The Living Artist

New art, at long last -

Transmutation. © 2010 Heather Keith Freeman
12″x14″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

This is what I referred to a few posts ago – the process piece that started as an intent piece gone wrong. It’s about chronic pain and movement and magick, channelling violent energy into pure swirls of motion. I’m still tweaking it, but you get the general idea.

Got a fresh taste of the bitter side of blogging yesterday. Had a piece up on my other blog about feminism as it applies to my philosophy, fraternal order and church, and got rather violently attacked in the comments. I thank my experience in social justice communities that I was able to deal with the problem rather than devolve into incoherent rage. Did I deal with it well? Shrug. Time will tell. In the meantime, I drew my line and I stand by it. A person has a right to speak as zie will, but any speech has consequences, which may include being cut off by people who won’t tolerate that sort of speech in their spaces.

Anyway. I now face a void in my art process. I’m working on a design project with Loolwa at Dancing With Pain, which is going well, but mostly past the actual creative stage at this point. I am bubbling over with concepts I want to explore in art, but a dearth of actual images. I would try to be patient, but I am already twitchy for lack of creation. It will come, it will come, it will come, I remind myself – but the waiting never gets easier.

I promise nothing – but is there anything you readers would like to see me tackle in art?

Let us say that I want a salad for lunch. For various reasons having to do with the way my body and brain work, I want a make-your-own salad from a grocery store.

There are three grocery stores with salad bars in my area. Schnucks, Dierbergs, and Whole Foods.

Schnucks has limited variety, mediocre quality, and the containers for the salad are made of styrofoam. (I’m no Beth Terry, but I do try to reduce pointless and wasteful use of plastic when I can.)

Dierbergs has better variety, but gave me food poisoning a few months ago. The quality is variable, ranging from delicious to, well, food poisoning. And more styrofoam.

Whole Foods has wonderful variety, good quality, and paper packaging. The chain also has atrocious policies, practices greenwashing, drives smaller organic stores out of business, and the CEO is a wingnut jackass.

Capitalism, the holy grail of market forces and competition which in theory grants me the ability to get the best quality at the lowest price, instead has given me a handful of crappy choices. I must compromise my ethics somewhere, and in some cases my health as well. (Or I could just not eat salads, compromising my health further.)

Salads. A burning, pressing issue, I know; I’ve got my finger on the pulse of the world’s anger!

Except this way that choices are framed, the idea that there is always a best or even good choice, pollutes our decision process in everything. Choosing a job. Parenting methods. Electing representatives. Too often, the plethora of choices creates a logjam as you try to figure out which choice will go the longest before stabbing you in the back.

I started packing my art studio today.

This is actually proving to be a far less torturous endeavor than in past moves (so far). Yet another advantage of my recent shift to pen&ink is that my needed supplies consist of a couple of pads of paper, one small bottle of ink, three brushes, a handful of pens and pencils, and my light box; the sum of which fits in a small backpack easily. So if I get stir crazy from packing and HAVE to do some art RIGHT NOW in the next month (very likely), I have those supplies, and everything else is fair game.

“Everything else” is a lot, I will admit. I am a pack rat and dabbler in myriad forms of artistic expression. I have supplies for jewelry making, clay, wire work, maskmaking, collage, photography – and most dangerously, “found object” sculpture, meaning any kind of junk object with an interesting form that I think I might be able to make into something someday. I’ve even kept about a zillion of the little orange tabs that twist off the top of my printer’s ink cartridges.

But more unexpected help comes from my newly limited resources thanks to my back injury. I’m no longer trying to do craft fairs, meaning I’m not going to keep trying to find new crafts to flesh out my product line (2-d prints alone do pretty badly at such events, I’ve found). It’s far less likely that I will have time and energy to, say, create a faerie diorama on a mirror just for fun, so away can go the supplies I got for that sort of thing. I’m not ditching the beads – I’ve found I like making jewelry – but gone is the fear that I am losing precious business resources if I want to get rid of something rather than move it across the country yet again. (In the past ten years I’ve moved from Pittsburgh to Boston to Seattle to Los Angeles to Seattle again, and now to Saint Louis!) Oddly enough in this case, with limited resources comes an increase in focus, and a decrease in attachment to all this stuff I’ve accumulated but can no longer use.

