So the last 10 days or so I’ve been trying to make sure I can beat the ineptitude that my hands face. It’s seemed as if it’s been entirely incurable previously, but what if, like everything else, the creative drawing/sketching talent is all in the mind? What if it’s a simple case of “Giving it a Real Go” and “practice, practice, practice”?

This is something I drew a couple of weeks ago on a Sunday afternoon. I was already fairly defeatist and annoyed with myself that I couldn’t seem to draw, and then this happened:

OK so the front left leg of the chair is shorter than the rest, but you get the idea. I was so amazed when I’d finished it at what I’d just accomplished.

So is the drawing skill something that everyone is born with? Is it just that people seem to accept that they can’t draw from a young age, but then remain envious of people that Can, and still appreciate art in terms of galleries, pictures, paintings?

I guess some people can hone in on their photography skill; my dad’s always been very good at taking excellent pictures, turning any odd flower or hedge into a piece of art; something purely created for that purpose. A talent which one of my brothers seems to have inherited. Skipped me. Damn! But, then again, could it just be a “simple” case of not having tuned into that ability so much? After all, I did do a photography module at uni, which I got a B for. Not great, but not bad, either. So maybe that, too, lays inside us all?

I guess photography can open all kinds of avenues for people as well. After all, some people live on being photographers, such as paparazzi and the like, but also photography artists. My cousin is an incredibly talented photographer who has done many an exhibition. She’s been to a few courses I think, but again, have those courses simply shown her how to use that creative talent, rather than teaching her the talent from the very beginning?

I’m starting to think that we all as children get creative and have that creativity inside us all our lives. It’s just whether or not we start to actually zone into it that’s the difference. What I try to think now when sketching something is that I’ve got nothing to fear bar fear itself. So what if I go wrong? No-one’s going to tell me it looks rubbish, just myself. We are often our own critics to a large degree.

A friend of mine the other day showed me some amazing work she’s drawn, including some characters on her brothers’ bedroom walls. I’m definitely not at that stage yet, and I’ll be surprised if I ever will be. But even SHE was negative about her own work, saying it had taken her at least a week to draw them both.

It’s making me think ineptitude is curable. We are all as talented as each other, just that we need to put The Right Level of concentration and effort into whatever we are making.

Despite my title, this post will actually be a photo how-to (sort of) rather than a post-Christmas dieting regime.  Expanding on a short piece I provided to The Camera Store’s e-newsletter, here are a few tips for making vertical panoramic images.

To create vertical panos, you will need at least two images of your subject.  With your camera on a tripod (and leveled, if you want to make your task easier when blending back home) and in vertical format, snap an image of your subject that is predominantly of the foreground.  Without shifting to the side, tilt your camera up slightly to capture more of the sky above the object you are photographing.  Try and have about 30% or more overlap between the two images.

Back at home, you can use special software to blend the two images or you can do what I do: blend the two images manually using layers in Photoshop.  It is easier to blend the seam between the two images together in parts where there is not a lot of line or texture–where you merge the two depends on what you have photographed, and how good you are at cloning!  For example, blending in a little extra sky to the top of an image, where there is no mountain peak or tree line flush with the top edge of the foreground image, is probably the easiest blend to do.  For reflection shots, I will often blend the two images around the horizon line in the water below the horizon–this process is made a lot easier if you levelled your tripod first!

In terms of subjects, I like objects that have some length to their dimensions already, such as roads, train tracks or boats.  Another subject that works well with vertical panos are those with a contrast or compliment between the foreground and a background element–a stump in water and a looming mountain, for example.  The sky’s the limit!  With soaring heavans above, a vertical pano helps capture such amazing skies. 

If you are looking for a great photo tour with a fantastic artistic photographer, I recommend checking out Frank Grisdale’s tour to Tuscany coming in June 2010. Here is a direct link to the tour and the announcement on Frank’s Blog

©Frank Grisdale

I will be giving a talk on photographing intimate landscapes  on February 20, 2010 from 1-3pm.  If you are interested in the more subtle moments in nature, then this might be the seminar for you.  Sponsored by the folks at The Camera Store, I will be sharing some tips and tricks on how to both see and capture stunning natural moments that will linger on in viewers’ minds and hearts.

I’ve posted the picture that accompanies the event listing on The Camera Store’s website here because it is fairly small on that website and the picture of me is REALLY big.  Rather weird.  Not exactly what I had in mind when I wrote about images that ”take your breath away”! 

This is how I sometimes feel.

The expression “a picture speaks more than a thousand words” is one that I was introduced to back in school days. At the time I just thought that old Mr H was just a weird pervy old man who didn’t know what he was going on about.

Looking back, I see he speaks sense.

While I’m doing my course in Interior Design, I obviously have to spend A LOT of time developing my artistic side. This has become somewhat of a challenge thus far, as I am renowned for being somewhat inept at drawing.
One of my earliest memories of drawing here in the UK we had to draw a boy that was described in a book. To this day I still can’t remember the book; I’ve shut it away so so far! My English teacher at the time was off sick, so we had a substitute who I don’t think realised that I was struggling with my English anyway. All the kids were sitting in the classroom, waiting to get their homework back, and I saw my drawing, so I held my hand out to take it when she gave it to me. She gave me a look as if to say “Not yet, Child!” and then proceeded to hand back everyone else’s work, stand at the front of the class, hold up my drawing and say “Kids, this is NOT the standard I want my homework sent in at!”

I had never been more mortified. I sat there, waiting for the ground to swallow me up. I think the rest of the kids figured it would be my drawing, but they didn’t mention it. Thank. God!
Since then, I guess I always had a bit of a lax attitude to drawing. Even before I’d started on something I’d admitted defeat.

So to be presented with the task of putting together a sketch book for the course? Holy F…!

But I think I’ve done alright, so far. By my standards, anyway. I’ll actually find myself sitting on the bus and get the pad out, and start doodling. When I put the pad away, I actually surprise myself at what I’ve just achieved! OK so the work isn’t perfect, it’s far from it, but I’m getting there.

Still, I do like my pencil. And rubber. In fact, I might approach a rubber company to sponsor me through this course, I use THAT much!! The only bugbear I have right now is that my pencil I bought at the weekend (treated myself for one which was £3!! FOR A PENCIL!!!!!) has now lost it’s rubber. Am absolutely gutted.

But then, back to the course. I have to draw layout plans for a couple of rooms; the living room, bedroom and a bathroom. Have done all the layouts, just need to now do an overlay on layout paper (not too dissimilar to baking paper in texture in fact!)  where I put all the furniture on. And it needs to be drawn freehand. IN INK!
Needless to say, this part of the project has taken me a couple of weeks. The same old thinking is still there; I’ve already admitted defeat before I’ve even begun. So I’m choosing to concentrate on my sketching a bit at first, and will THEN try to use the ink pen to muck around with.

Practice makes perfect. Or just an enormous ink-blob on a page, with the words “I HATE DRAWING!!” Scribbled all down the side!

It’s already the first of December.  Does anyone find that strangely unsettling?

Perhaps because it’s the first day of the last month of the year, all of my nebulous feelings and more-or-less unarticulated fears about not getting enough writing done this year seemed to be with me when I awoke, sitting leering at me from the foot of the bed, or peering over the headboard with their owlish eyes magnified by coke-bottle-bottom glasses.

Just great.

I’ve said before that I wasn’t sure of the direction of this particular blog.  I know that Victory Garden Redux is a photographic journal of my kitchen garden, and it has a pretty steady heartbeat (although lately it’s harder to find inspiration as the garden goes to sleep for the winter).  In it, I ramble a bit every day through my memories of the garden, sometimes memories only moments old, and my philosophy about our relationship with the Earth pokes its head up now and then, and I get fanciful and daydreamy, just as I do in the actual garden, and I also deal with the real nitty gritty and get my hands dirty.

The main goal there was to post something every single day, so that I develop a habit of producing some writing for public view each day.  The public view is the part that scares me the most.  And I can definitely say it’s working.  Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I blogged in thirty minutes or less, including photo uploads, on two different days, and it’s been a long while since I’ve felt the characteristic stomach lurch that pressing “publish” used to give.

