Moving to mirandaaisling.com

Recently I have completely revamped my artist website, mirandaaisling.com.  I've had this website for a couple years now, but I've never been able to edit it in the way I wanted.  In the past couple months I've been working on making myself more official as an artist.  I had to make a website on yola for an assignment for grad school, I created business cards, a facebook page, and I've been having more and more conversations with people about myself as an artist.  On my business cards I put my website, but when I handed them out I always added a disclaimer about the state that my website was in.

Now I no longer have to do that.  While my website is not a professionally done perfect piece of art, it conveys who I am and what I do much more clearly.  Now, I actually want to show people my website.  Because of this, I've decided to move over everything from this blog to the blog on mirandaaisling.com and I will continue writing there.  If you like what I write, please come and have a look!  I always love conversations with new people about art, community art, and just about anything else.

The Next Best Idea

It's taken me a while to figure out what kind of creative swing I'm on.  As a person interested in more things than my brain can handle, I've discovered that I go through creative swings.  For weeks at a time all I will be able to think about is painting.  In all my free time I'll race to my paints and spread my canvasses around the room while my guitar, books, and other art forms lay gathering dust.  Then my painting swing will taper off and suddenly I'll write three folk songs in a week and spend three more weeks playing them and writing more.

At the beginning of the year I was on a guitar swing and wrote what I considered some of my best songs yet (as usually happens whenever you write something new).  Then I fell into a bit of creative confusion. I was overloaded from life in general, which tends to stunt my creativity, but still needed to find my outlet.  Turns out that I needed to be reading, that for me imagining the worlds created from words on a page is as creative an activity as writing those worlds myself.  I'm still in the reading swing (plowing my way through the Harry Potter books yet again and bringing my boyfriend with me).  But a few weeks ago I could feel the next swing emerging: writing.

Here's my problem.  In the summer of 2010 I started what I, at that point, considered my best idea yet.  I developed the story, the characters, the arc for at least three books, and started writing.  Then came November and it was time once again for NaNoWriMo (if you don't know about that just wait until this November comes and it rules my life once again).  I wanted to write my next 50,000-word-in-a-month novel and I wanted it to be about the world I had just developed.  But I had noticed how much better my writing was when I wasn't writing for NaNoWriMo, so instead of carrying on my story I decided to develop one of the legends of my new world into its own story.

Well I did that and I have my next finished book (I'm sending it out to be read/revised at the moment if anyone's interested, just comment and/or email me).  But it took me much longer to accomplish than I thought.  In my new creative swing I turned back to the original story from the summer of 2010, started trying to write it, and found that I just couldn't get into it.  It was fun to re-read and think about, but the creative juices just weren't there.

So I've been stuck in a creative rut, not helped by the fact that my life has gotten just a bit crazier with the end of the semester and the end of my apartment's lease cycle (yay for three new roommates?)  It took me a while to realize that what my creativity was trying to tell me wasn't to continue my old story, but to start a new one, and that's exactly what I did.

Suddenly, my creativity is in full swing.  Theo Baez and her friends have been born, the first chapter has been written, the story arc has been discovered, and a new world has been created.  My paintings continue to gather dust along with my guitar, and my old story is retreating into the depths of my hard drive, but in the face of the return of my creativity, that's okay.  Soon my creativity will be swinging another way, but for now it's time to start my best idea yet.

The Separation of Art and Science

While reading Out of Our Minds  by Ken Robinson, which I'm sure I will reference many more times, I was introduced to the history of the separation between art and science.  I had always wondered how we'd managed to get from the multi-talented interdisciplinary Greeks to the specialized modern world and here was at least part of an answer.

Apparently, It all started with Nicolaus Copernicus and heliocentrism, the idea that the earth moves around the sun.  Galileo Galilei is the name most people associate with heliocentrism, as he delved into it a generation later, but Copernicus began the idea.

With Galileo began the separation of Church and State, which until then might as well have been one being.  Suddenly, during the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment, everyone was asking new questions and a new paradigm was established.

During the Renaissance, art and science were still closely intertwined.  We still use the term Renaissance woman or man to describe someone who is well versed in many disciplines.  Just think of Leonardo Da Vinci, painter, inventor, and sculptor extraordinaire.

But in the Enlightenment, under the lead of those like Rene Descartes, the "I think therefore I am" guy, science became much more particular about who it would share its bed with.  Rationalism and Empiricism took over and suddenly the arts found themselves being shifted to the sidelines.

In reaction to this, the Romanticists burst onto the historic stage.  Musicians, poets, painters, and artists of all kinds sprang up to "[focus] on the quality of human experience and on the nature of existence" (Robinson, pg. 97).  Romantic music has always been my personal favorite; it was the first form of classical music that truly moved me and the era that I have always enjoyed playing the most.

The separation of science and art has persisted and deepened until today, when we take it for granted.  There are the artists and the scientists, the descendants of the Enlightened and the Romantics, and they rarely overlap.  As I read Ken Robinson's chapter on what he called the Academic Illusion, I scribbled "what about enlightened romantics?" in the margins.  When I started writing this post I realized that they have existed, the artist scientists, the Renaissance men and women, but they have become figures in history instead of contemporary role models.  In my work as a community artist, I hope to restore that bridge.

While I support the separation of Church and State, the separation of Art and Science is true blasphemy.

