The Living Artist

2010.

The year we make contact.

Um, no, wait. That’s Arthur C. Clarke and Roy Scheider and a mysterious camera somehow outside the spaceship transmitting video inside as they slingshot around Jupiter.

Anyway. I thought I’d start the new year – new decade, yikes – with an introduction of sorts.

I’m Heather. I live near St Louis, Missouri with my husband Andrei, 3-year-old son Aiden, family friend C., and a black cat named Nuit. I’m hard of hearing since birth, and have syringomyelia and fibromyalgia from a car accident in 2007. I -

You see, this is the thing. I don’t really know who I am anymore.

I have – fragments. Remnants, torn scraps of my life before the accident. Many of them are good, just – less than what they were. And right now everything I’ve got is trying to make sense of those scraps, reassemble them into something I can call a decent life, with purpose and direction and flow. To somehow find the new intersection of what I want to do with what I can do, and be okay with that.

And what role does art play in this? After all, this blog is called “The Living Artist”. I wonder, often, how much right I have to claim the title of artist anymore. My professional status, always shaky as I never made anywhere near enough money to support myself, has not even a whisper of truth anymore. Months go by sometimes without my putting pen to paper. But there are two things I cling to when I can’t remember who I am or why I’m here. One is my son Aiden. The other is art. If I can’t make art, I can think about it. If I can’t think about it, I can look at it. If I can’t look at it, I can hold tight to the belief that all these things will return in time. They always have. And sometimes that’s all I have.

Anyway, since blogging is, as Havi likes to say, therapy you don’t have to pay for, here is where I’m trying to work all that out.

To sum up with a complete non sequitur, here’s a cross-section of my favorite blogs, in no particular order:

The Fluent Self
FWD/Forward
Uppercase Woman
Shakesville
It’s Not All Mary Poppins
Sociological Images
Ursula Vernon
Questionable Content
Dancing With Pain
Love Isn’t Enough
Amalah

It’s been over a month since I’ve posted any artwork.

In fact, it’s been over a month since I’ve even touched pen to paper (unless you count scribbling with markers beside my 3-year-old). My muse has been, not just silent, but the type of silence that muffles the ears and vibrates the air with its weight, the silence of a three-foot blanket of snow under a full moon.

And as much as I’ve tried to remind myself that it’s all part of my natural cycle, this has been a longer and deeper sleep than most. Not only was I not motivated to pick up my pens, but no images were floating in my head as I drifted to sleep. No striking shadows were catching my attention, begging me to consider how I would carve them in black and white. I wasn’t even feeling the restless itch that usually accompanies the fallow stage of my creative cycle, that itch that eventually explodes in a rush of messy, flailing, glorious inspiration.

At first it didn’t worry me. And then I was worried that I wasn’t worried. Was I losing myself? Was I leaving the artist behind? Who was I without that?

But in the last few days, my liminal spaces have started sprouting images again. The outline of a hand, a worried face peering through. A skull lit from within by a candle. I’m not ready to start drawing again yet, but I can see the light round the bend.

Havi wrote today about stucknesses that aren’t supposed to be there anymore – stuff you know, that you’ve worked on and worked on, and it’s still tripping you up and holding you back and making you feel stupid for making the same mistake all over again.

Here are some of the things I know, but have not been able to integrate into my living practice:

• When I’m tired, I need to rest.
• When I’m being sedentary due to pain, forcing myself to move anyway will just make things worse. I will move – and happily! – when the pain stops.
• When I do invocatory artwork, I need to be prepared for the invocation to ripple through other areas in my life.
• Don’t force creativity, or try to work on what I think I “should” work on. That will just kill the magic.
• Getting down on myself for not doing more will not help me do more; it just wastes energy that could be spent resting and healing.
• Stagnation is a natural part of the creative cycle. Perhaps view it as sitting or processing rather than stagnation.
• There is no perfect solution to anything. “Good enough” will serve me far better.
• If I touch just one person with what I do or say, I’ve made a difference.

What do you know, but don’t seem to be able to act upon?

A couple of times a year I get this crazy bug up my ass and start wondering about graduate school.