But this blog has been used as a repository for, well, everything else.  On it, I’ve discussed the process of quitting smoking, gone on Joy Rebel missions, and kept up with my journey through 12 weeks of The Artist’s Way and a couple of weeks of Art Every Day Month.  But now, I have to be honest with you, I don’t know what to do with it, in which direction to go.

I’m going to be pondering that for a few weeks, maybe right up until the New Year.  Meanwhile, I want to take my writing to a new level here, and not just on the garden blog.

I’ll be posting a freewrite topic on Wednesday mornings, and then my response to it by the weekend.  I want to get back into the habit of doing Natalie Goldberg-style freewrites regularly, to stretch my writing voice and practice using my deep intuition when wielding a pen.  For anyone unfamiliar with Natalie Goldberg and the timed freewrite she advocates in both Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind, I’ll be posting the basic rules and procedure along with the first topic.

And if those of you who like to write want to join me and post your responses on your blogs, or even send them to me via e-mail, you are welcome to.  I’d love some company.

I used to meet with a friend for weekly writing practice, wherein we’d both freewrite on a topic for 10 or 15 minutes, or more, and then we’d pause, shake out our aching hands, and read aloud what we’d written to one another.  Following Natalie Goldberg’s guidelines, we never critiqued a freewrite (a sure path to paralyzing the creative voice), but only listened attentively and then said “thank you” or other words of gratitude in response.

It was a beautiful partnership, and it did a lot for me, as I think it did for her.  It would be wonderful if this space could birth something like that.

However, I’ll be getting some writing done no matter who joins me, starting tomorrow.

Namasté, y’all!

Sure, if you spend thousands of dollars on your camera, then you should use it.  A lot.  But oh! the allure and freedom of the point ‘n shoot!  Released from the heavy weight of hard camera bodies and saved from the hassle of digging for that dangling cable release, your creativity can REALLY soar.

I primarily shoot natural subjects, and a good quality point ‘n shoot produces excellent files under the right conditions.  Often, I find myself using these little cameras for the shot that I probably wouldn’t have taken if I had to use my heavier, pro camera.  Frequently I am surprised and happy that I ‘risked it’.  Also, when out hiking, I usually leave my macro lens at home to save weight.  Again, the point ’n shoot helps me capture those intimate details that I would have missed.

But it is not only nature that can be photographed with your point ‘n shoot.  As any snap-happy tourist knows, the flexibility and ease of use of the small camera means fun! fun! fun!  Suddenly, you are seeing quirky images everywhere:  out a plane window, your breakfast table or on your way to the washroom.  You are smitten with the colours, lines and textures of ordinary, everyday things.  You are seeing.  Playing with a point ‘n shoot is the equivalent to doodling for master painters.  It stimulates your creative mind in fresh and non-judgmental ways.  Who cares about noise, imperfect compositions or blown highlights?  The point is to leave your analytical brain behind and just play.  Try it!  Your photography will be the better for it.

My ego is probably no smaller than the next guy’s, but I also enjoy poking fun at myself.  So, for my humbling act of the week, I thought I would post my first 5 photos taken with my first digital camera–the Nikon D100.  I had taken a few images before with a point-n-shoot and a film camera, but the D100 purchase marked my first serious attempts at photography.

These images were taken three years ago in the summer on two different nights.  I think I was lucky those two nights with the lovely yellow canola fields and the clouds, so they aren’t actually too bad for first efforts.  Here they are:

I think there is some merit in going back to the beginning and seeing where you’ve been and how far you’ve come.  I’ve made worse images than these since taking them, but of course I’ve made some better ones too!  Being objective about your work is a critical skill to learn and essential in helping you improve as an artist.

How far have you come since your first images?

Sometimes, weird coincidences happen across state boundaries, across gender lines and even across periods of discrete time. 

Irritated by the emergence (or more accurately, resurgence) of the age-old debate over whether photography is a purely documentary or artistic endeavour, Darwin and I wrote “Photoshop and Nature Photography: How Far is Too Far?” as a guest column on Jay Goodrich’s blog on August 7, 2009 (see link below).

Since then, this topic has been surfacing in other forums like a breeching whale.  And why?  Because it matters. 

As far as I can tell, the photographic industry is in a period of profound transition.  Gone is the old model of the lone, male wolf loping on the prairie, or skulking in the pre-dawn gloom, searching for his photographic prey:  the alpen-kissed peak, the trophy animal headshot, the dripping reds of a rare sunrise.   Electronic technology has burst into warp speed, and all kinds of new creatures have been encountered on the way.

I am one of them.

I had a film camera, and I dabbled.  But the instant feedback of a digital image has leapt my creative ‘focus’ to a new level–me and thousands of others who did not have the time/patience/interest in the old ways of putting image to output.

Change is scary.  The ‘Other’ is scary.  Especially when it rocks the foundation of what we call ‘reality’.  It is not a rhetorical or philosophical question to ask:  What is reality?  Our politicians tell us that reality is Us vs. Them.  Their politicians tell their people that reality is Them vs. Us.  If some alien race threatened mankind, we would save our neighbour whether black, white, red or yellow, gay, straight or bi, old, young or not saying. 

To get to the point.

Read the links below.  Think about what it means to you to be a photographer.  Think about why you take photographs.  If you could make someone feel what you felt when you took an image, whatever the image, wouldn’t you?  Isn’t that why we take pictures?  Isn’t it about us, and expression, and sharing our ‘reality’?

August 7, 2009: “Photoshop and Nature Photography: How Far is Too Far?” by Samantha Chrysanthou and Darwin Wiggett

November 2, 2009: “Art and Prejudice: What is the Real Truth in Photography?” by Guy Tal, guest column on Jim Goldstein’s blog

November 2, 2009: “Photography’s Eternal Identity Struggle” by Jim Goldstein, guest column on Guy Tal’s blog

November 5, 2009: “A Disturbing Trend in Landscape Photography” posting and thread on Nature Photographers Online Magazine

Here is an image of Mount Yamnuska in Bow Valley Provincial Park:

I shot this in early October and have decided to use it as my  monthly image for my self-assignment.  I’ve cropped off a chunk of the blue sky to make a more square-ish format.  Mount Yamnuska is an interesting and recognizable feature in Bow Valley Provincial Park.  Its sheer limestone face was created as a result of thrust from the Mcconnell Fault.  Apparently (I’m no geological expert here), there is 80 million year old rock in its face and 8 million year old rock at the scree slopes near its base.  Pretty cool!  “Yamnuska” translates to ‘wall of stone’ from the First Nation’s term for the mountain.

Yamnuska, or Mount John Laurie as it is also called in honour of that individual who was a friend and founder of the Indian Association of Alberta, is also a popular spot for Calgary rock climbers and scramblers bent on practising their technique.  It’s a gorgeous hike in the spring and fall when you can look down from the first shoulder of the mountain and gaze out over the Bow River valley.

Well, I won’t be posting much for Art Every Day Month for the next three days.  Sigh.

A huge work deadline just came up Tuesday morning.  It’s the kind of thing that can send me reeling, panicked.    Somehow, after a 10-minute sob-fest when F. reminded me of hard things I’ve managed in the past and pointed out all of the silver linings inherent in this job (he’s amazing, truly), somehow I’ve gotten back on the horse and even feel a teeny bit cheerful.  I’m beginning to think Julia Cameron really isn’t lying when she says using our creativity makes us more resilient in the face of challenges.

And I even managed to draw a few mushrooms today — although they were done as a sort of doodling as I participated in a work-related phone conference.  That mycology club meeting last night really inspired me and gave me a new artistic impetus.  Who knew?  It also had me laughing, which is always a plus, and gave me some holiday food for the blogs linking mushrooms, Santa Claus’ ruddy complexion, flying reindeer, and pine trees.

Although I’d probably better be quieter about that artistic impetus sometimes.  When learning about spore prints, I said excitedly to our friend Vance, “You could use those in art.”  He tried to explain that they’re used for legitimate scientific purposes, i.e. identifying fungi, to which I answered, “Oh, I do understand that, it’s just, I think they could be art, too.”  (When I googled “spore print” upon returning from class, sure enough, some of them have ended up in art museums.  So I’m not the only one to get this brilliant idea — although in my vision, they were used differently.)