Embracing Myself as an Art Blogger

I have a complicated relationship with the internet.  It started very young under the tutelage of my geek father who had me programming on MOO's and in Microworld, gave me an email and an instant messaging account, and tried to help me start my website all before I reached double digits.  I've also had various unsuccessful blogs but never found myself truly devoted to them.  Part of this is because when I think of blogs, I think of my father writing on his blog everyday and the geeky/political topics that I would then be forced to listen to over the dinner table.

And yet here I am, lying in bed on my one free day this week typing away on a blog that I have managed to write on at the very least once every two weeks (usually once a week) since January.  While this isn't the spurting amount of information that most blogs have, it's a level of consistency that I have never managed to maintain before and within my current life style, it's something I'm quite proud of.

So why is this blog actually alive?

The biggest part is that I'm writing about something that I'm passionate about.  Art, people, and the connection between them are three of the things that will make me drop everything.  Everyday I come in contact with at least one idea that I could write about because community art is the center of my life.  It's what I live and breath in my jobs, school, and relationships.

Another important part is that I decided that I'm writing this primarily as a documentation of my own thought.  While I love when people read my blog (the stat button that I check incessantly tells me if people actually do or not), I only take minor blows to my ego when I write something that doesn't get much attention.  That's because, much in the way that I journal everyday to build up a documentation of my life, I write in this blog to build a documentation of my growth as a community artist.

But now I want a little more.  I'm currently surrounded by the STUDIO of Possibilities, the creative center that I am building with Ulrich Inge and Sam Newland.   We've started trying to spread our idea by talking to people, by shamelessly marketing ourselves, and by making connections between our idea and what is already out there.  I think about how excited I get whenever someone reads my work and I realized that there are two things I need to do.

1.) Read other art blogs.  It's a karmic circle.  Read and comment to get new ideas, give ideas, and, show other people writing that someone does care.

2.) Make myself more of a presence on the internet through writing more often and just as consistently while commenting on other ideas to create connections.

To begin fulfilling my new goals I googled art blogs and stumbled across http://art-blogging.blogspot.com/.  Here's a whole list ready-made for me!  A whole group of people writing about art waiting for me to read them.  And who knows, maybe I'll be lucky enough to get on that list as well.  And then maybe I'll actually be able to say the word "blog" without cringing and lowering my voice.

Documentation

For the past few hours I've been scrounging through my apartment, pulling my art from the walls, the dishwasher, the bookshelves, and anywhere else it has walked off too.  I've removed it from its natural habitat, placed it on an 18"x24" piece of drawing paper and photographed it.  After returning all the art pieces to their homes, I'm now settling in on my laptop to edit it all the pictures I took.

Straight from my kitchen shelves to the internet!

I'm doing this because for grad school this semester I have to create my artist's website and I've realized how little of my art I have quality pictures of.  I have plenty of snapshots of the studio, paintings in progress, ceramics before they were put through the kiln, etc., but by the time my art gets to the finished piece apparently I just let it move on.  The exception to this are the extensive pictures I took from my senior show in painting.  Because I took so many pictures of the gallery last March, making the painting section of my website was much easier.

But as I worked on my website I realized that I don't have enough creative output in any single art form to portray myself as a professional artist.  I have about ten paintings, twenty plates/bowls, three recorded songs, two books, and a quickly growing wealth of pictures of kids work.  Separately, this doesn't show the amount of time that I've spent developing myself.  However, all together it starts to form an image of a dedicated artist.

To this end, I photographed all the pieces I have left from my ceramics senior show (which are now sitting in my kitchen, thankfully they were all clean), pottery that I've painted at work over the past nine months, and the various stages of my knitted canvasses.  Adding this to the random images I had strewn throughout my over-full iphoto folder and now I have about seventy pictures to work with, instead of twenty.

I've also realized just how much I've made.  I thought when I moved to Boston my creative output had slowed down some, but now I've realized that while I don't have any new 8" oil paintings, I have generated quite a bit of everything else.  As I go back to work on my website, I can now fill in all the missing areas with concrete examples of my art, what people really what to see, instead of fluffy writing about what I like to do.

The lesson learned: document everything.  I've already made a point to do this, I have journals spilling out of the bookshelf, a 97% full hard-drive, and stacks of art everywhere, but I need to do it more and in a more organized manner.  As I plow along the path to creating my community art center (we now have an in-progress website! thestudioofpossibilities.com) I've been focusing on documenting everything, because that's what shows your competence and gets people interested.  As of now, I'm starting to practice what I preach in my own work.  Get ready for a lot more of everything!

My Best Art Piece

As an artist who is also a young professional and a graduate student, I'm used to hearing both others and myself commiserate about trying to find the time and space to do art.  Eight foot tall oil paintings just aren't plausible in a small, rented apartment on the outskirts of Boston when you work two and a half jobs.  I realized this before going into my new life and started working on smaller pieces, but even so, my painting output has trickled down to a small and inconsistent flow.

And yet I don't feel any lack of creativity.  There are many reasons for this, but I struck on one in particular while I was writing in my nightly journal (which I will have to go back to after the completion of this blog post).  For the past couple years I've joked that I am my best art piece.  To the extent that if I got a tattoo, which is still in the list of possibilities, I would want it to be my artist signature so that I would have signed said best piece of art.  I always approached this half-jokingly and semi-seriously.  My current definition of art is "an object or idea to which a person devotes time, thought, and energy."  If this is true, than I am indeed an art piece, as are you.

