Rituals

I attended a small presentation today. Suzanne Vega, the lovely singer/songwriter, is performing tonight at our local performing arts center and she agreed to give a free workshop on creativity today. Okay, so the words "free" and "workshop" and "creativity" each have their own pull but combine them together and I'm in the front row. (Actually the third row but who's counting.)

So there we were, a small group of about 50 artists, surprisingly few of them actual musicians, but all admitting to being artists, ready to hear the low down from some who's made it. Not surprisingly, she started out with the disclaimer that there is no magic formula, no one special task that will make it all happen.

I knew that. But it bears repeating.

She had some other good points. She suggested that you carry a pen and notebook with you, everywhere you go. And write things in it. I wrote that down in my notebook that I carry everywhere with me, with one of the dozen pens floating around in the bottom of my bag. I started doing that while in school and the habit, fortunately, has stayed with me. It made me smile a little bit.

She said that you need some space to work. Maybe it's a chair. Maybe a room or a corner of a room. Someplace where you can sit and think and no one gets to ask you if you know where something is or if they can eat this. My chair for the last year has resided at Panera Bread but I got the point. I didn't write that one down.

Maybe this is only surprising to me, but the most relevant point she made, in my opinion, was that you have to connect with people, and stay connected, and these days that means on the internet. It means Twitter and Facebook and MySpace and Blogging. I wrote down "Blogging - rituals." because when she said that I remembered where I had been just over 24 hours earlier and thinking about rituals.

My father in law died two weeks ago. It was not sudden. It wasn't unexpected or tragic. It was the passing of a man who had lived a long life into a different part, the last part, of the human experience. But we couldn't hold the ceremony until yesterday. There were any number of reasons for this, not important ones, but we all seemed a bit in limbo for those two weeks.

It didn't seem like it should matter, and maybe in the long run it didn't. Sometimes, when I thought about it, I even felt like it was a good thing. The extra time gave us room to process, time to reflect and think about how we felt. Except for the fact that once we were there, in that small chapel in the Veteran's Cemetery, it seemed all at once like we'd just lost him. Again.

It was a military ceremony. The family had a few minutes to say what they wanted to say and as I listened to his children talk about their father, I both knew him again and knew him for the first time. We laughed a little and cried some. I was proud of them all, these people who were my family through another ritual and a shared lifetime. They were good people who stood to honor their father.

Then, polished and poised young soldiers moved with erect precision through a ritual that has been witnessed by millions of families at this time. The salute, the unrushed and precise unfolding of the flag, then holding it out over the soldier, covering them in the flag of their country while the sharp and strange 21 gun salute is made, and then the even more precise refolding of the flag and it's presentation to the next of kin.

The soldier folding the flag was a young woman, dark hair in a tight bun at her neck and her face solemn and nearly expressionless as she folded the flag. Each bend of the fabric smoothed deliberately with a white gloved hand before moving to the next fold, down the entire length of the flag until the solder at the other end, a young man with a round, young face, tucked the ends of the flag into the triangle, taking time to carefully smooth and secure every bit, every wrinkle.

This was a packet that was not going to come undone. This was a duty that was not going to be rushed. This was a ritual that was as carefully and deliberately performed for an old man long away from his service and his uniform, just as it was for the young soldiers who might have died recently. At the end they gave it to his wife, who wanted to protest, and maybe didn't want it at all, but who took it, trying earnestly to tell this young man, this stranger, this soldier, that Will had been a man of peace. As if that meant that he couldn't be here, in this military place.

Everyone was very respectful to us as we filed out, to complete the ceremony and then complete the ritual, with the breaking of bread and the celebration of life.

And on and off during this entire event, this entire day, I thought about ritual. I thought about how we place ourselves in the context of ritual and custom, to ease emotion. To create space for our minds to work through whatever we have to do now. I thought about the meaning of the senses, the sharing of photos, the sharp report of seven guns firing together three times, the food we eat as we spend time together and the touch of a hug.

How did we develop rituals? What is it about us that creates rituals to deal with the events of our lives? As I listened to Suzanne talk about the use of prayer, meditation and sometimes even things like Tarot cards to access the archetypes of our nature, of our waking dream space, I thought about the rituals of art making.

I read an article recently where an artist, talking about his work and his method, said that the Jewish philosophy is that art is as much about the materials used as what you do with them. That you invest, through your time and attention and intention, added meaning to the materials you select and that you use to create your art. To make important art, you use important materials.

Subject matter, thought process, that zen state when you are working and your hands just seem to be doing what they're doing without you even knowing exactly what it is that you are doing or why, these are all made relevant through the ritual of creating art.

It seems to me that once you go through something like that, the question of whether or not anyone else likes it is actually irrelevant. Someone will see it and understand. Someone will recognize the layers of intent and attention wrapped in and around the work, like the thick waxy coating on an encaustic painting, deepening and coloring the subject. And you will have succeeded, even if you never make a dime.

But its more than that. Because the same is true of your life. Intention, attention, respect for your materials, love of the results, fearless movement in your own direction, listening for the voice of inspiration and heeding the delicate, tentative, almost invisible call of intuition, of the pattern. These are the things that create value in a life, just the same as in a work of art.

