On Making
First, my apologies for the lack of a Friday newsletter last week. I was under the weather, and it completely slipped my mind! Last week, we had tornados and a snowstorm in a few days, and weather like that really affects my chronic pain!
I’ve been painting a lot lately. I dug out my watercolor palette, colors carefully curated over the course of years, and I’ve been playing around with shapes and colors, in a meditative fashion. A friend gave me Lisa Solomon’s Color Meditation Deck, and I’m loving working with it. There are 62 cards, so the deck offers over 500 potential combinations for endless color meditation opportunities. This deck gives you the mental space to concentrate on the act of creating itself instead of the anxiety that facing a blank page can give. It also adds a layer of surprise and challenge, helping you to break out of "creator's block" and find fresh inspiration. I’m a longtime fan of Solomon’s work (I love her Field Guide to Color), and the deck appeals to my love of color and my need for novelty in my creative life.
In a world that claims to love creativity but doesn’t allow space for many creative people to actually make art, it can often feel like a battle to carve out time for play, which is something vital to my creative process. When I was a beginning poet in college, it felt so easy to write a poem. I had that hubris of youth that is necessary to making art. I set challenges for myself and tackled the challenges easily. I had a list of 100 words taped above my desk, and every day I’d pick two words and write a poem that had to include those two words. Most of these efforts were not great, but a few survived the editing process and ended up in my first book.
It isn’t as easy for me now to attempt writing constraints like that. I struggle to be bad at something I spent so long trying to get good at. I know this kind of thinking is the enemy of creation. Trapping ourselves in lines of thinking that tend toward perfectionism keep us from creating the best stuff, which always happens when we are willing to fail. As an undergrad student, I felt confident in the quality of my work (even though looking back now, I cringe at most of my work), and I was also fortunate to be at a school where I was surrounded by artists. Making things was just the default setting. Everyone was talented and creative; we just took it as a fact that we wouldn’t be there otherwise, so we didn’t need to prove ourselves. And I often long for those days of sitting in my roommate’s painting studio and writing while she painted, or having long discussions about a novel or painting or play or film we loved or hated.
Nowadays, I feel as if, in some ways, I’m less confident than ever. I remember Mark Doty telling me once that you never reach a point where you feel as if you’ve “made it” because the better you get, the more capable you are of understanding how much better you could be. That has held very true for me. And it makes it much harder to go back to a state of playfulness when creating, including giving myself constraints or assignments.
But with painting, I love it. I’m not a good painter at all—I struggle with representational art—and it’s not at all my métier, but I love doing it so much, and I think that any time I’m engaging in the art of making something, I’m helping to keep that channel open. I have always loved painting, and my parents raised me to value art very highly, exposing me to art and museums, even though we lived in rural Iowa, without easy access to such things (this was pre-Internet, after all).
I wish I could draw and I wish I knew more about painting, but it doesn’t make me feel imposter syndrome, because it has always been solidly a hobby for me, something I do for fun.
I did take a painting class my senior year of college, and mostly painted Rothko-esque color fields. I got away with my abstract art, I think, because I was so cogent when explaining what I was aiming for, and that impressed the professor. But I loved the materiality of oil painting, spending time in the studio, and the physical act of mixing colors, seeing something before me made by my own hands.
When I left college, I threw all my oil paintings away, and gave my supplies to a painter friend. I think it was a decade before I tried painting again, and this time I chose watercolor, with its lower barrier to entry. I think fountain pens were the gateway back to painting, the way a medium-to-broad nib can make it feel like you’re painting with words is delicious.
Today is National Handwriting Day, and I still love writing by hand, especially with a fountain pen on good paper. Like many neurodivergent kids, I had horrible handwriting in elementary school. I worked hard to have more legible penmanship, and now I love writing by hand, though I still struggle with true calligraphy. I feel closer to my writing projects, though, when I write them by hand, at least in their initial drafts, and I’ve kept a daily journal most of my life. I love the digital and technology has made so much accessible, but as long as my sore joints will let me make the attempt, I’ll be scribbling away by hand.
I will be celebrating National Handwriting Day by inking up one of my favorite fountain pens in one of my many inks, and enjoying scribbling away in my journal. Do you like to write by hand or are you fully in the digital age?
My in-person teaching semester starts this week, so it will be a busy one, and newsletters will be a bit shorter this week, but I will still see you in your inbox later this week!
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