As I was writing tonight, I realized that this metaphor can be applied in another way.  I've noticed that when I do a creative act, the whole picture often overwhelms me.  For example, if I try and draw a face and it looks like a deformed melon.  But when I try and draw the specific curves and lines, ignoring the fact that they will make a face when they come together, at first it looks disjointed and wrong.  If I push past that and continue to focus on the lines, then after x amount of time I have an art piece.

My life is like a drawing.  If I try and create the whole thing in one broad stroke, it takes on life's version of a deformed melon, ungainly, overwhelming, and downright discouraging.  However, if I separate out the elements, focusing on the way the blue dots meet the red squiggles throughout the piece, trying to highlight a path for eye movement, or bring balance to the overall composition, then I make progress.  It's then that I can do work intently, step back and marvel at my success, and then dive back in.

Of course, sometimes when I take a step back it looks just as bad as it did when I started.  This happens in my life too.  I spend all my time focusing on my folk songs only to realize that my technical skills as a classical pianist have all but disappeared.  But sometimes, when I spend all my time developing myself as an art teacher and start wondering if I've left behind my painter self, I step back and realize that because the teacher part of my "life art" is stronger, myself as a person overall is stronger.  What I've been focusing on contributes to the balance of the overall composition of my life.

With this reassuring thought in mind, I'll turn back to my journal and continue writing about the wonderful class I taught today on figure drawing while my paintings shiver in the corner, my guitars sigh in their cases, and my book continues to sleep on my desktop.  But soon it will be their turn, because to create a wonderful art piece you have to pay attention to every detail.

My First Studio

When I was in college and debating between being a psychology major and minor, one of the areas of study that interested me was the effect surroundings have on creativity, emotion, and learning. There are places that are inherently creative, ones where our minds can’t help but wander, and ones that immediately make us feel angry. As I began hypothesizing I thought about the different factors: visual make-up, personal connection, cultural symbolism.

While this still interests me greatly, when I decided to make psychology my minor and pick up two art forms as my double major, I chose to address this question in reality rather than within the settings of a psychological test. Although my quantifiable outcome may not be as persuasive, I believe that through studying places that bring specific emotions, particularly creativity, I will be able to recreate them in a directed setting.

Currently, I’m sitting in the studio where I took my first steps as a visual artist and created my first series of paintings. I can see the paint spots on the floor from my brush and the beads scattered around the studio from my drawing. As soon as I step inside the glass doors of what was for four years my creative center. my minds starts to whirl. I am here now not to create my own work, but to support my closest friend as she does hers, and yet my mind fills itself with possibilities.

Much of my inspiration for starting a community art center comes from this space. It is a giant room on the third floor of the art building with a high yellow ceiling and tall windows with swiveling planks of wood that serve as shades. Apparently, it used to be a gym.

There are no walls in this space except for the four that create its outer limits. Instead, stacked cubbies built together and placed on wheels create barriers less than half the height of the room which turn this wide open space into a maze of sorts. It was a maze that I memorized, down to every detail, during my time as a college student.

Because the space is open, noises drift uninterrupted throughout. Classes overlap, music blends together, the pounding of hammers and the harsh click of staple guns echo throughout. A constant flow of creativity twines itself through the false cubby-walls, the echo of years upon years of inspiration.

When I was creating my art in this room, discovering who I was and who I wanted to be, I could look up from my canvas to whoever else was in the room and ask their opinion or just how they were. We were a community, a support system, one that I know lives on without me in it. Of course there were aggravations and irritations, painter’s block and spilled paint, but in the end all of this gets absorbed into the greater creativity atmosphere.

This atmosphere is what I aim to capture, what I want to make available to those who didn’t or don’t have the money to find it in a college setting, who did have the money but wouldn’t spend it on art, who had it and had to leave it after four wondrous years, to everyone who cares to experience it. Sometimes all it takes to feel creative, to become an artist, is to be in the right place, encouraged by the right people. While the true artists are the ones who can capture this energy and hold it within themselves, in my art center I want to open up that possibility to everyone, if only for the one hour a week they can spare to come to my studio.

Being Worthwhile

Most people I know in community art are busy, very busy. This includes the teachers who do art or grad school in their "free" time, the IT personnel, waiters, and software techs who create art at night, and everyone else who finds their lives in community art. Between my two and a half part-time jobs, full-time graduate school, creating my own art, a wonderful boyfriend, and friends and family spread across the city and the country, I don't leave much breathing room for myself.

This weekend is the first time I've had two days off in a row this year. Yet earlier this week I found myself thinking, "Wait, I'm not working Saturday or Sunday? Maybe I can offer to take someone's shift..." Thankfully, I threw out that thought, although it was quite tempting, and that's why I'm sitting in my bathrobe in my kitchen at 3:15 having gotten out of bed less than an hour ago. I woke up at 10, after ten blissful hours of sleep, only to reach out, grab my book, and stay in my bed for another four and a half hours. I released myself into the world Orson Scott Card created in Ender's Game, a world that I knew in my childhood and only now gave myself the time to go back to.