And it is a wise person who, at the end of their life, has given that to those around them. Freely, and without reserve.

What is the difference between someone who wants to be an artist and someone who is? I believe it is the person who has incorporated the ritual of art, not merely the act, who is the artist. Suzanne is right, there is no one magic formula or task. There are many. And, like any ritual, they only become more powerful, more meaningful with repetition.

Sitting in my Studio

I'm sitting in my studio. The windows are open and I can hear rain as it finds its way through the leaves of the massive oak tree we call Big Ray. (Burr Oak - Raymond Burr - Big Ray) I've come up here to clean and hopefully work, but instead I'm writing this blog post.

I haven't written much lately, mainly because I've actually been working on art. Something, somewhere, has loosened in me and I've started to actually produce work. Not as much as I would like. NEVER as much as I would like, but more now in the last six to eight weeks than I have in many months before this. And it's good. It's very good. Mosaics and mixed media work. Some painting. I'm settling in and creating some of the things that I've been thinking about for a long, long time.

The thing I hate about my studio is that I've got it so crammed full of stuff that I have a hard time finding things. I wish I could be more organized. More respectful of my own, hard won space.

The things I love about my studio are many.
It has a sink. I am so freakin' lucky to have a studio with a sink. And cupboards.
When I look out the window I see leaves and some little bit of sky. It's like having a studio in a tree house.
As much as I hate how much stuff I have in here, it's great too, because almost anything I want to do, I have the stuff to do it in here.
I can do whatever I want in here. There's no one who is telling me that I have to do a certain thing or not do a certain thing, other than the mean voice in my head, which I am trying to still with work.
It's a luscious melony orange color, full of juice and creativity. And while there's not a lot of wall space, there's still some left for things to go up.

And finally, let's face it, the best part about it is that it's a studio. I have a studio. For many years I didn't have one and I limped along, working on the dining room table or in a corner of the living room, with art supplies stashed in boxes or drawers but always overflowing into our living space.

In one memorable apartment, during my quilting and doll making phase, my studio was behind the couch in the living room with the sewing machine right next to the hall that went to the bedrooms. My husband remembers that one every time he thinks about the foot surgery to get the broken needle out of the ball of his foot. I remember that year because my oldest son was two and the only time I could find to work was late at night, after everyone else had gone to bed. Not a lot got done but it was good stuff.

I learned to mosaic in first house we owned, sweeping small shards of glass off the dining room table whenever it was time to eat dinner. In that house I also took over almost half of our bedroom, with my fabric and sewing machine. But I hated to sew up there because it was always hot, stuffy and the roof slanted down in such a way that the only place in the room where I could stand upright was right in the middle. So I would haul stuff down and work on it in the small living room, with the kids crawling through the work.

Don't get me wrong. Even with a studio my art supplies are not confined here. They bust loose and creep down the staircase with alarming and overwhelming frequency. As I write this there are bags of fabric in the tv room, waiting to be turned into costumes for 3D fairy tale illustrations, a big bag of paint and brushes in the dining room, left over from this week's art date, several tubs of glass shards in the dining room and garage, given to me by my local stained glass supplier, waiting to be sorted and then cut up into smaller shards for my mosaics. And there's always random art tools stuck into drawers or pencil cups, and rolls of paper tucked out of the way in crannies behind the couch or between the hutch and the wall. And that's just the stuff I remember.

And I'm grateful. Grateful for all of it. Grateful for the luxury of space to devote to something that I clearly could never NOT do. Grateful for the patience of the man I married. He not only lives surrounded by my art, but occasionally finds himself wounded by it, and still he doesn't complain. Too much. Grateful for my sons who, maybe because they never knew any different, don't seem to notice or mind that their home is a colorful, patterned mess. Actually, I know they notice, and I suspect they mind, but they don't make me suffer for it, and for that, I am also grateful.

Sitting in my studio. I'm going to get to work now.

Touring Studios

Last weekend I went up north to visit my sister and go on a Studio Tour. Great idea, the studio tour. You travel around the countryside, visiting artists' homes and studios to see where and how they work. Local galleries and shops put on their best clothes and invite you in as well.

What I liked best about this tour was the beauty of our surroundings. A few years ago I went to California for the first time and drove the Pacific Coast Highway. It was a breathtaking and unexpectedly moving experience. As I followed Highway 35 south from the Twin Cities I found myself reminded of that experience, especially just outside Maiden Rock, on the eastern shores of Lake Pepin. There were the same winding roads, and stunning vistas, with rolling landscapes, and views of trees clinging to vertical cliffs on the left and a shining expanse of water on the right.

Okay, so the cliffs weren't as tall as the California mountains, and the shining waters were clearly bounded on the other side of the lake, no more than 2 or 3 miles to the west, as opposed to the limitless expanse of water you see when you stand at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. But the feeling you got, of straddling some magical line, between land and water, sky and earth, was definitely echoed in this almost hidden Midwestern landscape.