Anyway, I’m packing. So far there’s a bag of trash, and two packed boxes of canvases, and a slowly-filling box of stuff to give away. The mat cutter and slide projector will probably go on Craigslist, in the hope that they will go to an art student. The (heavy!) art books will go one or two at a time into the bottom of boxes with other supplies. And as I sort through boxes of stuff I haven’t even seen since before the last move, I will constantly fight the glee of discovery with “no, you haven’t used this in at least two years, you don’t need to keep it!”

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.

So there’s this thing about how speaking and singing use different parts of the brain, meaning that if you memorize something spoken and then have to sing it you can’t remember it anymore. Also how Freddie Mercury could speak in a complete mumble but enunciate perfectly in his singing.

Turns out the same thing happens with writing and drawing. I’m working on this piece that has words all through the background and I’m having to “draw” the words so they end up in the right places – and oh the brain stretching! It’s also causing me to be in a not completely verbally competent place, so this post may be a bit on the incobblxtwq mmrszopidd weddiddle carp x. Q$3!

You’d think I’d know better by now. But nooooooooo.

Yesterday I’m prepping for this piece having to do with the weight of woman-targeted stereotypes and expectations. I couldn’t find a photograph in the pose I wanted, so I used myself as a model. There I am, staring at my own face while I plot out ways to immobilize the image of my body with words like “slut”, “bitch”, “princess”….

…and I find myself plunged into the mindset of the bullied and confused 7th-grader I once was. In a depressive funk, convinced of my own uselessness and dysfunctionality, wanting to sleep the day away rather than face another day of stares and whispered comments and planned challenges to which there is no right answer.

I have no doubt that, if I devoted the effort to finish the piece as planned, it would be one of the more powerful things I’ve done, and possibly quite healing for myself as well. But I just can’t do it right now. I’ve got too much other Stuff I’m dealing with. I will deal with it someday, I’m sure, just – not right now.

Fortunately, I’m pretty sure I can continue with the concept of the piece, just as long as I don’t use myself as the model. I may still get dragged into a funk about the state of feminism, but it won’t be quite as…. personal a process, and should still have nearly the same impact when it’s done.

Workflow.

Sometimes what you get done and what you don’t is all about the workflow. It’s less about the Thing you are trying to do and more about the Things en route.

Example: I very rarely use my fancy, expensive digital camera that I adore, because once I take the pictures I have to find the flashcard reader and mount it and transfer all the pictures and wait for the photo program to load and sort the pictures and find the good ones and rename them and upload them to wherever and EACH ONE of these things is a colossal pain.

And that’s all assuming the camera’s battery doesn’t need to be charged or I can actually find the freakin’ charger, of which I already have TWO because I bought a new one after I couldn’t find it before (and then found it), but today I couldn’t find either one and ended up taking the pictures for my SEKRIT PROJECT on an iPhone….

You get the idea.

Organizer types talk a lot about redesigning your workflow to reduce hassles like the above. I suppose in that case I should have a photography workstation with the cardreader and battery charger in designated places, but then I have to clear a space for said workstation, and that just devolves into a cascade of other decisions I have to make when I’d rather just be working! So my camera goes neglected, only to be pulled out when I really need it and nothing else will do.

Poor camera.

Today I’m having trouble developing my thoughts on this because I really want to be working on my SEKRIT PROJECT, which is finally in a place where I can start drawing instead of mucking about with reference photos.

I’m nervous about this one. The reference photos I have now still aren’t quite right, but I think I can fudge them into something that will work. I could make them right in Photoshop, if I cared to trek downstairs and reboot the tower into the OS that actually RUNS Photoshop, and transfer the relevant pictures over there and wait for Photoshop to load and and and we’re back to workflow again. So it all comes round.

