Traditionally, the third Sunday of Advent is centered around the virtue of JOY.  Growing up, the nuns would tell us that true joy hapens when we follow the order of the lettering....Jesus-first, Others-second and Yourself last.  There is some truth to that maxim, although this kind of thinking flys in the face of our increasingly "me-centered" society.  I haven't felt too joy-filled of late and have begun to suspect that something is out of order in my own life or in my life as an artist. Pursuing this line of thought, I've come to understand that, like the Jesus-Others-Yourself maxim, there is a similar "right-relationship" order for my art-life that needs to be kept in balance.  I call it JOY by another annacronym:  Job-Order-Yes. 

I think that at the very root of my art-funk is my thinking.  I admit that I basically think of myself as a hobbiest. Although I am a serious artist and have worked my way into being an "almost" full time artist and am known as an artist, I suspect that under the covers of my thinking, I still see myself as a hobbiest.  The difference between art as a hobby and art as a job is huge!  As a hobbiest, I allow myself studio time only when I have the liesure to do so.  As an artist, I would go daily to the studio and work full hour days.  As a hobbiest, art happens only when there is a deadline or a compellling idea. With a job as an artist, I would work consistently, regularly while inspired or uninspired.

Ordering my life in the light of art-as-a-job would be easier.  As a hobbiest, I now take the time to view new e-mails as they arrive or answer the telephone on the first ring.  If my art were my job, I would order all of those constant interruptions to the end of the day or at a lunch break.  So much of new technology has allowed me to be always available, leaving me unavailable for what I truly want to do--ART.

So, what is stopping me from changing my thinking and revloutionizing my life?  One word...one big word.  "YES"   So that is what I will work with this week, transforming my insights to a new me.  Re-ordering my work from hobby to job. Saying "yes" by saying "no" to interruptions and non-essentials.  Practicing the virtue of JOY and hopefully feeling a little of it myself.

In the spirit of magnanmity, I took time last week to re-create my studio. I hate working in a crowded and cramped space, so I gave myself the gift of time to put things away, re-organize materials and just generally de-clutter.  As a result, I feel fresh and ready to work again.   I have some new casts in the works for my "Portal" series and am excited to begin the process of applying the wax.  There will be an interesting, I think, balance of color and the white of the embossed paper for this series.  I am also going to try underpainting with watercolor before I apply the wax, hoping to get greater depth and more subtility in color.

The virtue that presented itself to me for this week's practice is the virtue of ENOUGH.  For myself, it means taking all of the ordinary things in life slowly enough so that I am able to pick up the gentle nudgings of my body when I am arriving at the point of "enough."   When I am not living fully in the moment, I find that I push my body and my spirit beyond the point of what I need for food, for activity, for rest,...even for making art. 

Artists have to become skilled in knowing when to stop working on a piece of art...when to say, "enough."  It is an important skill to develop because it is so easy to really mess up months of work on a piece of art, by working beyond the capacity of the canvas to hold the idea.  That is one advantage of working in a series.  Everything doesn't have to be said on one canvas. We can take several works to nuance ideas, explore images and paint with different pallets. 

As artists there is a quality of "enough" that does trap us.  It is the distructive place of not being "enough" ourselves.  There is so much great work out there and so many successful artists that it is easy to get caught up in comparing ourselves and our work to others.  When I go there, my art suffers from starvation. I am furiously feeding the hunger of my self-esteem rather than enjoying the food of my own truth.  I know it is one of my most significant struggles in the making of art.

So, this week, in the gentle spirit of "enough", I will look at the work of others in a spirit of delight and appreciation.   I will travel my own solitary road, one step at a time, making the path as I go....and it will be enough. 

Do you, too, find it difficult to see yourself and your work as enough?  Comments are welcome.

Several comets collided in my universe this weekend and the energy is creating something new!  Yesterday was the beginning of the Advent season, a time in our Church of preparation and anticipation.  These four weeks before Christmas have always been one of my favorite times of the year.  Advent often, as it did today, coincides with a cold front--which means warm fires and hot chocolate--significant changes from the generally warm sunny days we have here in South Texas. 