There are a lot of things I really miss about college. So much of it I didn’t appreciate while I was there – just the sheer luxury of being able to focus on learning rather than bills, your life path rather than the leak in the kitchen, to lose sleep to a thesis deadline rather than a feverish toddler. College was structured, formalized, logical; there were beginnings and ends, milestones, goals that seemed to mean something. There was always a higher purpose there in potential, beyond survival, beyond doing it because someone told you to. The people there would change the world. Not all, not even some – but the awareness of that pervasive possibility flavored the air and the culture and made it rich beyond imagining. I miss that. Some days I hunger for it.

I don’t miss the social drama, though I do miss always being able to go to that one spot in the student center and find friends there to play bridge with or talk to. I don’t miss the hidebound professors who insisted on their one true way of doing things, no discussion. I don’t miss the buzzword speak of academia, the piling on of empty complex clauses to make it appear that you’re saying and doing so much more than you actually are. I don’t miss the insularity, or the resultant cold shock of entering the real world only to find that college had not prepared me for it at all.

I have friends in grad school, and they live and breathe nothing else. They live in their own little world and like it. For the most part they have given up suburban comforts for city apartments. If they have family, they’re in grad school as well. It’s not a life that shares well.

What could I get out of graduate school? I have a three-year-old, chronic pain, and can barely manage to keep the laundry from devouring the upstairs in Blob-like gluttony.

And yet the dream persists, of shared studio space, late-night discussions with other artists over minutiae of shading and anatomy, of losing myself in construction of a manifest idea, in the dissection of unconscious assumptions and visual processing to create something entirely new, in surrounding myself with those who are similarly obsessed with making something new.

My life is not a bad one. I have a family I love dearly, a comfortable house, friends. And yet there are days when I can feel nothing but stagnation, pointlessness, isolation, and strike out wildly for anything and everything that could change that state of being.

Graduate school isn’t the answer, with its full-time demands and $30k/year price tag. It’s a symbol of the answer. Change. Purpose. Connection.

How I’m going to get there is anyone’s guess.

My major realization of yesterday had to do with how frustrated I am about how sleepy and tired I’ve been. Even when my painkillers are working, it makes it hard to function when all I want to do is go to bed.

My realization was (duh) that I am taking not one, not two, but *three* drugs that say “may cause drowsiness”. Just because I don’t get to the point where it’s unsafe for me to drive doesn’t mean that there’s not some cumulative effect.

It doesn’t solve the problem of the drowsiness, of course, but maybe I can stress about it a little less.

The secondary thought was the wondering how I could visually communicate this feeling of walking through a dream, of the constant pull to blissful, quiet sleep. It’s something that will have to percolate. The colors and lines will soften; the focus will blur; it will be a door to a different world, shimmering in and out of existence. Is this where I’m to go next?

We shall see.

*yawn*

In the continued search for new art ideas, I’m currently being plagued with ideas in hyper-realistic, illustrative styles; which while I could argue I have the technique to accomplish, I don’t have the patience for, certainly not with my current low level of endurance!

In my head are also plenty of images that do suit my current graphic style, but I’m uninspired by them. For the first time since I can remember I find myself not terribly interested in drawing female nudes. Or more specifically, the nude female form seems to no longer be enough in and of itself. I want it to be saying something, meaning something – but what? And how, without cluttering it up with symbols and background that take away from the clean, graceful lines that my current style is all about?

I suppose I am making several assumptions that are limiting my options here.

First, I’m assuming that I should be trying to stick with my current style; to build up enough of a body of work in it that I can think about going into business again.

And *that* assumes that I can and/or want to go into business again. To which I have to honestly say I don’t know. I certainly wasn’t having much luck with it before my injury. It was a constant source of stress, feeling like I should be pushing harder, not knowing where/how to push, feeling like I was faking it, being dishonest by calling myself a professional. There’s less of that now, though in its place is guilt for not having even the potential to contribute financially to my family, and shame at being reduced to “just” a housewife, and a disabled one at that.

On the plus side for staying with my current style is that it is something I can do with minimal supplies, in very small chunks of time, curled up on the couch to accommodate my back injury. I’m not sure what else I could physically do. I’m just happy to have found something, anything, that is still possible for me.

One part of me is reluctantly thinking that what I should do is just back off of art for now. Focus on creating my home, my garden, staying sane – though art has always been a crucial part of staying sane for me – and let the art return when it feels natural.