And the towns (it would be an aggrandizement of monumental proportions to call them cities, and even the word "towns" is, in some cases, quite a stretch) are also reminiscent of a deep history. Small wooden houses, most wearing their century of life with weary dignity, cluster together, and for this weekend, show off their party colors.

We stopped first in Maiden Rock. It was a glorious fall Saturday, if a bit too warm (it eventually reached 90 degrees that day - and in Wisconsin, October is usually more like 50 to 60 degrees, with 70 degrees a welcome departure) and being a Saturday in Wisconsin, there was a farmer's market. Two tables. One with the biggest jar of homemade pickles I've ever seen for $10 and the other with a small selection of late season veggies, like squash and some late tomatoes.

For such a small town (I think the population was around 300) it had an amazing variety of art galleries and shops. We went to two. The first was a little converted house with beautiful contemporary art. Drawings of huge flocks of birds juxtaposed with interesting multimedia stuff. I can't list too much because as we were looking around the owner had to close for a few minutes. So we wandered up the street to a place called Basil's. This old house clings to the sidewalk like a little old lady clutching her purse and as we went in we were bombarded with stuff. The walls were covered from floor to ceiling in paintings of vibrant blue trees against orange skies and villages with jaunty red roofs and multicolored doors. Tables in the center of the room were heaped with leather purses and birdcages, holiday decorations for every holiday, not just the one coming up, costume jewelry antiques and retro boxes, all ready to slide off into your possession. Cabinets lined the walls and the open doors were hung with feather boas and beaded wire strands. As we picked our way through the plethora of stuff the owner cheerfully confessed to us that they'd already had avalanches.

Reluctantly we left. It was 11:30 and we'd only been to three places and only one of those was actually on the art tour. Before leaving town though we stopped at the Hungry Pelican. This was a bakery with some mouthwatering goods, like sour cream and green onion foccacia cooling on a table behind the counter and raspberry cheesecake pie. We had stopped to use the facilities and loved the look of the food, but we reasoned that it was early and the line (10 deep) was a tad too long to get something to eat already, so we moved on, once again passing on the $10 jar of pickles. (One of the drawbacks to a tour like this. You either have to have an impressive bladder or be willing to cajole your way into a bathroom. Another option, which we chose not to exercise, is to pee in the woods.)

Only later did I stop to wonder why a bakery in the middle of Wisconsin was called the Hungry Pelican. More on that later.

The next town was Stockholm. I won't go into detail here. I mean. I could. There's details. But the problem is, I'm blogging, not writing a novel. Here's the skinny. Great art. Great shops. Very cool look. Cooking shop!!! Small campground on the edge of Lake Pepin complete with pelicans. Still at this point (and it's 1:30 now) have only gone to 4 out of 12 proposed sites. Time to pick up the pace so we went on to Pepin.

And ate lunch. Really nice little cafe. Not amazingly good, but certainly better than many MANY a small town cafe, and great Scotcheroos. In Pepin we saw giant bamboo and tissue paper fish made by many people in the community in workshops put on by a local artists, as well as a video about an event they had held earlier in the summer, where they built a Viking ship out of scrap wood on the shore of the lake and then lit it on fire. I began to wonder just how much time these people have on their hands. And, in at least one part of my mind, I had to ask "Why don't they do this where I live?" And don't tell me, I know the answer to that. Because I'm not out there organizing the giant Viking ship burn. Well, not yet at least.

At this point we turned up into the uplands of Wisconsin, and as we wandered through two lane country roads that dipped in and out of steep crop-lined valleys, rising periodically to ride the crests of ridges, we drove past the birth place of Laura Ingalls Wilder without even realizing it until we'd gone completely past. We realized that we could easily come back after our next stop, billed as an artist who does sculpture, so we decided to go forward.

So, you're in the middle of nowhere. The last town you drove through had a population of 4. You turn at the instigation of a small orange sign and start driving down a gravel road that goes on, up and down over hills for a few miles, until you pull into a farm house driveway where you are greeted by an enormous stone sculpture, in progress. We were delighted to find that this charming artist, Stanton Sears, was also, along with his wife, Andrea Mykelbust, responsible for bringing in the artists who orchestrated the big Viking ship burn. Sears is the creator of some stunning public art that is both architectural and oddly organic. I put their website on the list. Check it out.

After this, we went back to where Laura Ingalls Wilder was born. The thing is, they had this cabin there, and there's nothing that says that this isn't the original cabin, until you walk in and realize that there's never been a fire in the fireplace or furniture on the floors. It's a little disappointing. Kind of like realizing that those tantalizing desserts on display in the restaurant are really fakes. I mean, you still get the gist but the perfection is false.

After this we really headed into the sticks, winding down gravel roads to ramshackle houses charming decorated as only artists can, to see pottery, painting and prints. We fell in love with most of the work and all of the sites. Cooing as much over artfully planted gardens, found art sculpture and the fall of sunlight through poplar trees as we we did over hand carved figurative sculptures (Dave Ekdahl at Nopointink also on the list), stone rattles (Nancy Liedl) and landscape painted tiles (Margy Balwierz, also at Nopointink) , we wandered until even we were too tired to do anything more than turn the car north again and head home.

And that was just the first day.