Yes, I’m counting the mushroom drawings as my “art” for Tuesday, and I’ll be counting my post over at Victory Garden Redux as Wednesday’s art.  I really like this one, the lovely photo and the interpretation both.

It’s a short deadline; I’ll be back to normal on Saturday, unless I’m comatose by then.  Maybe I’ll catch up on postings for The Artist’s Way and Art Every Day Month then.  I know I’ll be doing some very enjoyable catch-up on checking out everyone’s blog posts for both groups.  That will honestly be the hardest part of this deadline — not just keeping my nose to the grindstone, but keeping my eyes from wandering over to all the blogs that have become a wondrously varied diet of soul food in just the last few months.  I’ll be starving long before Friday night, I bet.

See you back here on Saturday, and have a great week creating art and living artful lives, everybody!

(Photograph is mine this time, taken on Monday evening and turned sepia after the fact.  I guess the photos also count as creative acts or art, but the camera is becoming such a part of my life I no longer think much about it.)

Today, November 1st, is the beginning of Art Every Day Month, the brainchild of Leah Piken Kolidas over at Creative Every Day.  I’d decided to join in a while ago — without realizing it would begin at the tail end of The Artist’s Way course and right on top of another work deadline.  However, I’m still going to try to follow along and engage in some creative activity every single day for the month of November.

(Not sure how often I’ll post, though.  Probably not every single day.  I already do that over at Victory Garden Redux, my other blog.  And yes, I may have to use blogging over there as my creative act on a couple of ultra-busy days.  But that’s okay, because it is a very creative act to post to your blog!  I’ve learned that in just over two months as a blogger.)

I went ahead and made myself a list of creative possibilities, and in the process I realized that my definition of “art” has been much expanded by the 11 weeks of The Artist’s Way completed so far.  That definition is now not only broader, but includes more playful options.  “Art” doesn’t need to mean “two chapters of my award-winning novel written” or “my masterpiece painted in its entirety.”  Thank goodness.

Hopefully, that new and more light-hearted variety will keep the posts interesting for y’all — and keep me on track for the challenge.  Boredom is death to my artistic initiative, I’ve discovered.  If it starts to feel too much like work, the motivation starts leaking out of me until I feel like an old balloon.  And at that point I’m just as likely to actually consistently produce artistically as, well, a deflated balloon.

So I’d rather keep it light.

Today’s creative efforts can unfortunately not be posted, because they’re destined to be Christmas gifts and I’m not 100% certain the intended recipients won’t read this blog.  I can tell you crochet was involved, however, with a lovely organic linen yarn, and that the pattern involved has the word “Euro” in it, so that F. looked at it and said, “What’s European about that?”  And I had to explain to him that this item is not really common here — yet.  I’m hoping it will catch on because it’s so environmentally friendly and, well, just plain smart.

F. realized he’d never yet seen one since coming here, but did agree with me that they’re really useful.  He used to carry one regularly in his backpack as a child, and his mother probably still carries one in her purse every day.

Tantalized yet?  I’ll post pics after Christmas with a review of the yarn and pattern, which I’m finding incredibly easy, in spite of its intermediate rating.  I’d venture to say that even relatively newbie crocheters could manage this.  The only difficulty might be with the size of the stitches.

Tiny stitches with a small hook, which regular readers may remember made it onto my list of touchstones.  I know it takes longer to create something with tiny stitches, but I can’t help it.  I just don’t like bulky yarn and big hooks or needles.  And something in me loves creating tiny, perfect (or nearly so) stitches.

Here’s some pictures that I can post, of a previous crocheted gift in progress.  This became a blanket for Mother’s Day, very springy and in a soft cotton blend, perfect for a light summer blanket.  I actually pictured my mom taking a Sunday afternoon nap on the couch at our house underneath it as I wielded my hook.  The couch is slightly older than me, made in the early ’70s, and still delightfully comfortable (it’s an amazing piece of furniture!), wearing its latest slipcover incarnation of a print of large cabbage roses, very cottage garden and shabby chic.

The blanket adds a bit of a bright spring and a slightly modern touch to the room now — but hanging from a blanket rack.  Mom thought it too pretty to actually use.  Oh, well.

Its stitches were quite a bit larger than what I’m at work on now.

In other AEDM news, I also wrote two notes to each of my female neighbors, reminding them of our scheduled meeting tomorrow for another creative activity, which I’ll reveal here after the fact.  I’m feeling very nervous about this one as it is absolutely outside of my comfort zone.

What could it be?

You’ll just have to tune in tomorrow to see.

(Photo of balloons in the air courtesy of morguefile.  Photos of blanket in progress are mine.)

- Style is a voice, not a prop or an action. If you can buy it, borrow it, download it, or steal it, it is not a style. Don’t look outward for your style; look inward. Cheryl Jacobs Nicolai

For more great nuggets and useful advice cruise on over to Cheryl’s blog – great read!

And please do yourself a favor and visit her website to be blown away by her B+W film  portraits.

©Cheryl Jacobs Nicolai

During Week Three of The Artist’s Way, we are given a series of fill-in-the-blank phrases in an exercise called “Detective Work.”  I enjoyed the exercise very much — once I got past an initial blocked phase where I could not seem to recall anything at all.  The first time through the list, it was as if I’d never seen a movie before the age of 15, never played with a toy as a child, and as if the ink in my pen had dried up quite suddenly when confronted with such phrases as “If I had had a perfect childhood I’d have grown up to be….”

But after we’d passed on into Week Four, and then Week Five, I found that page of the notebook again and found all the answers flowing easily from the pen nib.  Almost too easily.   The corresponding memories popped up clearly, too, as though they’d always been there, just shrouded in a stubborn mist.

And my favorite childhood toy, the first on the list, was a classic “scientific” toy:

Of course, I learned no science whatsoever from the magic rocks.  I remember receiving them as a Christmas gift — and I assuredly wasn’t yet 10 in the memory, which means either (a) my parents ignored the age-appropriate guideline, or (b) the decade in which I spent my young childhood was not very regulated yet, and there may have been no guidelines at all back then.  Both scenarios are equally likely.  I know for a fact that my parents thought the age guidelines were pointless if they intended to personally supervise my engagement with any toy, and also know for a fact that it was common enough to place a baby in a baby carrier on the floorboard of your car, or even unbuckled in the passenger seat, in the 1970s.

I actually fell out of a moving car — albeit moving very slowly — in 1979 on the way to a ballet lesson by — get this — leaning my back against the passenger side door.  I’d been sitting on my knees with my elbows propped on the dashboard just previously, making the windshield fog up so I could draw pictures in it.   I fell out wearing my tights and tap shoes, and when the man who’d been driving the car behind us ran up to check on me, I asked him worriedly if he could catch my mom now driving away because otherwise I was going to miss dance class.  (How’s that for priorities?  Sadly, I did miss dance class, spending that time at the hospital being checked for concussion.)

So child safety regulation was, let’s say, a little more lax than circa 2009.  If car seats and seat belts weren’t yet de rigeur, it’s possible that a toy made of water-soluble metallic salts and a packet of liquid sodium silicate slid easily under the radar.

My dad and I did the actual stalagmite-creation process together, although I remember him being a little frustrated with the lack of a decent explanation of why it worked and what scientific principle it illustrated.  We didn’t have Google back then, so he couldn’t show me this.  But being Daddy, he speculated at length on the possible point of the experiment.  Daddy had done graduate work in Chemistry, worked for the army’s Explosive Ordinance Division, learned about the disarmament of Vietnam-era chemical weapons (among other topics), and likes to figure things out.  I think he would have gladly taken apart my little plastic aquarium and done other experiments with the stalagmites therein, until nothing remained but cloudy colored water or dust — just to be sure.

But it was far too late for that.  I’d fallen in love with my new fantasy world in a jar while he lectured.  I couldn’t stop staring at the world within the little octagonal plastic aquarium.  From every facet of the octagon, I had another window into this realm under the sea.  And I doubled the whole kingdom by sitting it in front of the mirror atop my dresser.