Right, so, apologies for the unannounced absence yesterday (which most likely none of you noticed). I was…. shall we say, in a mood such that I needed to make use of my art as therapy, starting to produce another piece that my husband will likely want out of the house as soon as possible.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m coming to grips with all I’ve lost due to the accident. Little things adding up, like bumper cars, and going out to a movie, and long road trips. Oddly the big things, like my change in art medium, and no more kids, I’ve dealt with better, I guess because they’re things you can shift your path around and move on. The little things you keep knocking up against when you least expect it.

What are those five stages of grieving again? Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance? Well, I skipped anger the first time round, somehow, and apparently it’s come back with a vengeance.

Of course, anger is probably the most difficult emotion to channel into art, because it’s so explosive. Expressed purely, anger tends to turn into a muddle on the page. Plus it becomes difficult to work with after the initial explosion, because you’re faced to confront it directly as you finish up the little fiddlybits around the edges. Anger is not something most of us like to look at.

On another topic, I’ve become utterly nauseated by any talk of marketing, even the non-icky permission-based kind. Normally I would eat this stuff up. I guess right now it’s another jabbing reminder that I am in no position to build my business, or even to have a business at all. Going to stop reading (or writing) anything on that topic for a while.

Anyway. That’s where I am today.

I’ve discovered an unexpected side effect of my change in medium and focus.

It takes me far less time to do pen&inks than paintings. While (pre-injury) I would very rarely manage to produce a painting in a couple of days, they are more usually 4-6 week endeavors. So I’m used to switching my creative focus once every month or two.

Pen&inks, however, I can turn around in a week or less. Last week I went from concept to sketch to (99%) finished product in four days. (No, you can’t see it…. yet!) I now find myself at loose ends and a little bewildered because on some level my brain was expecting to be engrossed in this concept for another month.

I am well familiar with the cycle of creativity; the exhilarating rush of the idea, the hyperfocus while laying it all out, the tedium and frustration of the final details, the settling satisfaction when I finally declare it “done”, and finally the drifting aimlessly before finding the spark of the next project. The aimless drifting part is especially maddening, but I had come to terms with it by reminding myself that it was all just part of the cycle.

Now, though, the drifting is going to come that much more often. And while drifting for a week after a month-long project didn’t seem too bad, if I do that every other week between pen&inks I think I will go mad! Maybe I can find some super-complicated, involved practice project to work on in between “real” pieces. Or maybe I will try to take those times to focus on getting the house in better shape.

Though, really, the main thing I need to remind myself of is that any “schedule” I try to form around my muse tends to strangle rather than encourage it. Better by far to create a structure for my uncreative time, and allow it to fall by the wayside when the spark of genius hits.

I’d forgotten how scary pen&ink is. Scary, scary, scary.

I had a drawing teacher in high school who made me draw for a week using only pen. No pencil, no eraser allowed. Then she made me do drawings with pen without ever lifting my pen from the paper. God, I hated that. So. Much.

Pen is scary because there’s no going back. Once you’ve made a mark, it’s made. To a perfectionist, this is pure hell. You also have to keep your hand clean and dry so it doesn’t smudge, and pause every few minutes to let each section dry. It’s tedious, meticulous, tricky work.

There are ways to fix some mistakes. You learn to make lines outside of where you expect them to eventually be, so you can then fine-tune in the right direction. You can shift shadows to cover smudges, and even drop a bit of white ink in at the end to cover the worst errors (so long as the white looks like an intended highlight and not a fix). But the margin for error is incredibly slim.

On the other hand, it’s exhilarating. The image grows as if by magic, with an intensity you never could have dreamed from the pencil sketch. With every stroke you look your fears in the face, terrified of making the error that will force you to start all over again. Then you jump off the cliff… and come up flying, again and again. And ever so slowly, you learn to trust your hand, to trust yourself.