tumble aimed at ordering their thoughts into a more perfect set of images, at opening windows more ideally designed to reveal the sense of their story when they finally do tell it.

I’ll make an exception for the astounding Sojourner, whose most famous truth, spoken in a magnificent moment of rhetoric despite a certain enforced lifelong limitation on her education, not to mention her being a Mere Woman, was apparently extemporaneous, and is appropriately known by its signature repeated phrase, “Ain’t I a Woman?“. For, after all, there’s the artful use of words, and then there’s the genuinely inspired use of words.

But for my part, I believe I’d better commit to working it out in the traditional way of practice and mistakes and–when I’m lucky–progress. And then more practice. Even my hero S. J. Perelman, from whose Promethean brow sprang a seemingly endless stream of miraculously hilarious and sparklingly snarky phrases and tales, was a tireless collector of ideas and librarian of a vast store of ridiculous names and outlandish colloquialisms just so that he would have them all at hand and well ingrained in his psyche when the right moment arose for their ultimate use. So I will happily take up the tiny corner of his mantle that I dare to touch and follow in those wacky yet hard-working footsteps of his as they meander through the wordless dark, picking up stray nouns and adverbs wherever they shine most brightly.

graphite drawing

No matter what happens, somewhere out there is a perfect word for it . . .

Sound Advice for the Voiceless

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watercolor birds x 2

Singing our little hearts out . . .

I have spoken about having Spasmodic Dysphonia. That in itself, when in the aural forum and not (as in yesterday’s blog post) just the printed format of the internet, is a fine thing in my estimation. It means that having SD hasn’t rendered me either mute or unwilling to let my sometimes goofy sounding voice be heard. It could conceivably be argued that it would be good if I would actually shut up occasionally, or at least not be quite so outlandishly talkative as I can get. I consider that other people’s problem. Egotistical, I know, and I’m not really exaggerating when I say that. What you hear is what you get.

Being fortunate enough to retain the power of speech, I prefer not to stop using it. SD has meant getting over any vanity I may have had about the sound or quality of my voice. Having been flattered by many in my younger years as a strong and clear and pleasant speaker and encouraged to take singing lessons, to consider radio work, to be a lector and to speak at public events, I now have a different sense of my voice and what I do and don’t trust it to do than I did then.

So I find it less comfortable both physically and psychologically to sing, and certainly have no desire to show off my resulting lack of confidence and practice publicly. I was always a nervous Nellie when it came to singing in any group smaller than a chamber choir (Yikes! Someone might hear me!), but even singing along with a crowd is not the same fun it once was. It has in no way diminished my delight in hearing others sing, however; quite the contrary, it transformed my understanding of what it means to be able to sing, and to do so with skill and fluidity and grace. Working on proper vocal technique will help me continue being able to speak, but my own sense of music has been shifted rather firmly into listening to and appreciating and being moved by others’ mastery of their instruments. My own musical endeavor now sits much more comfortably in the realm of written and spoken language and of trying to capture the marvels of rhythm and pattern and color and sound in the confined refinements of print and speech. The potential is perhaps equally profound and potent, but simply takes an entirely different route through the senses in some significant ways.

Just to be crystal clear on this, I say this without any sense of loss or privation. I’m not suffering! Indeed, I consider myself incredibly fortunate. I’m neither summarized by nor limited to a description of my anomalies any more than I am defined by the ways in which I conform to any norms. SD is something I have or experience, not who I am or what I’m capable of doing. I could go through the list of potentially problematic quirks that help to shape my daily experience and my present self and sound like either a professional victim or a hypochondriac, or I can find–as I most decidedly do–that while each of those oddities has enough effect on my health and capabilities to be worthy of treatment or accommodation of some sort, each brings awareness of deeper gifts and the drive to overcome not only the irksome ills themselves but anything else I might be letting hold me back.