From that day until the rocks finally dissolved some three years later, the magic rocks became my partner in crime, a trigger to my subconscious to kick in creatively when I wanted to go to my room, shut the door, and daydream myself far away.  I say “crime,” of course, because this behavior was repeatedly and many times harshly discouraged.

Oftentimes the shaming word “lazy” was invoked, and Week Nine of the Artist’s Way, where we are now, has a few wonderful things to say about how artists are mis-named “lazy” by parents and others who view the desire to make art as an act of rebellion against them, and how we then apply this term “laziness” to what is actually a potent fear of separation, abandonment or loss, along with the usual contingent of guilt for even wanting to do our own thing and thereby terribly disappointing our loved ones, all of this unexamined and stuffed emotion blocking us from even taking the first steps to make Art.  (I had a dual reaction to most of this chapter:  part of me wanted to hide it away and felt embarassed by it, like it was unseemly even to say some of this stuff, and part of me wanted to laugh out loud and send copies of it to everyone who ever discouraged my art, even peripherally.)

But I can daydream to my heart’s content nowadays.  Well, except for the duties of adult life which intervene now and then.  Still, it’s a lot freer than feeling I must do it clandestinely, somehow unobserved, lest I disappoint those I love and invite censure and criticism of my very character.

So bring on the magic rocks!

Problem:  how to locate a vintage toy?  I ended up going to e-bay and ordering a classic 1980s set because all of the modern versions looked so strange with their non-octagonal aquariums and lots of little stickers to tart up the ensemble.  If the trick worked and I ended up with a rainbow-hued garden of coral forms, why would I ever want to ruin it with a sticker?  No way!  Plus, the modern versions were rather expensive.  So was mine, once I paid for shipping — and I learned afterward that you can usually buy a basic set for about $3 at a local discount store.

However, I was pleased with myself for not only planning an artist date, but actually exercising the forethought to have an item shipped for the occasion.  And to have unearthed a heretofore unrecognized wishlist item from excavating my own past felt, well, strangely comforting.  I could almost use the word “re-parenting” here — but that word still feels dirty and disloyal.

My artist child felt pretty special, I can tell you… and she could hardly wait to open the package and get cracking.

Do you see what I mean about a magical underwater realm?  Can’t you just imagine all the mermaids swimming between the rocks, sitting on the cracked and fallen branches of coral, making their homes in the cool, bejeweled caves at the base of those palace-shaped formations?

I could.  Still can, it turns out — although when the process was first completed, I couldn’t think of anything at first.  I could only stare and stare and wonder if this artist date had turned out to be a waste of an hour and $13.  My artist child seemed supremely happy with the outcome, not at all concerned about how empty the underwater world appeared to be.  I even wondered out loud if you had to be a child for the “trick” to work, at which point I distinctly heard her giggling at me.

This did not put me in the best of moods.

I put the jar (found it on my Artist Date in Week One, remember?) filled with the new kingdom in fresh, clean water on top of my desk and left it there overnight.  Nothing happened for a couple of days, except that I kept staring at it and even took it repeatedly to the mirror atop my dresser to double the size of the world in a flash.  But … nada.  No swirls of color, no movement.  This world was empty.  Maybe even dead.

The experiment had caused me nothing but grief and frustration this time around.  Well, mixed with a little beauty, I suppose.  Not a total loss, then.

But the very next morning, after morning pages, a lovely mermaid with spiky peach-colored hair and turquoise and silver fish scales came swimming right up to the glass to introduce herself and take me on a tour of her world.

Apparently they just had to trust me first.  They were there all the time.  (Although they were totally different mermaids than I knew before, and it was a totally different city than the one that finally crumbled to sediment in my childhood.  Of course!  I am a totally different human being now, too — although some similarities remain, and one mermaid I have met assured me she recognized me vaguely from her grandmother’s stories.)

There’s a lesson in there somewhere.  I’m not quite sure how to articulate it.  About trusting oneself and Art taking patience and the Muse absolutely impossible to lure out until things are not just calm and beautiful, but ready for her.  About working with your subconscious and not expecting duplicate results and — well, I’m sure all of my fellow Artist’s Way travelers could add to this list.  Perhaps I can’t entirely articulate it because parts of it are communicated to me without words.  Maybe I just need time for the words to come to me….

Meanwhile, if you need me anytime soon, I might be completely and joyfully lost in another world.

I am teaching a new Online Course through the Nature Photographers Network on learning to see like a photographer.  This course is great for beginners AND those of us who have been taking pictures for awhile but are stuck in a rut with our designs and composition.  Freshen it up and take things to a new level without leaving your home (well, except to snap pics, of course!)  Check it out–great value compared to all those other online courses out there.  And there’s other courses by other photographers on the site too if you are looking to improve your skills in other areas.

Affirmations bring up a lot of resistance for me.

You’d think I’d be over this by now.  I’ve been working with them, on and off, for several years.  What convinced me to try them, with the voice in my head scoffing, “This sounds so retarded,” and “People will think you’ve lost your ability to reason,” and many other nasty statements in a similar vein?

Simply the realization that I felt it was fine for me to say the cruelest, harshest things about myself in my mind.  Even normal.  But try to say a slightly nice statement — hell, even a statement that just wasn’t mean, and I felt the blood rising to stain my cheeks.  Being neutral to myself at that point in my life embarrassed me enough to cause a visible blush.

Pretty effed up, huh?

I’ve advanced well past that low point now.  For instance, I no longer assume any statement my ego spouts is true or correct.  It may bear a vague resemblance to some aspect of reality, but you can pretty much bet it’s been massively distorted by conditioning and habit.  It’s certainly not wise to assume the mind’s commentary about oneself and one’s prospects in life is a mirror-perfect reflection of reality.

But I still can tell when I’ve found an affirmation that touches a sore spot in my psyche.  A place that has yet to heal, where I need to recondition myself to be able to accept a wider range of possible interpretations of reality.  Because, just like in old times, I suddenly hear that familiar, whining voice pipe up, “This is so stupid.  Why are you wasting your time on this arty-farty nonsense?”

So I picked five affirmations from the list Julia Cameron provided us with in Week Eight of The Artist’s Way, and I chose the ones that really made my ego squirm with embarrassment.  Two, four, and five may even have ignited the faintest warm blush when read aloud.

At least I know I’m on the right track.

Creativity is a blessing I accept.

My creativity blesses others.

I now treat myself and my creativity more gently.

I now share my creativity more openly.

I now accept creative recovery.

(Photo courtesy of Morguefile.)

I have just received my first ‘hate mail’ and here it is (minus the author’s first name):

In a way, I’m flattered that this particular gentleman was moved enough to take the time to email me, but the shortcomings in his comments has inspired me to write a short blog on the art of constructive criticism.  You see, I would like to engage in a dialogue with any person who has an opinion on my work so that I can learn what clicks and what doesn’t.  But that is hard to do of course if you don’t have the full name or website of the person whose macros “are nicer”.  So, in lieu of a discussion with Monsieur B, here are a few general tips for those who love to point fingers.

#1. Stand Behind What you Say. 

Why is it that the cloak of anonymity makes some people act differently than when they are in full view?  If your comment is going to be viewed publicly, will you still make it?  If your answer is ‘no’, then perhaps you should revise or even reconsider making such a comment.

#2. Personal Attacks are Not Constructive Criticism

Ask yourself why you feel moved to comment on someone else’s work.  Are you motivated to help that person improve?  Or are you grandstanding, putting someone else down to make yourself feel good?  If your goal is to help others be better at what they do, then learning a few tips on how to get your message effectively and diplomatically across is useful.  If you are out there to thump your own chest…well, probably no one cares to hear it.  Personal attacks on other peoples’ work reveals more about the character of the sender than it helps the receiver.

#3. Start With a Positive

Want someone to actually listen to your feedback?  Start with something they did well.  This will get their attention and help balance out the negatives you are about to dish out.  Humanity spends a lot of time obsessing over the gritty stuff in life, but we can all take a lesson from Barney the Purple Dinosaur and try to get along.  Remember, your goal here is to help another person, not put them down!

