If Memory Serves
If memory serves
It serves us right
To swerve first left
And then to right
To right the ship
And shift our weight
See changes flip
Both small and great
As fools it’s true
But happy ones
And lighted through
By moons and suns
As endless time
Follows its curves
To roll away
If memory serves
Yes, my eyes are my inspiration. Lots of the stuff that’s put out there in the world as ‘inspirational’ doesn’t work that way for me, so to that I just say, ‘Inspirational my eye!’ but when it comes to gathering up visual data for idea generation, that’s what tends to get my engine revved up more truly. So I’m really enjoying my holiday rambles in search of same.
Yesterday R (my beloved spousal-person) and I and his parents were collected midday by R’s cousin and his wife and we all went into Gruene (Texas) for lunch and a short stroll together. Lunch was grand, the company was lovely, and the day was pleasant all through. But of course what I found the most enriching on the little walk was enjoying the numerous attractions of an old town designed to be pedestrian-friendly, tourist-enticing (there were oodles of the latter) and full of details not found in our own more northerly town.
So I took pictures as a mnemonic device to help me retain some of what we’d seen and to give me images from which to (literally) draw or make digital paintings. I also get out the camera whenever I simply want to be more observant, because it’s remarkable how having that little device in my hand makes me notice all sorts of things I wouldn’t otherwise see. This, naturally, is something of a potential irritation to R since it means that I get into my ‘interval training’ mode, as I call it, wherein on our walks he continues at a steady pace and I stop over and over again to take photos of little sweet-nothings, then dash to catch up with him, at least until I see the next item of interest. Mostly he’s quite tolerant of this method, but it’s been known to irk him (understandably) when the stop-and-start means he’s talking to me and doesn’t know I’m twenty–or fifty–feet behind him. I can still hear him, or I wouldn’t stop cold, but it’s not quite the same, I know. <Sheepish grin.> He does still manage to love me enough to keep going out for walks with me, even knowing I’ll do such a pesky thing every time.
And that makes the walks all the more pleasurable, you can be sure. And it makes me all the more happy to take any good opportunity to go hunting for more input for my visual files whenever I can. Click! Snap! Smile, everybody!
There have been a few occasions in the past when I thought I would go out into the wide world, metaphorically speaking, and seek my (however tiny) fortune on the strength of my artwork. I happen to think I’m a pretty good artist. Even other, seemingly sentient and sane, people have given me reason to think I’m a pretty good artist in somebody’s eyes besides my own. Not that I would be in the least biased.
So I’ve looked into various ways to ‘put it out there’ [Ed: don’t be ridiculous. NOT THAT!], from looking at DIY publishing, either online or on-demand, of prints of my artworks or of books–I’ve got a whole stack of book pages laid out with my art and writing on a whole slew of topics and themes, all stashed away digitally for Maybe Someday use–to sending hard copy prototypes of said books and artworks to various publishers, galleries, shops and the like to see if they’d be interested in aiding me with their resources. The answer, always, has been No. All who respond with anything other than simple form responses indicate that they, too, think my work is good stuff. But the other universal response is: I’m too hard to ‘package’. After whatever amount of hemming and hawing is required in the instance, the clarification is that my work (usually referring to the visual parts, but written forms have been included as well) varies too much. I’m not same-same-same enough to be marketable, apparently.
I consider this high praise. But it’s rotten for business, as you can imagine. Yes, I’ve sold both speculative and commissioned artworks, but only privately and by word of mouth and for very modest sums and, frankly, none in quite a long time. I’ve had a number of gallery showings, but virtually all ones that I organized myself, paid for from start to finish, framed and installed and lit and removed myself (though as my family and close friends will attest, not entirely without enslaving some of them for some of the schlepping and heavy lifting)–and nearly all of these also garnering me good reviews, when I could get any critics to attend, and lots of enthusiastic appreciation from attendees, but no sales. I’m actually beginning to think they might be onto something, those crazies who sell high-end mansion properties and deal with slow sales by jacking the prices higher and higher until equally crazy buyers consider the places posh enough to capture their highfalutin imaginings and plunk down megamillions of dollars or Euros or what-have-you. Meanwhile, I’m sitting here on my little paper and digital treasure trove of creative wonders and selling occasional copies of them for pennies at Zazzle.com.