Yes, I am a lily-livered scaredy-pants of the first order as well as a lollygagging and procrastinating and self-sabotaging ignoramus, able to match pretty much any other arguably normal person around in those foolish and unhealthy arts. But at the same time I am so gifted as to understand that my true limitations are all self-imposed and even self-created, and that not only do people with far greater difficulties and far fewer resources live far more impressive and productive lives than I, I can grow up and into a better version of myself by taking notes on how they do it. Being a somewhat lazy and under-motivated student, I have to actively counter the urge to hide behind the couch until all inspirations and moments of willing effort pass, but on certain miraculous occasions I find that, well, I actually get up and do something.

When I do manage to pull myself up by my nearly invisible bootstraps, I find that despite having familial tremor (mainly in my hands) since who-knows-when, I can draw a straight line or a pretty fine freehand circle when I’m focused enough to make art. When I’m not, I have learned to hold my drinking glass with both hands if need be, or to keep kettle and bowl nearly overlapping when ladling soup. When all else fails, spill cloths and laundry detergent are mighty handy things. I may chill easily, thanks to my slightly off-kilter thyroid, but I’ve got layered-clothing styles down to a -40 Edmontonian nine-layer art form that I can still pack in my carry-on baggage. Wanna learn how to do nearly any basic survival task without an inner compass? I have virtually every dyslexic and perceptually dysfunctional talent I’ve ever heard tell of, from the ever popular reading-related visual chaos to spatial, directional, numerical and probably even temporal displacement. So without even knowing or trying to do it, I learned most of the affected skills upside down, backwards and sideways, doing everything with my own inevitably inimitable flair. Once I started treatment for them, my clinical depression and anxiety stopped holding me back and instead informed more of my interaction with other people as well as with my art. My lack of physical stamina and athleticism may have prevented my becoming a famous basketball player or dancer or a three-meter platform diving star, but I figured out early that leverage and a little logical logistical ingenuity could make up for a largish quantity of strength and skill in things physically challenging. Blazing alternative trails isn’t glamorous work but it’s done useful things in my life, and gives me an appreciative slant on those whose achievements outshine mine.

And when it comes right down to it, my ‘substitute’ versions of reality have served me quite nicely. I don’t sing in the way of the magnificent-voiced soloists and choral artists whose offerings have so richly embellished my existence, but there’s nothing stopping me from using the alternate voice I have in words and images to sing in my own way, and mainly for sheer happiness.

spring green flora + text

There are so many ways — and so many reasons — to sing . . .

a ReSounding ValeNtine to eXuBerant advocates

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Digital collage of two handmade collages

What are we searching for?

What need have I of inspirations of my own when I’m being diligently hand fed meaningful resources by those around me?

In response to my musing on the Muse, or substitutions for one in absentia (https://kiwsparks.wordpress.com/2011/08/06/titles-without-tales/), XB writes and asks what moved me to begin blogging in the first place. Short answer: XB.

The longer and more precise answer is that those kind souls comprising my Support Group–loved ones, fellow artists and writers, and those standing ready with the occasionally required kick in the hindquarters–made me do it. There are those who will say that that’s a typically long-winded way of saying the Devil Made Me Do It, but I like to think their motives were altruistic, regardless of what anyone thinks of my output. After all, there was the now-famous critique of a gallery installation of mine, and I quote, If I had stuff like that, I’d burn it. Since that came from my very own Gramps, and I knew that he had zero sense of irony but that, well, he loved me, I feel certain that there was no hidden agenda in the remark. Purely observational. In point of fact, my grandfather would have burned the lot of it without a second thought, but luckily for me he didn’t have his hands on the stuff. Turns out, it simply made me consider more seriously my audience, if any. Granny, viewing the photos of the installation from the other side of the table, loved it. Bless her soul.

My grandmother, let’s be honest, would have loved my work if it were the closest thing to excrement produced by anything other than a mammalian digestive system, because she so closely associated it with me, whom she also loved. I think she really did get a kick out of the art installation in question, aesthetically speaking, but it was irrelevant in the context of the moment. What I was beginning to figure out was that there are as many filters, as many reasons for liking or disliking what an artist does, as there are electrons in the known universe. And that’s counting the town of Electron, Washington. I was also starting to understand that I was compelled to Make Stuff (pictures, poems, stories, sculptures) without regard for whether anyone else would care or not, would like it or not. This was a very useful realization, as freeing as that period when I discovered that if I made larger quantities of stuff, it wouldn’t matter as much if the same percentage didn’t turn out the way I wanted, I just had more to recycle.