#4. Comment on Actions and Behaviours, Not the Person

Simple folks—-keep your comments to specific things that the person could do to improve.  Saying someone’s work is ’stupid’ is a waste of time.  What about their product is not successful?  What can they do next time to improve?  Be as specific as you can.  This point works for those receiving some constructive criticism too; remember that this exchange is not about YOU but your work.  Don’t take criticism personally as a reflection on your worth.  Learn to evaluate the criticism you are receiving for merit, just as the person providing the feedback is evaluating your work for merit.

#5. Keep Your Own Nose Clean!

Those who offer criticism univited often feel like they stand upon a higher moral ground.  Perhaps they have been in the biz longer than you and feel that this seniority equates to superiority (I’m not sure about the truthfulness of this) or perhaps they are one of those energy-draining, life-sucking parasites whose only pleasure is found in dragging other people down.  In any case, assuming your motives for speaking up in the first place are noble, make sure you are at least doing what you are advising the other person to do!  For example, if you wish to criticise someone else’s writings, then make sure your own written comments are free of grammatical and spelling errors.  (I’m not kidding!  How can I take seriously the comments of someone who mispells ‘ignorance’ in his hate mail??!)

Mean people are a fact of life.  Everytime you put your work out there, you risk negative and unhelpful feedback.  But growing a thick skin will help you deflect criticism that has as its aim the desire to harm and not help you.  And to all of you out there who lift a pen or peck out a few sentences, make it worth your time and ours and learn the art of constructive criticism.

I have to confess that up until now I’ve been happily bumbling along with a paintbrush in my hand happy if selling a painting happened now and again.  But since blogging and networking with other artists out there it’s made me realise that I’ve got to work hard to earn a place in this game, and harder still to keep it. What am I talking about? I’m talking about going professional and what effort it takes to get there.

Where does that begin? Apart from putting your  artwork out there – it  begins by impressing people who are going to give you that first rung on the ladder, by telling them what your art is about.  In other words your Artist’s Statement  – the paragraph or page where you get a chance to really sell yourself.  For artists our statement tells people  that we are serious about our art. Get that wrong and it’s game over? Don’t worry if you don’t get it right first time.  Some artists don’t even have a statement which is fine, but a statement (sometimes accompanied with a brief biography about the artist) gives us something to grasp onto and helps us to understand the artist reasons for why they do what they do. It certainly gives galleries an idea of what you’re about.

I’ve put together a few lines that I call my artist’s statement and it’s a work in progress for sure, because  I know I have only just scratched the surface of understanding what my art is all about.  Artist Christopher Stott says: “stick with your subject and grow with it.” I’ve been painting stones for about two and a half years now,  and when I first began I studied their every detail and was determined to copy every line and groove in their surface as realistically as I could.  But I began  to question the way I was painting them, wondering if I how I could grow with them.  When I think I had the answer I realised I had taken a turn and so my statement clicked into place.

So how do you write your statement?  Carte blanc. Mind blanc. Invent something? No. Write something truthful even if writing in the third person helps to spark off ideas, but above all be honest.  And if you can’t write much that’s fine.  Less is more. You can always add to your statement after all, your art is something that is going to develop as you do so therefore so is your statement. Good luck!

Jim Goldstein has a highly rated podcast called EXIF and Beyond where he interviews photographers and photo industry types in-depth. This week he has me as his victim. You can hear me ramble on here.

Darwin above Lake Abraham, Alberta

“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”

– English proverb

“Courage is being scared to death – but saddling up anyway.”

– John Wayne

I cannot decide whether I hate it or love it when everything in my life seems to be falling in line with a certain theme.  Perhaps it depends upon the theme.  This week, I was rather grumpy about it as this is the moment in The Artist’s Way when I start to growl (subconsciously, hopefully not yet aloud) at Julia Cameron and her precious naïveté.

Sometimes I feel like she is a bit too fairy godmother-ish for my taste.  I don’t object to fairy godmothers on principle — just to the ones who don’t deliver.  I mean let’s face it:  most of those, “Dream it and it will come to you,” gurus are just trying to make a buck.  They’re all talk, no action.

At least, this is how my ego sees it.  My ego has, of course, been conditioned by its earliest experiences.  Here is an example:

My mother would often complain about how terrible and financially precarious our lives were.  As a small child, I was convinced by her dramatic way of phrasing these worries that we were perhaps days from losing our home, and I would pitifully memorize the details of my bedroom or the kitchen or my backyard in an effort to hold on to them somehow.  For a reality check:  my parents have now been in that house almost 35 years.

Mama would then state how she would have arranged things if she were Ruler of the Universe, and then sigh and meet my eyes with this brave, but somehow hollow and sad — oh, so sad, I cannot possibly describe how sad — look deep down in her own pretty hazel eyes, and say, with a forced and rueful little laugh, “Oh, well, if wishes were horses….”

Ah, yes, then beggars would ride away happily ever after to their castles in the air.

I have no idea when I learned the last part of the phrase, but I knew it well enough not to need it by the time I was in grade school.  I also knew well enough not to start wishing out loud if Mama was in the room, as I was liable to be interrupted mid-wish with the sigh, the little laugh, and the half-a-proverb.  It was pretty predictable, although I don’t think she even realized she was doing it.

And not that I like to quote the Wikipedia very often, but here’s part of what it has to say about that:

“The proverb may be used to mock a wishful attitude by pointing out the uselessness of wishing. It may be also be used with a more serious tone as an admonishment, for the same purpose.”

But wishing was not just useless in my home.  Wishing was downright dangerous.  At least, my extended family thought so — and Mama seemed to agree.

There is a whole lot of material there, so I’ll just keep it short and explain that the larger family conception of the Divine was not as a benevolent power, nor anything near the Father of Jesus Christ they professed to believe in.  If spiritual beliefs go on a sliding scale, our collective vision would have to come in somewhere in the range of the Ancient Greek pantheon.  Capricious, violent, tricky, jealous, frivolous, sometimes downright cruel, always ready to put you back in your place — and intensely interested in the pettiest little details of our lives in particular.

Because, of course, our family was special.  We had been chosen to be cursed by the gods.

If you think I’m exaggerating, I’m so happy for you that you cannot imagine a family where this is the literal foundational spiritual belief.  As Tolstoy put it, “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” so it might be challenging to picture if you come from a different kind of unhappy family — and nearly impossible to comprehend if you came from a happy one.  I thought this family curse thing was, well, obvious, indisputable, rock-hard truth.  (Isn’t conditioning amazing?)

But I was cursed. Believing you are cursed is a curse of its own kind.  Talk about a paranoid worldview!  That effed-up idea of God is probably the worst curse you could give a small child.

I grew up thinking God had it out for me.  Even to say what you planned to do out loud was taboo in my grandfather’s house, because apparently that was precisely the act of naked hubris that invited God to take you down a peg or two.  Looking happy was a bad idea, too.  I mean sometimes you couldn’t help it.  But you’d better keep it under control, or you would just be inviting more negative attention from Above.  All-seeing Being?  Perhaps — except God couldn’t see what was in your head, and so saying it out loud or wearing it indiscreetly on your face invited censure and the kind of booming ha-ha-ha-we’ll-see-about-that-you-ridiculous-mortal response that seemed perfectly normal for me to expect by the time I was a teen.

It took until my mid-20s before I seriously re-examined this notion.  By then, I’d been angry at God, gone on sabbatical from God, and was so sure God’s job was to hinder and trip me up that I secretly thought it was useless to try anything.  No wonder I was depressed.

And even when I was convinced that my beliefs were wrong and that I wanted to change them, that’s only changing your mind intellectually.  The conditioning and the preprogrammed emotions linger on.  It’s a lifelong job for me to learn to step out on faith and declare what I want — and then act on it.  It takes a heck of a lot of courage to take steps toward things I want with my whole heart.  And Julia Cameron wants me to make frivolous wishes???  She wants me to freewrite using “I wish…” almost 20 times in Week Five.  (18, to be exact, plus an extra special wish at the end.  So it’s 19 total.  Yes, I counted.)

When I got to that page, I shut the book rather forcefully.  My artist child sighed, then pouted a little bit.