For those four and a half hours I didn't think about my responsibilities, what I should or could be doing. I lay safe and warm under my down blanket, flipping page after page of an incredibly well-written book. There's power in that. In doing something for no reason, with no motivation except the pleasant feeling it brings. I think that's called living in the moment, something I struggle to do. Sometimes I get that when I play guitar, paint, write my own stories, or talk freely with someone I care about; the absence of wanting to be anywhere else but where I am.

What does any of this have to do with Community Art? I swear, I still ask myself this question no matter how much I ramble in these posts. In the rush to do things, sometimes we forget to enjoy things. We think that everything we do has to be worth something, has to have some product. When I lay in bed and read an entire book in a morning, one that I've already read, what am I accomplishing? I'm not making money, spending money, writing that paper I should be writing, responding to my list of emails, managing my budget, writing a new song, revising my book, painting, catching up with someone important to me, or any of other things on the to-do list that constantly regenerates itself. But I am enjoying myself, and isn't that why we do all the other things?

When I start my community art center, I want it to be a place where people can experience what I am experiencing now, the absence of wanting to be anywhere else. A place where they can submerge themselves in the moment, whether its with a paintbrush in their hand, a guitar on their lap, or an incredibly interesting person across from them. It's in these moments that we are truly alive, that all those other things we do become worth it. And wouldn't it be wonderful if all those moments happened at the same time in the same place, so that we could experience them with each other? Enjoying ourselves and each other; creating things, even if they're only good memories. That's what is worthwhile.

Dream a Little Dream with Me

One of my favorite games as I was a kid was trying to figure out what I would be when I grew up. I don't ever remember having an aspiration to be an astronaut, a famous singer, or (to use the dream of a friend of mine) a paleontologist. Yes, there were times I imagined my face on the movie screens, or my voice coming over the radio, and let's not forget thinking about what the USA would be like with Miranda Hynes as Madame President. But I've always loved so many different things, that none of those dreams lasted long because how could you be President and a famous actress?

And so in my game I used to try and figure out what I could be when I grew up that would allow me to do everything I liked doing. As I've gotten closer to what I want to become, marching down the path of self-development, I've realized that not everyone asks themselves this question. Most people have their work and their hobby; what they do, and what they like to do. For me, that was never an option. My passions run my life, every part of it.

Whenever I introduced someone else to this game and explained everything that I loved to do, they came up with an immediate answer: “You should be a kindergarten teacher!” This seemed like too obvious a choice to me. Wasn’t there something else I could do? Some profession I could find that would make me able to help people while making art and not be confined to a classroom?

If you’re reading this, on a blog about community art, you can probably guess what I ended up deciding. But it took a long time for me to realize that my two passions of helping people and being creative weren’t mutually exclusive. It took longer still once I had my realization to see how I could fit the two together. When I was sixteen I solved my game; I wanted to run my own community art center. From the solution of my game came my dream, and since then I haven’t stopped dreaming about it.

With each person I’ve met my dream has grown and solidified, coming ever closer to becoming an actual concrete goal. When I began to dream of my art center, getting my degree in art was the goal, one that I was less than two years away from. As graduation drew closer, my next goal arose: to find a life after college that included art and a way to make money. And so I applied to Lesley University for a Masters of Education in Community art while also applying to the Community Art Department at the Museum of Fine Arts. With the realization of each of these goals, I faithfully continued my march towards my far off dream.

Now, a little less than halfway through my masters degree, my dream is that much closer to becoming an actual goal. I’ve recently been offered an internship at the wonderful Springstep in Medford, where I will learn about the inner workings of a community art center and add to it as best I can. With each goal accomplished, I’ve realized that my dream isn’t as far off as I think it is. Instead of a jump into space, I can now see a climbing staircase of goals that will, if all goes well and I work my little ass off, make my dream my reality.

The Community Part of Community Art

For a long time I didn't have very good friends. There were people I was close with, people I spent time with, people I saw everyday, even people that I thought I would know for the rest of my life, but it wasn't until college that I truly began to build my community.

My college years created the two closest friendships that I have, that I have ever had. Through the past four or so years with these two wonderful women, and with the many other incredible people who have helped to shape who I am, I've learned what it means to be close to someone. For me, the closest form of intimacy doesn't come from sharing secrets, sex, or history. It comes from the exchange of ideas.

There comes a point when I'm so deeply wrapped in a conversation that I lose track of where my thoughts end and my companion's begin; when the idea forming in my mind comes out of their mouth. It is through these discourses that I discovered my passion for human connection, through whatever means available to me, and then came up with a way to channel that passion into an actual life.

I've lost count of the number of times that a new idea has formed while my mouth is moving, butting its way into whatever conversation that inspired its birth. That's how I first came up with my plan to start a community art center, one month into the fall semester of my junior year of college. I pulled out my notebook just now and flipped to September 9th, 2009, the day the idea was formed. A single page of notebook paper is covered in messy pencil with The Salon (the original title of my center) scrawled across the stop. I can still remember my hand moving across the now familiar page as I sat in the dining hall of my college campus, waiting for my closest friend to get out of her art history class so I could explode my new idea, that I got from talking to my own art history professor, onto her.

I do indeed tend to explode when I have an idea. My sister calls it "bubbly Miranda" which, despite not carrying the gravity I would like, is the most accurate description of the state I enter when a new idea is forming. Words and phrases bubble out of me, bursting into the world through the conversation of whoever I am talking with at the moment. My eyes become cartoonishly wide and my hands, or rather my entire arms, swing from place to place as if I am preforming as a storyteller.