The other aspect of the critiques I’ve sought that always seem to end with ‘gosh, you’re wonderful, buuuuuuut . . . ‘ is that the same people who tell me I’m too diversified (if not wholly a dilettante and a flighty fool) for my marketable good often tell me in the same conversations that I have a very recognizable style, so no matter how much my subjects and media and moods vary, they find my work fairly easy to identify. And they say this as though they, too, think that’s a good thing. Can’t say I can untangle how the good seems to be perpetually the enemy of the moneymaking; clearly a puzzle I haven’t solved. Yet.
Until then, I keep doing-what-I-do, plodding along and enjoying the process because if it isn’t making me (or my patient partner) any income, it should at the very least be fun to do it! And I do find that no matter how much my attention wanders or my themes hop around from light to dark, from complex to childlike, from crudely handmade to semi-seamlessly digital, I see more and more the marks of my own nature and personality and style peering out at me from each work. I may draw characters that are as far from my own ‘type’ and experience and even beliefs or prior interests as can be imagined (by me), but each of them ends up being somehow a child of my own making or a member of the larger family of my creative spirit, and that’s pretty good, too, I’d say.
This guy just gets his update digitally, being a digital fella himself. Variations on my themes always give me food for thought and inspiration for further adventure. In this case, it’s the most painless form of male prettifying I know. Hmmm. Maybe I oughta consider this form of plastic surgery for myself. See you later–but you might not know you’re seeing me!
Though bleary, psychedelic and portentous dreams had haunted him into a knot by daylight it was neither dark nor stormy that morning. Tarryble Slye was in such a grim and grimy mood when he finally wrestled awake that he decided not to get out of bed until it was darker, for his business with Methden Gartinen was ugly enough to require at the very least a whiff of midnight, better yet a night gripped by a walloping storm. Whether the requisite pelting of rain and blasts of lightning came or not, Slye was determined to drag himself out of bed as late as he possibly could, and put off tonight’s assigned meeting as late as he could get away with it too. That rat Gartinen had made the whole thing sound as innocuous as he could and even offered to pick up the dinner tab beforehand, but there was no mistaking that once he was out of bed Slye was going to be sorely sorry he’d ever crawled out at all. He was already sorry he’d committed to showing up, and backing out of it wasn’t an option; maybe he ought to accept the proffered payoff: a paper-wrapped catch of fish and chips was probably the best thing he could hope to get out of this lousy, evil-tinged day.
Man, how he hated doing taxes.
Count me among the millions enamored of those strange birds Mother Nature garbs in the most exotic finery yet makes the comic relief when it comes to songbird status. Peacocks are hardly the scaredy-pants of the menagerie, but you’d never guess it when you hear their guttural squawks of Help! Help!! across the way. From what I’ve seen, this propensity for sounding the alarm does in fact make them rather handy gatekeepers for herd and flock, but as for any timidity, that seems to be far outweighed by their curiosity, which instead makes them as bold as their colors would imply.
The Love Song of Alfred J. Peacock
All of this makes them quite fascinating to me, and not only so because of my persistent attraction to all things gloriously colorful and iridescent. It also, serendipitously, makes them relatively approachable when they don’t feel threatened, so besides being photogenic they are also photograph-able. So I have a small but nice collection of peacock portraits and closeups of their dramatically beautiful details from which I can make playful peacock artworks. I share here a trio of my ‘recombinant peacock’ digital pieces using the same elements I’ve shot to create slightly different effects.
Psychedelic Peacocks
The peacocks gave their tacit permission. And I, magpie-type bird that I am, can’t help but oblige. Help! Help!! Help!!!
Peacock Moire
Don’t accept a falsehood for your reality–if you have to create your own, then do it!
Back on that old topic of whimpering: of all the [wonderfully dire and woefully valid] reasons I can’t possibly do the enormous amount of work required by this assignment, there’s none simpler or more honest than Number 11:
11 BUT I DON’T WANT TO _______________ (you fill in the blank)!
Boo Hoo. It’s not always optional, is it. Just keep firmly in mind that sometimes doing the required thing leads to unexpected delights in the end product. Not to mention the thoroughly predictable delight of having it done, finished, off the To Do list and out of nagging territory. Just get it out of the way now and you’ll be ever so relieved. Maybe even pleased with yourself!
12 ALL CREATIVE PEOPLE ARE (take your pick):
Eccentric; loose; savants; savages; radical; anti-intellectual; uncontrollable; fluff-headed; egocentric; snobbish; smelly…
Everybody is one or more of the above at some point; look at all of our pop-culture idols who get hung out to dry on a daily basis, not to mention all of the religious, educational and political Saints who irk the multitudes so regularly. So imperfection is hardly a reasonable excuse for avoiding being (or being in the company of) an art maker.