Yeah, like that.

But I pretty much ignored her.  I am far too skilled at ignoring my artist child.  However, I did decide to soldier on with the Artist Date I had planned for her.  (Which is a two-part date, by the way.  This ridiculously long essay is part one.)

When we did our detective work in Week Three, I’d written that the best movie I ever saw as a kid was Escape to Witch Mountain.  This was obviously the 1975 version.  They’ve got a newfangled one out now, I see.  Anyway, we rented it, and it came in the mailbox on Friday.

Now, the part I failed on with this Artist Date is that F. was with me.   In Week Five, I learned a valuable lesson:  do not expect to watch a movie at home alone.  We have a tiny, two-bedroom apartment, and F. loves films.  It’s not gonna happen.  Besides, he’s curious about the things I watched as a child, as I’ve mentioned before.  Still, even though I didn’t follow the Artist Date rules to a “T”, I got a lot out of re-watching this old film — and that’s in spite of the vintage-style special effects and bad acting.

I enjoyed the 1970s clothing, for one thing.  I got a glimpse of why small me held tightly and stubbornly to the idea of following her intuition — in the person of the heroine, pouty, whiny, teary, but capable Tia.  And even though I’d forgotten almost the whole film, there was one scene I’d remembered with clarity all these years.

TONY:  Tia, what’s the matter?

TIA:  Oh, everything.  And nothing.  I mean, maybe it’s because we’ve gotten everything we ever wanted.  More, even.  It’s … I don’t know.

TONY:  It just doesn’t leave us anything to wish for.

(If you’d like to see that clip, it’s at 3:29 on this youtube video.  This is an 8-1/2 minute excerpt of the original film.)

I have to admit, that really got under my skin.  Of course, the children don’t get what they really want until the end of the film, when they locate their long-lost tribe and find a place to call home, away from the meddlesome humans.  But as far as wishing for material things, with toys, horses, pets, an ice-cream parlor, a mini-puppet theatre, and the installation of a carousel underway, it’s true there’s not much left for them. And when I was a kid, I did love it when they got it all, nearly as much as I enjoyed reading the scene in The Little Princess when Sarah wakes up to find herself in luxurious comfort after living like a drudge for all those months.  (Notice that’s another impossible-wish-come-true story.)

As I tried to fall asleep that night, I was remembering reading about a Native American tribe who considered wishing a sacred act, a co-participation with the Great Spirit, with the implication that the world could not continue to reinvent itself every day without our wishes.  It was a religious duty, really, to keep wishing.  Tossing and turning, I kept thinking of all of you who are in my cluster and follow Jamie Ridler’s Wishcasting Wednesday — I mean a lot of you put it out there every week — and nobody’s been struck dead yet (“that you know about,” adds my ego).  Phrases from Shakti Gawain’s Creative Visualization kept popping up as I was coming to the conclusion it was going to be impossible to drift off, all about how we create our own reality, etc., etc., about how I have wished for things before, I just never allowed it to become a habit.

In fact, I remembered that I’d written out about 20 visualizations to put in my “god jar” — really a shantung-silk covered box — a few years back when I was doing some spiritual work.  When I was cleaning my house to get ready for this move to South Carolina, I went through the box.  (I’d forgotten all about it.)  In there was a visualization that pretty accurately describes F., with the confident assertion that I would find him and fall in love.

Final result:  I got up and wrote out the wishes.  I felt scared and stupid and quite daring — and just a little bit relieved when the wishlist was done.

Artist child was pleased.  (I’m going to have to name her.  She’s becoming so clear to me lately, she deserves her own name.)

And I finally could go to sleep.

(All these photos courtesy of morguefile.)

So this is going to be a bit of a hodge-podge post (you’re forewarned).

First, the image above is the first photograph I’ve officially taken with the 4×5 field camera (yes!  it is out of the box!).  The couple featured are our relatives from Belgium.  They were kind enough to let me snap this image of them relaxing on the deck at Aurum Lodge.  The image was taken on expired Polaroid 100 instant film.  Amazingly, despite being VERY expired, the chemicals aren’t all dried up.  I love the yellow cast–sort of like a built-in retro look.  I have grand plans to make some still lifes of retro things (like old juke boxes, junked cars, glass pop bottles…) so that I work with the tint and development peculiarities of the film.  So cool.  Stay tuned….

Now for the weird surprise.

I’ve taken my own advice to study other art forms in order to be a better photographer and enrolled in a community painting club.  The other night, while scrabbling away at a sketch, I glanced over at the artist sitting next to me and received quite a jolt!

She was painting from a photograph of mine!!

At first I thought it was Darwin’s image as she had folded the paper to form a new framing.  But then I meandered over and told her I recognized the image and she said she had gotten the image from the 2010 Panorama Calendar put out by Firefly (there’s an entire story on this company and draggy-feet on the way to pay-day, but perhaps I should save for a Rant the poor track record of publishers for paying up).  So here’s the original image (squished small as it is a panorama):

“I hope you don’t mind….” was her offering at being found-out painting from another artist’s work.  And here is the question.  I didn’t mind in this case (even if she plans to sell her work later), but are there ethical considerations here?  If a photograph is published in a calendar, should artists seek permission from the photographer (whose name is listed on the calendar) before making a new art work from that image?  Or is that image somehow in the public domain and up for grabs?  Perhaps an acknowledgement of some kind, like a reference to the original photographer, would suffice?

Guy Tal has expressed some thoughtful comments on a similar theme in his web journal.  I think that, just because something is easy (i.e. being inspired to create your own art from another artists’ works) doesn’t mean some acknowledgement isn’t due.  For the record, when I studied art in high school, our art teacher always advised noting on the back of your piece the name of the original work that inspired your interpretation by writing “After ‘Starry Night’ by Vincent van Gogh”, for example.

A good idea, I think, for all of us artists.

“Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop.”

– Lewis Carroll

Apparently, lots of folks give up on The Artist’s Way around Week Four.   That may be happening in our Artist’s Way cluster, as well.  I’m not sure.  I know that I was tempted just a few days ago to say to Hell with it… and yet, I know that is just my inner resistance speaking.  It can speak rather forcefully sometimes — sounds a bit like a preacher in a pulpit, yelling and carrying on, whenever something in me feels threatened or scared.

Creative recovery is threatening.  At least for me.  “What have I been avoiding doing because I was too scared to act on my dreams?” sounds a bit like, “How have I been wasting my one precious life, frittering it away on things other people thought were important?”

This is the kind of question designed to have my foot sheer toward the pit, to borrow a phrase from my favorite Neruda poem, “The Poet.”  (Which I cannot seem to find online to give you a link, because typing in Pablo Neruda “The Poet” yields such predictable results from search engines.  God, they are rather unimaginative programs; aren’t they?)

And it doesn’t help much that we’ve been uncovering “buried dreams” this week.  I did almost every exercise from Week Four, but I may or may not be able to blog about them.  Some of them were so painful to unearth and contemplate that I ended up alternately in tears or furiously angry — with myself, with the world, with the early artistic abusers in my life, with American pragmatic, workaholic culture and its impoverished, exclusionary American Dream™, with the IRS … and so on and so forth.

Yet I wasn’t writing the morning pages to process any of that stuff.  Nasty combination.

Anyway, I have decided to keep going until I get to the end.  I owe it to my artist.  For anyone in my cluster who needs to end the journey now for whatever reason, I applaud what you’ve done so far and send you my best wishes for a continuing exciting and fruitful creative life.  Of course, my hope is for all of us to continue.  My clustermates are an amazingly creative and inspiring bunch.

But I think our intuitions will tell each of us what’s right for our individual journeys … and that will look very different depending on where we are.

Today will mark the end of reading deprivation, and I think that will go a long way toward improving my mood.  Also, I began to write my morning pages again today.  All of life, and not just The Artist’s Way, is full of these stops and starts and course corrections and resuming where we left off — maybe even something we left off years ago, an abiding dream that refuses to die.  Here’s to small victories on a long and winding path!

