Creativity has everything to do with making things. Loss conjures up the negative space surrounding creative acts. The past few weeks are so entwined with both, that writing requires some sort of mental and emotional tool I know not its name.
Loss: my Mother on August 14. Creativity: acceptance into the Artists' Guild of Spartanburg's 41st Juried Show on view in September. Loss: grief, grieving. Creativity: acceptance as Artist-in-Residence with the Paducah Arts Alliance in October. Loss: my last surviving parent. Creativity: grief as inspiration.
My Mother was a talented draftsman. Which is to say that I saw her strength in drawing and sumi-e and painting as the ability to render what she saw. In my teaching, I share her ink brushwork of koi, sparrow, and flowers as an example of what is possible. I unroll her precisely drawn pencil study of a desk, chair and lamp that conform neatly to two-point perspective. "This is what it looks like," I say to my adult students. She studied at Syracuse University in the 1940s until she met my father. Then she created six children.
I have been creating since I first dipped my digits into fingerpaint. My Mother patiently viewed my childhood endeavors until they morphed over time into the artwork I craft today, images viewed on my laptop. Truth be known, in the last months of her life, it was babies, dogs, rabbits, birds and nature that tickled her most. Not art; nature.
But creating art is my nature. The "tool I know not its name" has pried open a fissure into which I pour the black of my grief, but out of which erupts the purest of lights. What newness will this light reveal? I'll get back to you in October.
Loss: my Mother on August 14. Creativity: acceptance into the Artists' Guild of Spartanburg's 41st Juried Show on view in September. Loss: grief, grieving. Creativity: acceptance as Artist-in-Residence with the Paducah Arts Alliance in October. Loss: my last surviving parent. Creativity: grief as inspiration.
My Mother was a talented draftsman. Which is to say that I saw her strength in drawing and sumi-e and painting as the ability to render what she saw. In my teaching, I share her ink brushwork of koi, sparrow, and flowers as an example of what is possible. I unroll her precisely drawn pencil study of a desk, chair and lamp that conform neatly to two-point perspective. "This is what it looks like," I say to my adult students. She studied at Syracuse University in the 1940s until she met my father. Then she created six children.
I have been creating since I first dipped my digits into fingerpaint. My Mother patiently viewed my childhood endeavors until they morphed over time into the artwork I craft today, images viewed on my laptop. Truth be known, in the last months of her life, it was babies, dogs, rabbits, birds and nature that tickled her most. Not art; nature.
But creating art is my nature. The "tool I know not its name" has pried open a fissure into which I pour the black of my grief, but out of which erupts the purest of lights. What newness will this light reveal? I'll get back to you in October.