Entering through art’s window
by Liz Abrams-Morley“Get out of your own way,” my sister says and my collage teacher, Fran says repeatedly “Keep your hands moving and shut down your over-thinking brain for a while. Then step back and look at what you have. Then reenter.”
“We need to get out of our own ways and do something else. Skip the cover,” my sister Pam says. For Chanukah she bought us each an “art journal” and we pledged to work on collaging our covers, but then both of us, trying too hard to make too much of a statement, froze up. “Let’s just do a random page.”
Somewhere I read “Cerebration is the enemy of art” but before I spend the next hour berating myself for not remembering where I read that, or scrambling to see if I can find the citation, I’m going to head back to my mess of a studio table where a new stack of cheap chalk pastels in delicious shades of green, blues and umber wait for me to start smearing and blending and exploring the way I did in kindergarten. I begin 2012 with a promise to myself–more gift than “resolution” –to remember to play my way into art.
When we were in grade school, earlier even, Pam and I liked to go in our shared room and “make stuff.” We played with clay, drew pictures, cut out paper dolls from catalogs. In the summer we made sand crab circuses, capturing sand crabs and putting them in buckets of sand and watching the patterns they made as they burrowed. Our parents’ friend, “Aunt” Charlotte Stoddard taught us to make puppets from socks. Pam got good at sewing for a while, we both learned to knit scarves and didn’t worry over the big fat holes we left when we made mistakes. I liked to tell stories with and to the dolls and stuffed animals. Eventually, I started to write these down and even send them out. Eventually, Pam started to paint with real oils on canvas and to show her work.
I love writing– poems, stories, even snippets of memoir. But some days I go to enter the world of words with a pen and notebook in hand, or sitting at a computer, and the words stutter; the door in feels heavy or even locked. Now that I am a professional writer, some days I burden the “writer” with a heavy dose of expectation of “professional.”
I was nearing 60, about to be adding “Gramma” to my list of titles and had, a while since, buried my parents when I found myself looking for a window— another way into the room where my poet/writer brain would be warm and ready–and discovered a not-too-threatening collage class at my local community art school. I’ve spent many glorious Monday evenings since then surfacing papers, ripping, assembling, playing with glue and colored pencils, chalk and crayon.
There are amazing metaphors which inform the work of a poet in the making of a collage. Collage artists combine images, compose a whole of fragments, attend to the rhythm, balance, and hope for some sense of focus and some sense of surprise to emerge. Each week I listen as Fran reminds me– “Put it down and see how you like it. You can always rip it off or cover it over with another piece.” I put something down. I step back. I watch a composition emerge.
Last summer, when we held our annual “Around the Block in Chautauqua County” week of writing workshops, we also cross-trained our creativity when we joined together drumming, moving our physical energy, and, with Kathleen Tenpas, painting gorgeous fabric swaths, printed with leaves and flowers and stems that left their shadows on the bright hued cloths.
This has been a busy autumn around here, a winter so full of teaching, visiting and traveling. For weeks my words felt stuck stuck stuck. Over the winter break, I pulled out my many very amateur collage “experiments” and began to chop and rearrange pieces, glue over, pull out, add a word here and there. I found an art store near home and took myself on “artist dates” as Julia Cameron prescribed in The Artist’s Way, coming home with a colored pencil here, a few sticks of chalk there–nothing expensive or ambitious. Kindergarten materials.
After a while of playing with these, images begin to form in my mind– in my ear– as words. A poem here. A beginning there. Afterall, I am a writer and ultimately, writing is the door I enter to understand and describe my world. But bless those other art-filled windows; they let in air, and light.
January 12th, 2012 at 3:45 pm
working my way through windows this week – reworking and starting new pieces of fabric, writing essays, finding some old beginnings that need middles and endings and deciding that the poem that won’t be published in Stone Canoe because it was already online is better off where it is – more people visit gardening websites than literary journals.