Since the birth of The Salon, I have talked with what must be over a hundred people about it, always expanding and developing both myself, my idea, and the person with whom I am talking. Through these conversations, which increased dramatically when I moved to Boston and began my master's degree at Lesley University, The Salon has evolved into Creative Spaces and, most recently, CATCH Art: the Creative Haven. (Get it? It's a self-retaining acronym! Eek!)

I've spoken with friends, family members, mentors, strangers, even people I don't like all that much, and they have each added their own flavor to my idea, if only by listening as I talked to them. I've read books and articles, started writing this blog, filled up countless notebooks, and created endless files on my computer as I continue my external thought development. Currently, I have a ten year plan for my art center. I have no idea what it will look like in the end because I have no idea who I will talk to in the time between now and then. All I know is that every conversation I have continues to build the community of people who have heard and helped with my idea and with the development of myself.

For the past few weeks I've been thinking about writing this post, drawing attention to the people part of community art. I spend a lot of time writing and thinking about the children I teach and the teachers I learn from, but just as important, if not more important, are the people who I teach and learn with. The people who listen to me, who talk to me, who dream with me.

There was quote at the beginning of one of my classes this semester which I have not been able to get out of my mind; "I write so I can find out what I am thinking" by Jerome Bruner. Obviously, just glance down the page, this is true for me. But I would have to say, more accurately, I converse so I can find out what I am thinking, and once I know what I think, I know what I am going to do.

Basement Music

When I was young(er), I used to see the videos of 20-something year olds fervently playing music in their livings rooms and basements late at nights, getting off day long shifts to come home just to make music. I always found it a little funny, these people who played late at night not to get famous or to go anywhere, but just... because. It seemed to me like they were adults holding on to childish dreams when they should be doing adult-things (whatever that's supposed to mean).

It wasn't until recently, when I truly began my adult life living on my own, supporting myself, working, etc. that I began to truly appreciate these secret gatherings. Music has always been a deeply personal art for me. I took classical piano for twelve or so years, sitting by myself in the practice room for hours. During those hours I began to fiddle with writing my own compositions, first classically and then folk-ily. I would sing my heart out while banging away on the piano, momentarily blanking out the rest of the world that was only separated from me by thin, white walls and the sound of my own music.

Those thin walls were the first thing that let other people hear my music, whether they wanted to or not. Sometimes music major friends of mine would come in to see who it was, or would say hello when I came out. Slowly, I began to bashfully invite people in while I played. At first it was just my family, but then I took a deep breath and moved on to close friends.

My breakthrough came when I brought my guitar to the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival for the first time, after my entire life spent going to listen to other people play music. That was where I got my first taste of the music community. I had performed before, in camp talents shows and music recitals, but there's something different about sitting in a group of people, none of whom are professional musicians, and just seeing what comes out.

I've finally come to a point where my hands don't shake every time I try to play in front of people, and I can finally listen to recordings of myself while only cringing instead of running out of the room. As I settle into my new life in Boston, I've become part of a jam group that meets after work in living-rooms and basements as we all hold onto the childish glee that comes with simply making music. I continue to write my songs, which have slowly but surely gotten better, and for now, that's enough.

My Stunt as a Storyteller

At this very moment I am absolutely elated, sky-high on performance energy that hasn't gone away even though I finished telling stories over an hour ago. That's right, my performance wasn't some theatrical debut it was my debut as a true storyteller.

In my recent class on storytelling I'd been exposed to what was about to happen today. I read articles about how storytelling can capture any audience because the human mind is intrinsically organized to understand stories, I told stories to my classmates and heard them tell their own, and I even went to story-telling events and felt myself captured by the storytellers in front of me. But until today, I remained skeptical.

I was skeptical of my own power. Here I was, listening to and reading about storytellers at all different levels of all different ages. It was easy to tell who the masters were, the ones who made you actually see what they were telling so much so that you couldn't look away. It was also easy to tell the people who weren't born into storytelling, for whatever reason. And not everyone is. Everyone can learn, surely, but there are some people who, for whatever reason, take naturally to the art form of storytelling.

I wasn't sure if I could be one of those. Sure, I've always told long winded stories (that's basically what this blog is, stories about my experiences with art). Theatrics have also always been a part of my repertoire, earning my the family nickname of Tallulah after Talluluah Bankhead. From years of singing and acting my diaphragm is strong enough that I can make myself heard in a gymnasium full of summer campers without completely ruining my voice. I've always known that I come alive when I'm in front of people; I thrive of off human interaction.

But could I tell stories?

As of now I can comfortably say that I can. At Story Stomp, a festival dedicated to "connect[ing] the imaginative worlds of reading and art" at Springstep in Medford that took place today, I performed in a section called "Storytelling with Miranda." I told three stories, The Enormous Carrot, The Gold in the Chimeny, and Stone Soup. After a day of dancing, cupcakes, and theater-movement activities I wasn't sure how the children would react to being asked to sit and listen.

The room was a wonderful chaos when I stepped in, with children playing tag, parents talking, and arts and crafts all over the floor. While we were gathering the children together I had them all do a little movement exercise that I used to do in choir so that they would realize something was starting again and then they all sat down.