13 IT’S SELFISH &/OR IRRESPONSIBLE TO BE AN ARTIST.
How about how selfish and irresponsible it is to be good at something that enriches lives and shapes culture and to refuse to exercise, to share, those gifts. How unkind it is to stifle your true self and passions (and spend your life unfulfilled or with a chip on your shoulder) so that you live a half life and cheat your friends and loved ones out of your rich complexity. How about that for selfish and irresponsible, huh? Choosing a ‘safe’ path never guaranteed anyone’s actually being safe, anyway.
14 NOBODY (read: Not Everybody in the Universe) WILL LIKE IT.
If you find anything that everybody likes, let me know. For that matter, if you find anything NOBODY likes, I’ll be mighty surprised. So, isn’t it good enough for you if you think your work has some value? It may not make you a market mogul, but it’s amazingly fulfilling to be an artist, and (other than food, which is admittedly desirable) practically no other wealth compares.
15 THE GREATEST!!!
Who says? There is no single Greatest of anything that everyone will agree on yet, and the odds are pretty good that they won’t all agree anything you do is the Greatest—or worst—ever, so why lose sleep over an untried concept. Do your best and be done with it.
16 IF YOU CAN’T SAY (do) ANYTHING NICE (or well), DON’T SAY ANYTHING AT ALL.
A half-baked effort is usually better than no effort at all; no effort guarantees a lack of (or negative) result, and misguided or incomplete efforts can occasionally be rescued or luck into a better-than-deserved result.
Think beautiful thoughts!
17 IT ISN’T AS GOOD AS _________________’S.
Probably nothing anybody else ever does will be as good as my work, but aside from that impossibly high standard, you have as good a chance as any of doing work better than somebody’s, at least occasionally, as long as you do work.
18 ALL GOOD THINGS COME TO THOSE WHO WAIT.
But they don’t come to all of the specific people who desire them, or ‘on time,’ or in the desired form. Your dream might end up in someone else’s stash of prizes if you don’t put up a fight for it.
19 I CAN’T DRAW A STRAIGHT LINE.
No, but a computer can do it for you, or you can use a straightedge, or you can hire a stand-in to draw your straight lines. Don’t tell me your whole oeuvre as an artist/designer is going to be straight lines. Sheesh.
20 CREATIVITY = INTUITION.
Intuition is an indefinable sense or sensation that can bring soul and emotional depth to the work (both process and product), but true creativity takes that nebulous touchy-feely power and combines it with study, effort, logic, research, skill and courage and synthesizes all of the elements of an artist’s knowledge and experience and passions into a concrete Work of Art (process and/or product).
21 THERE’S NOT ENOUGH TIME.
True. We’ll never be given enough time for everything that’s important. So it’s up to us to TAKE the time. And MAKE the time. There’s no real alternative. It’s called Making Choices (and living with them).
22 YOU CAN’T FAKE INSPIRATION.
Maybe you can’t, but I can. Seriously, folks, most people won’t know the difference if you substitute delirious hard work and enthusiasm and use all of your know-how to its limits. If that isn’t quite Inspiration, at least it’s mighty inspirational. When in doubt, review Item Number 10 in Tuesday’s post (linked above).
Go ahead: try your wings!
Waving my arms is something I may think about more than the average person does. From when I was pretty young I was conscious of arm movement as being mighty significant in a seriously diverse series of ways. First of all, there was that childhood training we all enjoy, if we’re well inducted, in the art of waving hello and farewell. I have almost always preferred the former to the latter, but in either case, whenever the occasion was deemed genuinely worthy of such a gesture, I knew that it was a sign of love or affection, and that made it pretty darn worthwhile.
Then again, I also had an early fondness for wagging my crayon-gripping fist over a piece of paper (or whatever flattish surface was convenient) to make squiggly lines and, if I got lucky, get them to coalesce into picture-like concoctions. I might be sitting off in a cozy corner at Grandma and Grandpa W’s, scribbling away, with the faint sounds in the background of parental and grand-parental chatter as they sat drinking their coffee intermingled with the slight chattering sound of Grandpa’s cup doing a little jitterbug against the saucer, because he had a mild tremor in his hand. Of course, his arm-waving was hardly dramatic, but it was one of those delicate underpinnings of my early memory that became part of the whole subtle weave of my perceptions.