The thing I need to remember is that art does not just mean setting pen and ink to paper. It is even a founding tenet of this blog that art is as much about how you see the world and move through it as it is about what you do and create. Cultivating mindfulness and awareness. Being in my body and in my life. Art does not need to be on display or for sale to be real. Art is… is….

Art is about that which you cannot communicate in words.

And that means it can be whatever I need it to be. Right now I am very tangled up in learning how to live with my chronic pain without resenting and fighting it every moment of the day. At some point that will become visual art, I’m sure, but in order for that to happen I must first find a way to integrate it all.

I’m still going to write. It may be more about my family and my house than what I’m drawing for a while. But it’s all about how I see. How to be an artist of living, a living artist.

Sigh.

So, life is good here in Saint Louis, and we’re starting to get settled in. We’re in a fantastic neighborhood, our location is such that we never have to deal with rush hour traffic, Aiden’s in a wonderful daycare…

…but art-wise, I’m stuck.

I did one piece, a re-do of Grace or Fate without the greys that were mucking the old one up, and that went fine. But when it comes to new stuff?

This morning I came up with a nifty image, started thinking about the specific logistics, and got wound into knots with thoughts like “but what would it mean? What do I want it to mean? What am I trying to communicate with my art? What is art for, anyway?

You know, your typical imponderables.

These sorts of questions never used to bother me. I was content to make things that were beautiful, and let others figure out their meaning. I’ve even written here that it’s better to let the meaning be determined by the individual viewer, and I still think that’s right. But more and more I’m wanting to go in with a solid intent, an overarching message – but I don’t know what that message is, let alone how to communicate it in art!

Maybe it’s because of the move. Maybe it’s because of the study I’ve been making lately of gender and racial issues. Maybe it comes with the general redefinition of self I’ve had to undertake since my injury. Either way, it’s a lot of stuck, and I’m only just to the point where I can put it into words.

I’ve got lots of other stuff to do, and no real reason to rush. But without an art practice to hang onto, I’m feeling quite adrift.

The one thing I’m sure of is that if I weren’t still an artist at heart, I wouldn’t even be thinking about these questions.

I seem to be stuck on the feminist piece (the one for which I was asking you all for feminine-loaded words last week). It’s not so much that I don’t know where I’m going, as I’m not in a good headspace to keep working on it. I guess I’m feeling uncertain enough about my power and position without pushing on those issues. Going to put it aside for now. Next time I get healthily worked up to a proper feminist rage I’ll pull it back out.

Right now I just want to do something pretty, that pushes my pen&ink technique a bit. I’ve got an idea about overlaying a couple of different figures and seeing where that goes.

Well, of course, it happened. I fucked it up.

I got cocky. I jumped off one too many cliffs, expecting to fly, and suddenly found myself on the ground with a turned ankle.

I also committed the cardinal sin of, when working on a particularly tricky bit of an image inspired by a musician, not listening to her music while doing it.

Limping and cursing, I studied it. Tweaked the lines. Re-evaluated my interpretation of the shadows in my source image. Got it…. better. Not great, but better. And then I put it down (only partly because it was time to go pick up my son from daycare). As I’ve said before, breathe, step back, take a break. I’ll come back later with a clearer head and “Lady Vagabond” playing on iTunes.

What does that painting mean again?

The confluence of two of my past posts has made something new clear to me: when someone asks me twhat a painting means, I should be overjoyed, because it means I made them think, and they want to open a dialogue rather than shutting down and turning away. That is success. That is my art doing what art is meant to do.

Sure, there still may be those who are looking for a label to slap on the blinking question mark in their heads, or who are asking an empty question just to be polite, but I will hold out the hope that those will be in the minority.

The other thing my recent blogging has been pointing me towards is the need for a new direction in the underlying purpose of my art. Up to now it has been the creation of visual anchors for inspirational concepts (and, of course, I only come up with this succinct summary of that purpose now that it’s becoming obsolete). But for the past year I have been finding myself bored. New images come to mind with the same frequency as always, but I find myself unmoved by the stories underneath the images, at least on the level I need to commit myself to painting them.

My new direction is fuzzy at best, but I believe it will be far more direct in challenging people’s boundaries and dominant paradigms. Doing that is something I’ve always liked, but it has been a lower priority; something I’d tack on or work into the background (of Lilith, for example, as storied here; or in something as simple as making my female figures heavier than the fashionable ideal). And it’s clearly time for my priorities to change.