For at least half an hour 35-50 (I'm horrible at guessing numbers) pairs of eyes were trained on me as I exaggerated all my usual antics, turning what are normally huge hand gestures into leaping body gestures. Both the children and their parents moved along with me, sometimes as volunteers, sometimes supplying information, and sometimes because a child just wanted to get a little closer.

Unlike when I play music or act in a play, I wasn't nervous. Beforehand, yes. But once the stories started all I had to do was relinquish control and let them happen. And oh man, did they happen. I'm not sure who had more fun, the children, the parents, or me.

At the end of the last story Allie Fiske, the wonderful woman who asked me to tell my stories, and I did a little configuration so as soon as I said "...and then music started to play and they all began to dance!" there was indeed music and the children and their parents did indeed get up to dance with me. Once the music was over and the last line of the song was done, one little girl who couldn't have been more than three years old came straight up to me and said "But that was only two stories!"

"It actually was three," I told her.

"But it was so short! I wanted to hear more!"

Can you imagine? A three year old who wanted to sit still and listen to stories after over half an hour of already doing so! Her and multiple other children and their parents came up to me saying thank you and giving me compliments that at the beginning of the day I wasn't sure if I would deserve. But none of their compliments felt as wonderful as hearing everyone saying "Stooooone Soup!" along with me, or dancing as characters in a story, or hearing some children ask to hear more stories.

As I left, a woman who had been watching through one of the many windows in the room said "You have a lot of energy!"

"I just never grew up," I replied.

"Don't ever," she told me with a grin.

I responded that I didn't plan to, and indeed I don't. As I bounced home, swinging my arms like one of the characters in my stories, I thought with my own ear-to-ear grin, this is something I could do for the rest of my life.

Dancing in the... Museum?

Last Thursday I took a group of children to the MFA for a late night visit. By 6 o'clock, which is only the time that we get there, the children are typically already hungry and antsy after having been at school all day and then at the club for three hours. Despite this, they normally do quite well in the museum and are excited to be around the art and to be outside of their normal environment.

The whole way there the kids were singing along to the radio and to each others ipods/phones. When, for a moment, I slipped past a station of rock music from some previous decade there were giggles and cries of "What is this?" "Is this music?" and my personal favorite, "No offense to whoever wrote this song, but this is weird." To my ears, this music was perfectly normal and, to run the risk of sounding like an old cranky lady, much more appropriate for the kids than the songs they listen to at 8-10 years old which all seem to reference sex or drugs with varying degrees of subtlety.

The visit itself went well, apart from a short bickering between two girls and some discrepancies over eating in the can. The kids still hold a certain awe for the museum and the artist we were working with. The project wrapped up a little earlier than planned, so the kids and I took a stroll through the museum on the way back out.

In the Contemporary wing there was a small country band set up and we decided to stay for a song. One or two of the kids started to dance, sticking their feet out in front of them in their interpretation of country dancing. Soon enough there were twelve children bobbing up and down in the middle of the new contemporary art wing at the Museum of Fine Arts.

I walked over to the two employees running the event and asked if it was okay that the children were dancing.

"Of course!" cried one of them, holding her clipboard to her chest as she grinned at the kids. "This is what we want to have happen. We want it to be fun!"

It was fun.

The handful of people gathered to listen to the musicians glanced back to watch the group of flailing children, all maintaining a respectful distance from the art on the walls. The musicians played louder, the audience started to nod along, and the kids were all for it. When the song ended we all applauded, formed a line, and walked out.

The children giggled as we made our way to the exit, pausing so that each of them could touch the Abraham Lincoln Statue, the only piece of art in the museum where the sign says "PLEASE TOUCH." In one evening the kids and seen art, reflected on it, created from it, done something "forbidden" (touching an art piece), and had fun.

As I drove the children back across the Tobin Bridge, listening to them sing to the radio once again, I thought about how the kids would have reacted if they had heard the same music that they were dancing to on the radio. I can only imagine the squeals and giggles of "what is this?" But when they were faced with the real live musicians, they couldn't help but dance.

Originality in the 21st century

When I began to work as an artist I wanted to be completely original, wholly singular. I housed a strong disdain for art history; I didn't want to learn from others or to be influenced by anything. To be influenced at all negated my idea of originality. I wanted to believe that I created in a vacuum, that my thoughts were completely my own. For the same reason I avoided, and still avoid, drugs of any kind, even caffeine for the most part. I didn't want to have to question whether it was my imagination and ingenuity or the influence of some outside factor that created my art.

This was before I took my first art history class, before I worked in a studio with fellow artists and had boundless creative conversations, before I read art criticism and educational theory. In Freire's words, I was ignoring the "tension between the individual and the social practice." In regards to my Enneagram type, which is a 7 for anyone who knows what that means, I was emphasizing my narcissism. I was distrustful, viciously independent, and felt like I needed to prove my artistic integrity.

I vividly remember the day I realized that I had already been influenced, that my culture had already formed and informed me. My associations, my choices, my very ideas had been influenced by the world around me since I first opened my eyes and learned what it meant to scream. After that realization, I opened the floodgates. I had always read anything and everything, unconsciously absorbing the thoughts of my favorite authors, artists, and teachers. But at that point I started to do so consciously, recognizing the connections and revelations that other people could already provide. I learned that I didn't have to reinvent the wheel, or the bicycle, or the car. Those were already done and I could use those ideas to move onto something new and wonderful; something completely my own and yet indebted to the rich history of the world.

