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.