Another comet came in the guise of Dan Brown's latest book. In reading it, I have begun to renew my relationship with the world of symbols and mystery and out of it have begun a new body of work based on the idea of "portals"... doorways to something beyond.   I wasn't sure what the "beyond" was until Advent brought me its gift.  I have had a long-standing practice of adopting a different virtue during each week of Advent.  I don't know when this practice started in my life, but I remember someone making the analogy of practicing virtues to the discipline of exercise.  A muscle will not be strengthened without either using weights or resistance.  Likewise, we don't become better persons without exercising our "virtue" muscles.  So, during the season of Advent, I workout interiorily by practicing virtues.

I think the portals in my work lead into rooms where the virtues live.  What would the space look like if Magnanimity, for example,  lived here?  What colors would she choose? What words does she speak, represented by pattern and texture?   During this Advent, I am exploring new virtues, trying on new behavior and, hopefully, making new art!   I invite you to join me on this Advent retreat.  I would appreciate your thoughts on the virtues and your insights into what a virtue room might look like.

MAGNANIMITY
I've chosen this virtue for the first week because I have been feeling "stingy" in my life.  Stingy feels "narrow" and limiting, petty and reactive.  I've been gifted with a usually upbeat and open personality, so this Scrooge-like view of life is uncomfortable and depressing.  When I think of a magnanimous person, images of some of the older women in my life come to mind.  There is a graciousness about these women and an acceptance of the persons they meet that is its own nobility. 

Artists are often gracious with one another, but stingy with themselves, squandering precious studio time to be at the beck and call of anyone and everyone.  I know I do that.   I have to answer every call and open every e-mail immediately, loosing my art-focus each time.  We are a scrimper and saver lot.  It's hard for us to use expensive paints and materials with abandon simply for the sake of discovery.  It's even harder for us to be lavish with our celebrations of successes and generous with dreams of our own accomplishments.   Instead, we downplay each sale with worry that it will be our last.  We look in amazement at others who make the magazine covers with their work or have a sell-out show and wonder, "how did they do that?"  But we don't spend time imagining ourselves in the same position and believing that it can happen...and so it never does.

I'm going to spend time this week being magnanamous in my work, gracious in my thinking and generous in my dealing with others.  I'm going to try to catch any stingness that might creep back into my life and banish it with a huge, yellow swash of paint--the good paint! 

How are you magnanamous with yourself and your work?  Your thoughts are welcome.

It has been awhile now since I put out the challange to myself and my readers to allow this project to unfold in public.  I haven't been timely with my posts, but I have been mulling and working on the idea...which has taken some interesting turns.  The project that I described it in the last post began to be cumbersome inside me...too many characters...too many modalities of creativity involved. It's often like this.  In the first burst of energy, I try to incorporate the whole world in the project.   I've slowly come to feel  the need to narrow my focus to something real--a person or persons, an area of history or this city.   When I shared my inner frustration with my critique group, a member offered a possible avenue for my focus...the Three Corners Area of San Antonio.  This is an area of the city that was settled early in our history and has been a continuous neighborhood since.   We took a day out to visit the area, talk to some folks, look at the architecture, trying the project on, so to speak.   I was fascinated and excited, but after a great lunch and a auto/foot tour, I knew that this idea was not speaking to me.

So, I had the structure and a visual of how I wanted to work, but no subject.  I've been in that stuck place all these months.   Lately, though, a new subject has begun to come into focus....my grandma.  My grandmother has been a primary person in my life and somehow appears in much of my work.  (She is the source of "Mildred" in Murphy, the Rainbow Dragon, and the woman in Painting #5 of my large scale works, and perhaps, even Hildegard herself in Hildegard of Bingen.)  But, I have never done anything directly related to the person, Annie Belto. 