Meanwhile, ambling back to the main question (all roads do lead to me) the concomitant bit of info seeping into my lizard brain was that it did matter to and please others that I made my art and that I shared it. So far I’ve never forced anyone to look at or read my work, unless you count teachers required to evaluate assigned things. Thus, I’ve become more comfortable with the idea that if something I do catches someone’s interest, they will likely come willingly to gaze and, if I’m especially fortunate, to make it a communal experience by responding to it as some of you have here.

Which all loops conveniently back to why I’m blogging. I’ve long been happy to haul out the artwork or haul visitors to where it is, if invited (or if a blank wall is foolishly left near me when I’m on a tear). But my friends, family, and other supporters are far-flung in the physical world and we all have remarkably scheduled lives. So when some of the same gang began to suggest that I consider sharing via a more “portable” and less time-constrained medium, the internet, it started to seem like a good idea. Further, when I began to notice how much more I enjoyed the compulsion to write and draw and whatnot if I actually practiced in a slightly disciplined way, not to mention that I sometimes even got noticeably better at it, then blogging at last appeared to be a logical outlet. I acquiesced. Here I am, forty-some posts into it and scratching my head in wonder.

In another completely unsurprising development of the sort that makes me slap myself in the forehead with an appropriately gobsmacked expression, I got a quick reminder that my attraction to art-making is inextricably intertwined with the urge for storytelling; that storytelling is one of the most basic and universal forms of communication; and that I meet and come to know yet another round of good and encouraging and inspiring people via this medium of ether-wandering. From my Oz correspondent at ‘the wuc’ (http://thewuc.com/) to my longtime friend and artistic supporter Mark who shoots me responsive emails from Edmonton, AB, to this morning’s surprise blog subscription from a high school address in Kathmandu, Nepal, I gain strength and hope and camaraderie and ideas. And this morning, from XB right here in my neck of the woods, I get the impetus for a whole new day’s blog entry.

So thank you, XB, thank you spouse and parents and siblings, Jimmy Dale and VN and my personal Dragonfly, and Candas, and so on ad infinitum. This blog’s for you.

lilac and apple blossom photos

With continued gratitude . . .

Never fear, though, while I do indeed have a soft squishy marshmallow center, I also blog because it’s a socially acceptable place nowadays to whine, vent my spleen with unseemly rants and generally behave like my crusty curmudgeonly exterior wants to do. Just a little caveat, my dears, lest you forget whilst I’m busy drizzling the much-deserved honey on y’all.

Titles without Tales

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graphite on paper

One of Our Best Operatives is Missing . . .

As both a visual and verbal storyteller, I’m bound to come up against the stubborn blank wall of imagination empty on occasion, if not often. Long ago I began using the trick of “forced randomness” to fill in the blank until something more substantial would either emerge from the resulting prescription or I’d get a welcome brain-wave from another source to rescue me. As I learned, it’s simply making the first mark on the page that’s generally the hardest part: once there’s a mark, whether genuinely random scribble made with the blessed No. 2 pencil or a slightly gibberish-tinged line written in exasperation, I now have something to respond to, to edit, to like or dislike or build upon, in whatever way I’m moved to do. The response may be disgusted continuous pressing of the Delete key or furious “unscribbling” with the big bad eraser (a tool I find I rarely use for actually erasing). If that’s the case, why then, I can work to divine just what was so unsatisfactory to me about the initial move I’d made and then there’s probably fodder in the facts enough to get me started on something more useful, more personally motivated.

If, on the other hand, I see the seeds of utility and interest in that first foray, I’m often well served by turning the whole process into a good healthy bout of problem solving. That’s what real creativity is to me: my flighty little brain’s attempt to figure out what’s missing from the world, real or not, and fill in the blanks. Blank page, blank canvas, blank silence. Aside from beautiful and meaningful moments of personal zen, I’m driven to fill them with stuff that intrigues and feeds me.