Sometime in my early teens or thereabout, I found that the family resemblance extended to my having my own familial tremors, occasionally in my head and neck but mostly in my hands and arms. There have been times when it was more pronounced than was entirely convenient for a person wanting to draw, but fortunately it’s rarely been at problematic extremes, more often merely requiring that I find ways to compensate for or control or use the tremors to advantage in my art-making. In any event, keeping my hand in (no pun intended) as an artist has tended to keep the inevitable interactions of these two kinds of arm-waving present in my attentions. Meanwhile, my other grandmother had her own kind of arm-waving to lend to the family skill-set: Parkinson’s Disease.
Typically, Granny had the wit and will to battle her Parkinsonism not only with great tenacity in staving off the ravages of the illness for many more years than is typical but also with a lot of good-natured humor, because that was her style. So whenever we had a family gathering, she was the first to offer her services for tossing salads and making milkshakes. That my mother has followed in the Parkinsonian lineage would make her forms of arm-waving far worse to behold, knowing that the same sort of insidious progression lay ahead for her, and to be fair, including the knowledge that the odds are a bit higher for me than for some that I will eventually join the parade, but she too has maintained a bright attitude about it all. Besides that, I am very slightly suspicious that her particular skillfulness when it comes to shaking the dice gives her a unique edge in the evening board games.
But the top of the list when it comes to magnificent ways and reasons to wave one’s arms has surely got to be the one I’ve been witnessing so much now that the concert season is well underway again: conducting. Bands, orchestras, operatic performances, choirs. No matter what the form of the musical art, if there is a conductor up there waving his, her (or, particularly, my beloved husband’s) arms, the love that fills the air is what makes all of the arm-waving a worthy and beautiful thing. It brings hearts and minds into focus and, often, into community, and it makes the world a more wonderful place to be.
And that makes me want to stop waving my arms altogether, just opening them wide enough to embrace that better world and anyone I can in it.
It IS All About Me, Really
To see the main
objective of the game,
It helps if one can
keep the goal in frame
And focus on it clearly,
deeply, truly,
But not to lose all
other sights unduly,
So if you’d like to
keep ambition near,
I recommend you stare
at me, my dear.
The depths of Space carry miraculous sparks of inspiration at a seeming infinity of levels.
A couple of years ago my husband was conducting a concert of choral works all, in one way or another, exploring the idea of Space, and he asked me to provide projected images that would act as a visual companion to the music. Since the centerpiece of the concert was to be a selection of movements from Estonian composer/astronomer Urmas Sisask’s ‘Gloria Patri‘–wonderfully meditative, somewhat minimalistic yet still quite melodic music which was to be accompanied by photographs taken through the Hubble telescope, I was given a clear starting point for the collection of visual images. The good people of NASA willingly agreed to let us use any Hubble images we liked, without any constraints and at no charge, so my task was to find the images I thought best suited the music at all points, edit them (some extensively, some less so) in order to fit the format of the projections, and collate all of it into a pre-arranged program that I could manually ‘play’ as the concert was performed. Looking for, and then through, hundreds of Hubble images was a bit of a project in itself; reformatting and resizing, digitally ‘cleaning’ and grouping and ordering them proved to be a little more weighty. But it was a pleasurable and energizing project all the same, staring at the stars and constellations in all of their miraculously varied glory. ‘Gloria Patri’ indeed!
Going forward to work out images for the rest of the pieces on the docket for this program, I was moved by both the enormity of the Hubble’s scope and our own galaxy’s tininess within the vastness of space to think that it would be wonderful to explore those strange dissonances and harmonies that occur in the known world, microscopic to massive, blurred by our limited vision and knowledge and delicately detailed by our constant finding of new facts and ideas in all of it. So for the other pieces in the concert’s repertoire, I sought out images that would complement each other yet emphasize the astounding range of contrasts in our spatial existence, from the granular to the grand. Pollen and planets might in fact have more in common than we can imagine, if we stretch our thinking just a little. Snowflakes and stars might be merely opposite ends of a spectrum that transcends dimensions, scale and vision.
I was reminded throughout this process not only of my minuteness in the great spectacle of existence, but also of how fantastically treasure-filled that existence is, from the level of the subatomic to things and thoughts so massive that the Hubble telescope and all of its exponentially larger generations of offspring may never quite be able to encompass the enormity of it all. If I ever think I’m running out of ideas, I only need to remember this one exercise in humility and happiness, and I should be able to break out of my stasis as a flood of newly sparked inspirations stream like comets out of me.
Art-Colored Glasses 