My eyes opened to the power of having people agree with you and the joy of reading what you already thought. When I talked about this with my sister, she paraphrased for me what she believes is a George Orwell quote: "The greatest books are the ones that tell us what we already know." Because in this large and lonely world, its always nice to realize that you aren't alone in your thoughts.

When I studied and read for art history, psychology, music, and my many other classes or talked endlessly with about anything and everything anyone who would talk back, I found a ready-made support system, a vibrant creative community that has existed for millennia and that to become part of all I had to do was acknowledge its existence. Suddenly, I was much less lonely.

Now when I read something new, the page is covered with exclamation points and stars. I veer away from drawing hearts around passages to preserve some semblance of dignity, and because hearts don't encircle paragraphs well. When I read, look at art, or find some wonderfully exciting person to talk to, I can barely keep myself contained. I can never keep myself still. My hands fly wider and faster the more enthusiastic I get and I edge forward in my seat until I fly back only to edge forward again. Journals, scraps of paper, and texts to myself contain the ideas that I simply could not keep in my head anymore because I wanted to remember them, to share them as others have shared their ideas with me.

I've always hated when people say that there is no such thing as originality, that everything has already been done. If that were true we would cease to move forward, to make progress, to create. Simply because something has already been written, has already been painted, doesn't mean that when I do it again it isn't original. It is through our unique lenses of the world that we create our originality. Degas's sketch of Botticeli's Birth of Venus may have been a copy of that painting, but it is the original of his sketch. If I were to sketch my own version of Degas's sketch, it would be a copy of a copy. But it would also be a copy of an original, and an original in its own right.

With this in mind, I embrace the ready-made creativity, ingenuity, community of my predecessors and my contemporaries. I put my ideas out into the world and wait to see what new connections will come back.

The Start of the next Story

I do any art form I can get my hands on; my artistic curiosity is something that I both enjoy and take pride in. There are, of course, art forms that I am more closely connected to right now, oil painting, creative writing, knitting, song writing, and pottery to name a few, but give me anything and I'll try it.

This mentality is why I chose electives in poetry and storytelling rather than my more comfortable music and visual art for grad school this spring. And, so far, what a good choice! This past weekend I spent my Saturday and Sunday from 8 am to 5 pm in a rather ugly, sparse classroom. Oh, the horror, right?

Wrong.

The best thing about going to an art/education school is that the teachers know how to teach and they know their art form. Abigail Jefferson, the instructor for my weekend course, isn't only a wonderful and engaging teacher, she's an inspiring storyteller. With her we learned about storytelling through storytelling. Throughout the long weekend I don't think we sat down for more than an hour at a time. This comes from Abigail's experience with middle schoolers, but also speakers to her knowledge as a performer and teacher about attention spans and how to best engage people.

While preparing and excitedly waiting for this class, I found myself noticing the stories I was already telling everyday and remembering the stories that I had been told throughout my life. There are stories that I forgot that I knew and stories that I forget how I know, ones through which I hear my mother's voice and Jim Weiss's on cassette. Yes, even I am old enough to remember cassettes.

Through the class I also realized that stories are, and always have been, how I learn. I've been blessed by whatever combination of nature, nurture, or spiritual force you personally prefer with a sharp memory. I can hear things once and teach about the material later in the day. (That has happened. More than once. Bad planning, I know). But during the weekend I realized that stories and discovery aren't just good tools for teaching and learning, they are the best.

Give me facts, numbers, and names and I can read them over three times and know them for the test tomorrow. But then I promptly forget them because I just don't care about those specifics. There are people whose life work is based off of such specifics and facts, but I am thankfully not one of them. I could describe the entire catalogue of an artist's work, the stories behind each piece, and the artist's biography, but forget their name until something reminds me of it hours later.

But to tell stories you don't need verbatim, memorized facts. Indeed, memorization often impedes a good story. You need to absorb and understand the story itself. Then, when you go back to tell it, the details can be formed in the moment, based on the connection and the energy you are experiencing. Storytelling is a trust exercise between you and your brain, one that I need to practice. I often lose what I know because I over-think and second guess myself rather than trusting not what I've memorized, but what I've learned, what I know. In psychology, that's called psuedostupidity. (A random fact I remember from my second year of college not because it was the most important, but because I could directly connect it to my life... and it made me laugh.)

From my reading for another class, I can see that I'm far from the only person who believes in storytelling as an incredible vehicle for teaching. In Literacy: Reading the Word and the World, Paulo Freire, the father of current educational thought and the archangel of Lesley schooling, describes how he teaches writing. Rather than reducing reading to rules of grammar and structure he taught these rules as "objects to be discovered within the body of the texts." He goes on to say that "the students did not have to memorize the description mechanically, but rather learn its underlying significance." Freire was on the forefront of changing teachers from the fountain of information to the leaders of discussion and discovery, or the storytellers.

As soon as I read Freire's words, my brain clicked into gear. I wasn't thinking of something that I remembered from my days of rote memorization, but something that I knew from listening to Abigail, taking part in her stories, and making my own stories; that human connection is the best way to teach and to be taught.

Are they getting anything?

Like any good artist/thinker, every once in a while I have an existential crisis. Is there any point? Does looking at pretty pictures ever actually matter? Am I making any difference? Why should we do anything when in the end we all die and the earth gets blown up by the sun? That sort of thing.