These Morning Pages got written in a brand new notebook, and I think I did need to do that, to somehow mark the start of something different.  When we began TAW, I’d just kept writing in my morning pages notebook the same as always.  But now I realize each time through this course is like stepping off down a new path.  In a creative life, there is always so much left to discover — of ourselves, of others, of the divine, of the world, of life.  (And really, what life is not creative?)

This section of the path has been incredibly dark, as though I were miles below a constantly dripping forest canopy, and the canopy itself was situated under a glowering, steel gray sky.  I slipped a couple of times on the muddy forest floor.  But the bit ahead is looking a little more promising.

Week Five?

Thanks for listening, by the way.  I know this blog is off to a rocky start and all over the map.  Lately it seems to center a lot on my personal journey through TAW.  Funnily enough, my other blog, the one that was supposed to be like practicing scales for a beginning musician, has found its theme and seems solidly on track.  This one, supposed to be my main one, is still finding its footing and right now serves as a repository of all the stuff marked “Other.”

I’m learning, though.  I suspect blogging has its own learning curve.

(Photos courtesy of Icanhascheezburger, Stockvault, Morguefile, respectively.)

“If you think you are doing something new and original, you just haven’t looked at enough art.”

A reader of this blog sent me a link to a blog by Larry Vogel, called the The New Renaissance Man. The blog is new and has just a few postings but the quality of the writing is wonderful and the pieces are thoughtful. So far one article that really caught my eye was The Fine Art of Appropriation, or Are We Just Stepping on Toes?  Larry ponders whether artists should worry  about whether ”this has ever been done before”. In the end Larry suggests that “this frame of mind will only lead to a nonproductive life.” I like Larry’s final line in the piece… it is the good swift kick in the ass that we sometimes need to keep us producing our art – it is worth reading! Bookmark Larry’s blog, I expect great things from this renaissance man.

“… Remember that The Artist’s Way is a spiral path.  You will circle through some of the issues over and over, each time at a different level.  There is no such thing as being done with an artistic life…. Our aim here is to find the trail, establish our footing, and begin the climb.”

– Julia Cameron

Week Three of the Artist’s Way found me going a little nutty — and that was before reading deprivation began.  Uh-oh.  For those of you who know me well, you realize this means you should be sending little sympathetic and encouraging notes to F. right about now.  (Actually, he’s been very sweet and understanding.  Last night he cooked me mittitei — probably my second favorite Romanian meal — for dinner when I wanted to keep writing.  I know, I’m so lucky.)

But lucky or not, I’ve been experiencing some of the emotional swings described in Week Four.  In fact, I got around to reading Week Four a little later than usual, and I felt so relieved to see it all there in black & white.  You can see where it would be a comfort to read that some people experience a, b, & c right about now during the course — if you, yourself, are already experiencing a & c, and finding them unsettling.

It’s like when you call your doctor to report a random symptom and she says, oh, of course, that’s a fairly common side effect of that medicine I gave you.  Always good to know you’re within the range of normal.

Well, sort of.

Anyway, it’s also been helpful to take a deep breath and remind myself of the cyclical nature of all spiritual growth.  I’m either going ’round and ’round a mysterious mountain, on a seemingly pointless journey and enjoying the changing views at different altitudes, or there really is no such thing as time and this is just some clever metaphysical ruse to get me to finally WAKE UP and become conscious.

As far as the path being spiral, I’ve mentioned how spirals are powerful symbols for me, and I even wrote about some snails showing up in unexpected places in my Victory Garden recently — without making the snail/spiral connection.  My friend Heather gently pointed it out to me in a wise e-mail after reading the post.  Since then, I’ve been seeing spirals literally everywhere.  (Reminds me of this experience, only I didn’t set out on a specific quest to locate the spirals.  Or maybe I did, without realizing it, by choosing to follow TAW.)

If I were a paranoid person, I’d be getting a little nervous by now.  As it is, the last sighting made me laugh.  Goddess is getting a little ridiculous, and I think she’s only doing so because I’m so damn stubborn and she wishes to drive the point home.  I one-upped her, however, by abandoning the morning pages.  This is difficult to admit, because I’ve been writing them faithfully for almost a decade now, and I honestly didn’t think that could happen to me.  I don’t even know what caused it.  I just… stopped.

One morning I didn’t finish, the next morning I only did one page, and the next morning a paragraph, and the next it was as if my pen had dried up.  I keep telling myself I will start again — and I keep not doing so.  I feel a little lost without them.

Chapter Four struck home on this topic, as well.  Now I’m asking myself precisely what I’m avoiding facing.  What issue has me so fearful that I’m now avoiding meeting my thoughts on the page in stream-of-consciousness writing?  (Weirdly, I’m still writing like crazy, just not the morning pages or anything resembling journaling.  This blog is as close as I’ve gotten.)

So, amid the ongoing detective work, which began last chapter and continues to stir up strong feelings along with the buried dreams and memories, and the complete and total avoidance of the MPs, and with spirals popping up like dandelions in springtime, I somehow managed to complete an Artist Date for both weeks.

Artist Date, Week Three:  Movie by myself.

I’m not one of those people who generally like to go to the theatre solo.  But I decided to do it anyway.  Because this is Seneca and I did my Artist Date on a Tuesday night, the theatre was absolutely empty.  It was just me and a hundred empty folding seats and cupholders.  Even the projection booth was empty.  I think the film was cued by computer.  The scene was a little surreal.

Yet because no one was there, I ended up displaying much more emotion than I usually would in a theatre — or even while watching a film at home with F.  And it wasn’t exactly a great film.  I went to see The Time Traveler’s Wife.  I knew it would be a cheesy love story, which is why if I wanted to see it, I had to go alone.  F. is a huge movie buff — who generally hates the Hollywood stuff and cannot stand the light romantic comedies and chick flicks I occasionally crave.

One thing I’ve come to accept:  my artist child is cheesy and romantic.  That’s just the way it is.  And I don’t want to change her.  So this was supposed to be a little treat for her.  The Time Traveler’s Wife, however, provided more material for thought than for romance.  As I drove home, I was mulling over the idea of time as a loop.  With my face still wet from where I’d dissolved into gut-wrenching sobs at the end.  (This reaction had me puzzled and worried, and then a few days later I read, “Be prepared for bursts of tears,” in Chapter Four, along with a beautiful analogy and explanation.  Now I’m convinced I wasn’t crying about the movie at all.)

Artist date, Week Four:  downtown Seneca, starting a vision journal.

For my fourth Artist Date, I went and saw sights like this:

Seneca is an old railroad town that has had the sense to preserve some of its heritage along the way.  I suspect this was due to a fortuitous combination of poverty and isolation.  I’d been wanting to photograph the side of that building since January.  None of the pics turned out as I wanted, but one thing I hadn’t taken into account when fantasizing about capturing it on film is the location.  I parallel parked quite easily.  But then came the difficult part, where to park my body.  It’s a narrow street, right near an intersection, and I had to keep dodging out of the way and once had to squeeze onto the little ledge there.

It’s less than 10 inches wide, that little space.  How do I know?  I had to turn my feet sideways, standing in ballet first position, while a truck roared past my nose.   Making this portion of the Artist Date my most adventurous photo shoot to date, by far.

I also captured this on Ram Cat Alley.

It’s a strange and wonderful little spot.  Because I’m longing for a cafe experience, I keep envisioning setting up little tables on the deck that faces this grassy ruin between buildings.  Although if they ever actually open a cafe in this space, I won’t be able to afford to eat there.  The prices are scandalous at the restaurants occupying real estate on this historic narrow street.

My favorite shop on the alley had closed.  That made me sad.  The woman who owned it had real design talent and a unique point of view.  She had created a place with the feeling of a chic sanctuary, if such a thing is possible.  I spent a couple of minutes staring at the empty windows and wishing her a better venue for her artistic dreams.  Truth be told, she was a little avant garde for this kind of town.  (Sigh.)

I wandered into an antique store instead.  Where I discovered, for an unbelievable $5, a bowl that I’d lost when moving a few years ago.  It’s vintage 1950s Pyrex, and I do love the vintage Pyrex.  I’m not a real collector.  I actually use the stuff.  I’m wishing for vintage refrigerator dishes someday, as they’re so much more practical and environmentally friendly than those disposable plastic containers that are leaching toxins into our leftovers as I write.