Sometimes I’ll use external means to try to force motivation. I might pick up the first book or magazine I see, crack it open to the first page my fingers find, point to a spot on the page, and tell myself that whatever word or image I land on has to serve as my starting point, the guide for making Mark One. I might look out the window and whatever moves first within my view has to be the source. Any of the old standard repertoire of such tricks will likely do. But perhaps my favorite is to give myself a title or an over-arching concept that could conceivably serve as the framework for a whole series of artworks, chapters, stories. I think of it as my “Mr Booktitles” approach, named years ago in honor of a school of “acting”, sometimes embodied by very famous and very popular actors speaking every line of dialog or soliloquy or narration as though it were a stand-alone title from a very badly written book, a method that still keeps me astonished these particular actors–or the writers and directors that should be forcing them to do better–can get hired and admired. Go figure. But the fatuous title approach has served me reasonably well, so I guess I mustn’t criticize. All I do in the instance is create my title and use either the text or the artwork to try to flesh it out, give it some meaning.

The graphite drawing above came from just such an approach, and ended up being the first in a series of five or six drawings that “illustrated” different parts of the “story” represented by the title, a sort of post-Cold-War spy adventure that never did get written and for which the present artwork illustrated, ultimately, the nonexistent prequel to the never-happened story. Not that I wouldn’t write the actual story at some point, but it wasn’t necessary to have it in hand as impetus to get some work on the page in another format. Who knows, it may be that the illustrations had to exist in order for the story to ‘need to’ happen at some point. If that isn’t convoluted enough, I don’t know what is. But at least it gave me a useful jumping-off point for a series of works that remains something of a favorite among my audiences and yes, with me too.

Be Still and Listen, Thou Big Dope

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run-down beauties

It's there, if you use your six senses . . .

Just because I believe that inspiration and the skill to fulfill it are best bought with persistent and focused labor doesn’t mean I don’t think it lies all around for the taking, too. There’s just so much astounding and strange and beautiful and fun stuff in every imaginable cranny of the world that the real charge here must be to keep all senses twitching at all times, not least of all the antennae of intuition. And I also lean toward the ‘it’s all been done already’ theory of creative endeavor, wherein pretty much every grand idea in history has very possibly already been had and it’s our pleasure and somewhat difficult responsibility to somehow recombine the DNA of our arts into something new and wonderful that’s now our own. So I have no hesitation about going shopping amongst all kinds of artworks extant for a better chance of gathering useful inspirations from them to move me toward my own next project.

When I go to an art exhibition I’m not only basking in the inherent attractions of the works hanging on the walls and filling up the galleries but also filing away molecules of inspiring marvels and, not least of all, building up a slight head of steam that makes me antsy to get into the studio again myself. When I attend a concert, dance, play or other performance, I’m absorbing whatever tremendous artistry, craft, skill, design, and magic came together to make the moments possible, and on the side, I’m mentally revising, redesigning, rehashing and reinventing on my terms every aspect I can imagine, making it mine. It need not diminish my admiration for the work in hand, but rather tends to let it bloom in every direction as an expanding universe of potential artistry. Granted, I am no dancer, haven’t acted since high school (unless you count acting competent, or like I’m not scared, when the occasion requires), and I’m certainly no great shakes as a musician of any sort. But I’ve attempted each just enough of each to appreciate the fineness of what I’m seeing when I sit at the feet of masters.

Even when I dine, the food and its preparation and context can provide a wild cornucopia of not only tasty satisfaction and belly filling sustenance but also another source of artful inspiration of every sensory variety. It might lead to more food (a grand enough goal, to be sure), might lead instead to some seemingly unrelated object’s invention.

Most directly of all, reading stuff that makes me shiver with happiness or shock or reverie or any other sort of appreciation has a strong tendency to get the creative juices flowing–specifically, toward my pen point.

Boston photos + text

Now let me lie between the pages of a fine book . . .

It’s all, and always, research as it happens. Right down to the purposeful hours I spend staring into nebulous space after the fact, looking for that miraculous confluence of thought word and deed that will combine all of my life’s experience into the right synchronous process of art-making to produce my next inspired work. Luck, be thou a true lady . . . tonight, tomorrow, forevermore. Muse, approach.