In the past two years or so, and even more intensely in the past six months, I haven't found these questions repeating themselves in my head. At this point in time, my life direction is clearer than it has ever been. I love what I learn, what I do at work, the people in my life, where I live, pretty much everything. It's a little surreal to tell the truth, but that train of thought is for another time.

Despite the current absence of my existential crises, I am constantly shoring up arguments for my rational self to use when they reappear in my life once again. At work yesterday a perfect example presented itself to me. I had a good chunk of time in the afternoon between two classes I was teaching at the MFA and it turns out that my co-worker and friend was in the same predicament. She suggested that we go to the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum since it is literally right up the street and I'd never been there (or so I thought).

I eagerly accepted and we made our way through the strangely warm January day to our neighbor museum, wearing our IDs on our red MFA lanyards. As we entered the new wing of the Gardner, which architecturally looks very much like the new wing at the MFA, we were kindly greeted by museum workers with bright yellow Gardner lanyards and I had to wonder if our separate museum superiors hadn't planned the obvious contrast.

Walking through the new wing was lovely. Looking at art and places where art is displayed and talked about is always interesting, particularly when you have good company. But my new found weapon against future existential crises came when my friend and I walked through the glass tunnel connecting the new wing to the original Gardner museum. As I entered the stone and brick mansion, I had the strangest feeling of deja vu. I shook it off, knowing that sometimes that just happens, and followed my friend in the main hallway of the museum that circles around the famous courtyard.

Finally, a memory that had tickled my mind for years snapped into place as I stared at the small hallway on my right.

There are some memories which are so specific that I can see bits of them in my mind as clearly as if I am looking at a video or a photograph. The hallway I saw yesterday belonged to one such memory. For years it had floated around my mind and every once in a while I would try to place it. Could it be the New York cloisters which I went to on a 2nd grade field trip? Or some scene from a medieval movie? Maybe it was from one of the cathedrals I saw in Italy that for some reason felt like it had happened a long time along?

Actually, it was the first floor hallway on the right side of the courtyard in the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum. Despite the fact that last time I saw it I was about a foot and a half lower, I recognized it instantly.

In fifth grade my class took an overnight field trip to Boston. We did all the usual historical and tourist routes, which is what I remember. However, apparently, we also went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum and the image of the cloister-like hallway in a building that had once been a woman's home engrained itself on my ten-year-old mind.

So how does this argue against my future existential crises?

Something that can be hard to tell as a teacher is whether you've really gotten through to your students or not. Of course there are the obvious responses, the glowing eyes, bright smiles, and exclamations of joy. But what about the kids who aren't as overt with their responses? Are they still getting anything?

I still don't have a definite answer. However, I can now say from personal experience, sometimes people are absorbing information even when they don't realize it. Ideas you were taught in your youth could be recalled from your memory banks at any point. And no, not everything will stick for every child. But there's still hope that at some point in their lives your students will have a moment of eye-opening memory that brings back some dormant lesson you taught them. Maybe they'll feel a deep connection to an art piece or a museum that you brought them to. Or maybe that's just me. Either way, existential crisis: averted.

New Year's Resolutions

It took me a while to decide on a New Year’s resolution this year. I had little plans, making sure I was doing things on time and keeping my life organized, but nothing more than I do all the time. Those mental reminders that you always tell yourself and hope that this time you’ll actually stay on point with them. But this past Saturday I finally decided on what I wanted to keep myself doing for the rest of 2012.

My resolution came to me after I realized that the show I wanted to see at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston was closing in three days. With the work schedule I had there was only one morning left open for me to see the art that had been open on a tab on my Google browser for the past two months. So, dragging myself out of bed unnecessarily early on a Saturday when I wasn’t working until the afternoon, I made my way through the chill of a January morning down to the ICA.

The exhibit I went to see, Dance/Draw, deserves its own post that I may or may not actually write. In my current line of thought, the important part was what it made me realize. Despite the fact that I work with art everyday, I surround myself with it in my school, my jobs, and even the type of people in my life, I found that I missed going to see art.

I’ve been living in Boston for over half a year now and until this past Saturday I hadn’t been to a single museum except the one where I work. Even there, I’ve only gone to actually look at the art for my own enjoyment and artistic development once or twice. There’s always next weekend, when I don’t have to work or go to class, or that friend who said they would go with me, just not today.

But there’s no excuse.

With the free entrance I get to the many museums in the Boston area, the easy T ride to all of them and the amount of holes I have in my schedule I can’t even pretend to have one. Art is my life. After three hours in the museum walking at a pace that a snail would laugh at so that I could read the writing on each of the pieces as well as absorb the visual effect, I was reminded just what that statement means. I walked out of that museum with my mind whirring so fast that it felt like I wasn’t actually thinking, I was just living the ideas of my art. Each breath I took, step I made, piece of trash I saw, was a possible inspiration for a piece of art, for my next creation.

And so we come to my New Year’s resolution. Once a month, without fail, I am going to dedicate a day to viewing art. Not to making it, not to thinking about it, researching it, or talking about it, but to actually standing in front of new art pieces. If all goes well, I’ll go to more than one a month. If all goes really well, every time I go I will be inspired to actually write on this blog. It’s a new year and art is as strong a part of my life as ever. I plan to keep it that way.