A few years ago I had to have a pain-blocking surgery on my knee. While I was at the small surgical center waiting to be called back for my procedure, I walked around marveling at these paintings on the wall by an artist I had never heard of. Hans Paus. These are either early works by him or someone’s efforts to copy him. In any case, these paintings (on simple canvases—very large, in this tiny waiting room) struck such a chord in me that I began drawing again.
I’m a writer, but when I was younger I spent a great deal of time drawing faces in my notebooks, dabbling in paints, and soon after I was married for the second time I began drawing quite seriously before writing became my primary focus and would be so for the next twenty+ years of my life.
When I went back to college, I majored in English literature. Then I got an MA in rhetoric and writing. Then I got an MFA in creative writing at Vermont College where I concentrated on poetry and creative nonfiction. I also taught courses in writing and humanities and in creative writing at UT Chattanooga for over ten years. While I focused on publishing and advancing my career (something that didn’t pan out by the way), drawing fell to the wayside. I did get a minor in art history as an undergrad and while I did draw and paint for a year or so, it never really became a practice.
It wasn’t until I saw the paintings on the walls at the surgery center that I decided to get back in touch with art. I wasn’t exactly planning on making art, just appreciating it, and so I built a massive database on my website of artists and art, all the stuff I love the most.
While I was building this database, I also learned things about new artists, about works that I’d never seen before, movements I really wasn’t aware of. When I was finished I was very proud of my little database, my march through art history, and I invited others, mostly close friends, to share it with me. I had intended it to be part of a salon/study group that we were starting, a jumping off point for discussion, but nothing much came of that. But what did happen was that I started making art. And in the making of the art I discovered that I love to draw on my computer.
I think I’ve always been attracted to things that are easy. As soon as we got a word processor, I began composing poems on it, no longer on the page. It wasn’t even a jump for me. I didn’t feel anything in letting go of the pen and the endless strings of legal pads. It’s a little different with art because I feel like I “should” be painting, I should be drawing, I should be making objects in “real life,” not just in the virtual space of my laptop. But a few days ago I started letting all that go. Why would anyone want to slog over a jar of pencils or a bunch of always-fraying and wearing-out-too-soon paintbrushes when they could paint or draw on a screen that is endlessly forgiving, endlessly generous?
And then there’s my bipolar disorder. My brain and its ever fluctuating moods does not exactly like for me to write. Especially poetry. Okay, well that’s not entirely right. My bipolar brain does not like for me to write my particular brand of lyric essay because in doing that I open up some door in my brain–as though a troop of ponies is let loose galloping wildly back and forth and up and down the channels and currents in my head. Writing fiction does not do this, writing straight up poetry does not do this (most of the time), but if I allow that poetry to merge with prose I run the risk of triggering mania.
Art does not do this. I can draw for hours and hours days upon days and I’m completely fine. In fact, while I draw I usually have the TV on or I have a book that I’m listening to and I divide my focus between what I’m drawing and making and whatever else is acting as… a mooring point? An anchor? I know writers who always write while listening to music, and I have been in workshops where we do this and it doesn’t bother me to write to music and perhaps writing while music is on would make music the anchor, the thing that would hold me down to earth. But I can’t really write to music in a serious way because it’s too distracting. Writing seems to take the whole brain, the whole kitten caboodle pony extravaganza. Art seems to take a specific area of the brain and it doesn’t make me feel nuts or crazy or out of sorts or any of those things that writing can do.
So for the most part I’m focusing on art now. And for some reason I feel this kind of steady confidence in myself that I can make money as an artist. In all my long years of publishing, I’ve never made more than $1000. I did a reading a few weeks ago and actually got $100. Wow. I have edited books and made some money. And I have received grants to go places like Bread Loaf. But my books made no money (most don’t). I never got paid for the readings I did. But I wholeheartedly believe that art is going to be different. Submitting writing and receiving rejections on that writing over and over and over and over and over and over for years is extraordinarily difficult to do. But for some reason, and maybe I’m deluding myself, I don’t think art will be this way.
Maybe because I can see other people’s art and readily compare my own to theirs and to the great art that I know, I just feel more confident. And making art doesn’t feel “precious” like my writing, like I’m going to be destroyed if you criticize me. Perhaps being retired from teaching has something to do with this as well. This will in no way be a hopeless effort to advance my career. Besides, making art is fun! And if you don’t like my art, it’s so much easier to dismiss just your dislike of my art as your own personal taste and that it is just different from mine. Different strokes as it were. In writing there is this tacit agreement on what is “good” among the academy and I was a part of that academy. It used to be this way in art, but art is a wide open space now.
The New Heaven–
I’m preparing for a show right now. Furiously. It will be my first show (not juried) and the only thing I want from it is to be seen. I do not expect my pieces to sell… I’m not sure that I even want them to sell or how I would feel if someone bought them. That is one part of making art that I’m trying to wrap my head around. When you write something it belongs to you forever. But when you make art, even digital art as I do, I’m not sure what happens. I know there are pieces that I’ve done that I love so much that I don’t want somebody else to have them and there are pieces that I could care less about ever seeing again. All this business side to art is new.
But it is exciting. The Saturday after Thanksgiving there will be an art fair and I’m going to have a table there and I’m going to sell cards. I feel pretty confident that somebody will buy a card, but if they don’t, I don’t care because I will use the cards myself. But somebody will buy some cards, especially if I hawk them. And I will. The fair will be my time to meet local artists, to see what they do, and get myself seen and ready to be really seen at the show. (and buy art of course)
Welcome to the new world.
~r.