We have two valuable pieces of primary source material that has exciting implications for a visual project: her scrapbook of delightfully narrative images taken with her own brownie camera and her life story in her own words.   The lens in my mind is beginning to focus on large scrapbook pages, with her words on accompaning sheets of paper...the pillars are becoming locations of her living spaces....the words are becoming sound installations...I am seeing "scrapbooks" from my paper substrates mounted on wooden display panels on the wall. 

I am now in the process of doing experimenting in the studio to create a form for each of the images and exploring several ways that I might reproduce and enlarge her photos.    I've cast a scrapbook size "cover" and like the feel of the book, but I am only at the beginning of this new stage of development.   But for me, the hard part of the "main idea" of the project is now behind me.  The energy and the work is different at this stage.  It is more about solving problems...hundreds of technical and visual problems.  That has its own kind of satisfaction.  Some of this work I do in the early hours of the morning...in that half-waking stage of sleep.   I plant a problem in my head before I go to sleep and let my unconscious work out the solution.   It often happens that I will have solved a very difficult secion of the work by the time I wake up.   The rest of the work I do by contacting experts in areas where I am not skilled or reading books on a technique I would like to use and by creating mock ups, doing drawings and creating examples upon which I experiment.   When  this phase of the work is completed, I will be able to put the project together in good, clear language to apply for grants or other funding.

Friday, June 05, 2009
I've had a new project in my head for about a year now, and I think it is time to begin.  I have a sense that the project will take me about two years to complete, depending upon the time I have to work.  About every ten years, I have a significant, career changing art work that appears in my life. It's not a new series of work, but it is a large work that takes me to a new level.  I document the process--the elements of the work that appear one by one-- in journals and it is fascinating for me to look back to see how the ideas present themselves, morph into a final shape and then take their place in the grand design.   It is a scary and somewhat messy process, but fascinating all the same. 

I've decided that I am going to document the process, this time, in a blog.  If you have ever wondered "how did she do that?"  or "how did she come up with that?" here is your chance to get inside the head of at least one artist, me.  I would appreciate your responses and insights along the way and will give credit in the final work for idea-changing insights.  I am inviting you to become a part of the creating process.

I expect the idea will change much before the final work is created, but here is what I know for now, along with its history... A year ago, I took an ecaustics workshop from R&F, and expected to make 10-12 pieces of art, the beginning body of work for a show.   I had been searching for a way to use encaustics on my cast-paper forms.  As it happened, the workshop was wonderful, but everything I tried on the paper looked horrible!  I ended throwing most of it away. By the end of the third day (of four), I was totally discouraged and frustrated.  I stopped using color and just applied medium (clear, molten beeswax with damar varnish) to the form and was surprised at how good it looked.   I added a transfer of a black and white cabinet card  and was blown away by its luminous quality of the image in wax.  At that moment, I had a vision of a whole room full of these "characters" each  with an accompaning story.

Here is the messy part of the process....while the inner visual of the completed project was and is, to this day, crystal clear, the details are very fuzzy.   I know that these images will be part of a larger story (19th Century San Antonio society? a family? famous Texas homes with stories of their inhabitants? or something not yet revealed...).  Germain to the project is an American book of poetry by Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology, that I taught to my students many years ago.  In this book, characters from the town of Spoon River, give bits and pieces of their lives in monologues.   So, there will be a performance aspect to this show as well.  Whether it will be a video installation along with the visual work or a live performance, I don't yet know.  Whether the performer will be just me, taking on several characters or a group of performers, I don't yet know.  That is how it is for me....a general sort of idea that begins to ruminate around in my head for a year or so...and then BAM!  The process begins with a dream...with an insight...with a first step...something that lets me know, the train has left the station!

Last night I was given the first piece of this massive puzzle that will slowly come to clarity in the next months.   I had a dream of these large columns hanging in the space demarking (?) something (areas of the city? classes? time?).  They are each about 6 feet high and are banded with rusty strapping.  In between the strapping are these wonderful, luminous, intricately-interesting paintings in encaustics.  The colors I am seeing are rich and varied, with each column having its own unique color scheme.  Since the characters are (for now in my mind) black and white, these giant spashes of color are so right.

