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.