It was like a sign, though.  Something I’d loved and lost, returned to me on an Artist Date in an out-of-the-way corner of an antique store in South Carolina, of all places.

(Is time a loop?)

I also found a stack of vintage postcards and an old children’s nature book.  I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the book when I saw it.  About a week ago, I found How to Make a Vision Board over at Christine Kane’s blog.  More things are changing in my life than would fit onto a single board.  But the idea of a vision journal had slowly taken root in my subconscious and now pushed up its first little seed leaves. What about making an altered book vision journal?  I thought.

“What if you screw it up?”  my Ego asked.  But it couldn’t argue too much when my entire investment was a dollar.  So what if I screw it up?   I started ripping out pages as soon as I got home.

To finish off my date, I wrote some of those postcards to people I’d been meaning to write.  They’re going in the mail today.

(Photo of snail and photo of movie ticket are from Morguefile.  All the rest are obviously taken by yours truly.)

“My creativity leads me to forgiveness and self-forgiveness.”

– Julia Cameron, from Week 1 of The Artist’s Way

It all began with some froot loops.

Well, not exactly.  They do figure into the story, though.  Or rather, they figure into the backstory.  Because to understand the story of my creative champion, we have to go back.  Way back, to a creative monster.  Only I don’t think she was really a monster.  I think she was a really exhausted and frustrated woman who had chosen the wrong career path and was just marking time until retirement — or until a freak tornado or car accident took her out of this plodding misery.

I have a lot of sympathy for her now.  But when I first met my nemesis, she was just plain scary.

To be fair, it wasn’t just Mrs. C who was intimidating; the whole situation was a little nerve-wracking.  We met on my first day of first grade.  Not my first day of school, but my first day of public school.  I’d come from a little private kindergarten, with about 10 students in a class taught in a homey atmosphere by a gentle elderly soul.  School meant curiosity and playtime and getting to ask questions and friends and drawing and trying new things and laughing.

Suddenly, the word “school” took on some frightening connotations.  At Mount Zion Elementary, there were hundreds of students, and their boisterous voices echoed and magnified in the cavernous, cinderblock corridors.  It was plain to see, on my very first day, that some of them were bullies who delighted in violence, and because there were so very many of us and so few adults, it was going to be nearly impossible to catch them at it.

I took a seat in my assigned classroom and watched a touching little drama unfold.  A boy (Neil, we’ll call him) was standing near the entrance to the classroom, clutching at his mother’s sweater and weeping piteously.  His mother finally detached herself and rushed away.  As soon as she was gone, our new teacher entered the room.  Her body filled up the entire doorway, and her voice was just as massive as she boomed at Neil in passing, “Quit your crying.  First grade is not for babies.”

I knew then and there I was in trouble.

Of course, most of that year is a haze in memory now, for which fact I should probably give devout thanks.  But a few moments do stand out stark and clearly defined, because unfortunately, they defined me.  I’ve already mentioned Mrs. C’s unfortunate habit of leaving the room to “get some air” at frequent intervals, putting the rest of us unfortunates under the supervision of a six-year-old bully, and the resultant scarring episode.  And I’ve mentioned, but not explained, the froot loops.  So let me get that out of the way.

Our teacher needed us to take a little nap once a day, for at least 20 minutes.  She would have preferred much longer, I’m sure.  It might have suited her best if we’d all gone into diabetic comas after lunch… but alas!  the gods are capricious and don’t grant all our wishes.  Nonetheless, it is difficult to get 30+ 6-year-olds to fold their arms on their plastic desks and bury their heads in them and pretend to sleep for 20 minutes.  For no one can sleep in that position, I’m convinced, even with the lights out, and we always had the soothing accompaniment of a slightly buzzing bank of fluorescent lights — and orders not to peek.  Or swing our legs.

Or move at all.  There’s a good girl.

Thing is, I was a good girl — or at least, I used to be unquestioningly obedient to authority, so I tried my darndest.  I did.  I kept my head down although it gave me a feeling I was suffocating.  (Did I mention we weren’t allowed to turn our heads to the side, either?  Even if we kept our eyes closed?)  I got quite familiar with the shadowy texture of my desk and a macro close-up of my arms.  But most of the class needed a little more incentive than just pleasing teacher, and so Mrs. C provided a little carrot.  A reward for good behavior.

Oh, goody.

At the end of each “nap,” Mrs. C walked between the rows of desks and silently slid a few froot loops beneath each student’s elbow — but only if you’d behaved.  Some kids thought this was really fantastic.  They munched their loops with enthusiasm, often showing cavity-riddled teeth.  And it was a good thing they did, because when I first saw the little brightly colored Ohs, I had no idea they were a food item and needed some context clues.  My parents had never let me within arm’s reach of a sugary cereal before, and I’m not sure, but I have a suspicion you have to be conditioned early on to like the taste.

I hated them.  The next day, when the froot loops came under my arm, I politely, but firmly, pushed them back out into the light.  Mrs. Cohen said, “Why don’t you eat your treats, dear?”  I answered meekly, “No, thank you.”  (I thought it would be impolite to say what I really thought.)  Unfortunately, Mrs. C thought I was being a little punk, so this went on… wait for it… all year.

Yes, I continued to behave perfectly during naptime, and the dear lady continued to slide processed breakfast cereal in front of my face as a consequence, and I continued to push it away, and she continued to ask or urge me to eat it.  All year.  She even got to the point of refusing to allow me to throw away my rewards until the end of the school day.  So a little corner of my desk was reserved for the manically cheery Ohs from about 1:30 onwards every day.  We were both equally stubborn.  I persisted in the belief that froot loops tasted yucky.

And I think it bothered her a lot that someone didn’t appreciate her generosity.

(Thanks, Teach.)

Had it been limited to that one incident when she was out of the classroom and an ongoing tug-of-war over the sugary snacks, Mrs. C would probably not have made it into my monster hall of fame.  Unfortunately, her influence was rather more far-reaching.

You see, on the first day of school, we all were “tested” for reading groups.  That is, we presented ourselves in front of the teacher’s desk when she yelled out our names and were handed a text and asked to read aloud.

I’d been reading since the age of two, and when I was a toddler my mother even had me demonstrate for visiting door-to-door salesmen to discourage them from coming around with home phonics courses and such.  I loved to read.  I even remember the book I learned to read first, and the story it told, which I realized much later was foundational for my way of perceiving the world.  My grandfather liked to have me read newspaper headlines aloud to astonish his friends, and he reports that when I was no more than “a little bitty thang” I sounded out the name Evinrude from staring at the boat motor when we went fishing, shocking all aboard.

I loved to read.  Still do, actually.

But when Mrs. C hollered my name out, she scared me.  I went as slowly as I dared up to her desk.  I was absolutely trembling by the time I reached her.  She was red in the face, and I could feel the irritation radiating off her massive body.  I hesitated, and it felt as if I were facing a fire-breathing dragon as she snapped, “Well?”

I don’t know to this day why it happened.  I could read the text in my hands just fine.  But I couldn’t speak.  I tried a few times.  I swallowed and took a deep breath.  I opened my mouth.  Then I glanced at her and shut it again.  I think if I’d stood there long enough, I might have gotten up the courage to read a few lines.  And I like to hope that in today’s school system a phone call to the parents would be in order, at the very least, before putting a blanket label on a student.  But from that moment forward, as far as my elementary school was concerned, I was learning disabled.

Being learning disabled meant a lot of things in our school system in the 1970s, but I won’t go into that now.  This post is already headed toward 1500 words, and that’s quite enough.  Suffice to say that it did affect my life to be labeled L.D., that it was a snap decision that echoed through the years and affected my self-image quite dramatically.  And not in a good way.

In part II, I’ll tell you all about a lovely and unorthodox teacher who helped me begin to heal some of the damage.

[Note:  This essay based on two exercises in Week One of The Artist's Way.  I am blogging about my process as I go through the course, and this is a belated post, as we are now in Week Four.  Nobody said following a schedule was my forte.]

(Photos  from morguefile)