With the first piece in place, I can now begin to work.  I thought I was going to work on the characters first, but that doesn't seem to be the case.  I don't know who these characters are or how they fit together.  In playwriting, we call that a "spine" the through-line of the story.  I don't know that yet, but what I do know are the large columns.  So my work begins in finding or making these columns.  Figuring out how to bind them with strapping and then learning how to rust the strapping...and THEN, I can begin the painting..and hope that I know, by then, the direction the painting should take. 

This new work is now at the M2 Gallery in Houston for the Degrees show.  We had an outstanding representation of work from Texas WAX members.  Max intended us only to have the main gallery, but had to open up the back space as well for the work.  I went to Houston for the show, but wasn't able to make the reception.  I ended up in the emergency room of MD Anderson while all my encaustic friends sipped wine and feasted at the delicious food table.  I did enjoy the images from the reception, now on the Texas WAX site, and I was able to preview the show earlier in the day.   The breadth and scope of the encaustic work is truly remarkable.  I am looking forward to bringing it all to San  Antonio.

I am still fascinated by this exciting medium, encaustics, and continually find new ways to work with it.  Although right now, my own work is minimal in color, I am enjoying colored pigment in my demonstrations for encaustic classes. Speaking of classes...I am having a ball!  Now that I have my teaching muscles back in gear, I love having new artists discover encaustics.  What is so addicting about wax?  The smell...the versitility...the texture...the translucency?   Perhaps all of it.  Perhaps because I have searched so long for a media that complements my cast paper.  Whatever it is, it has captivated me!   

"We make our way by walking..."  I first came across this phrase in the 1980's in my research for GUALSINGA, a collaborative dance/drama work I created with a group of artists.  The story depicted the experience of Salvadoran peasants massacred at the River Gualsinga during a fourteen year military counterensurgence program. The drama was powerful, not only for the dancers, musicians and actors who embodied the story, but also for the real life refugees who peopled our audiences.  They were the survivors; some of the 45,000 displaced from their villages and spread throughout North and South America.  The words, "Se have camino al andar," were first spoken by Antonio Machade, a Spanish poet, but for the people of Central America the words bestowed a power that impelled them to survive  to tell their story.

 

Some years later, in graduate school, I began working on a one-woman play, HILDEGARD OF BINGEN.  Although Hildegard lived some nine centuries earlier, there was something about her faithfulness to an unknown path in life that called forth the phrase again.  At the end of the first act, when all doors had closed to her, she picks up her skirt, so to speak, saying, "Well if I cannot see the path, then I suppose I will just have to make the path as I walk."  And she does.  It isn't until the end of the play that we see just how much this image had influenced her whole life.  "Ah, we so often fret because we must make our way through life by walking where there is no path" Hildegard says,  "And now that I am old, I can turn around to see that there has been a path all along.  Yes, God, with such humor has carved each step onto my face.  This face with its hills and valleys, is the map.  Here is the proof that I have lived,  Here is the testimony that I have loved." (HIldegard of Bingen, 1990 Michelle Belto).

 

I am not surprised that "making my way by walking" has appeared again in my work.  It becomes the title of the first piece in a new series working with a new media, encaustics.  When I begin the walk down a new path, it is always with the same feeling--overwhelming gratitude that after months or years of searching, I know I am finally on the RIGHT path, coupled with something akin to terror.   Like Hidegard and the women of Gualsinga, straining in the dark to seek something to light up a murky, overgrown trail, I am not given more than the next step.  It is no wonder that most artists I know are deeply spiritual people; the act of making art again and again with only the next step hazily outlined is in itself an act of faith.

 

And so I begin in a new direction...on a new, but also familiar path...with new expectation.  In the words of the Bard, I will now "screw my courage to the sticking point," and take that step.  Back to the studio.