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I visited the Denver Art Museum yesterday. The Star Wars and the Power of Costume exhibit is only here for a few more weeks and though I am not a complete science fiction geek, I do love me some Star Wars. I had to go.
The costumes were stunning. I really enjoyed seeing the concept art which was presented as drawings, storyboards, and costume fabric files along with a few videos.
Layers.
Time.
This place is all about unimaginable spans of time.
I am spending the month of November at Petrified Forest National Park as their artist-in-residence.
From a distance, the huge trees look very much like they fell and were cut by a chainsaw quite recently. Up close, they are miracles of color and form in stone. Because, of course, these trees have not been trees for at least 216 million years. All of their tree-ness was replaced by minerals and became hard stone so long ago—just now eroded out of their hiding place in the Chinle formation.
This was one of the many little weaving experiments I did for the Weaving Tapestry on Little Looms class (now open for registration HERE!). I wove this for a section about weaving text and I intended it to say, Do it! (I was going to weave another one that said "Just" but ran out of time.)
But when finished, I realized that it sort of looks like it says "Doit!".
So I looked up the definition.
To get to Omaha from Colorado, you have to drive the entire length of Nebraska. It is a long state, though not without interest. After many Woolful podcasts, I arrived at Kaneko in downtown Omaha. If you've never been to Kaneko, make sure to make a visit--and leave yourself some time. Their tag line is "open space for your mind." And it is a place that will inspire you if you let it.
I was there for the American Craft Council conference, Present Tense. I was interested in meeting other creatives and having a few days to talk about the world of art-making.
My hike was wonderful. I was unable to post to the blog from the trail, so what follows is a little photo record of my walk. I hiked for 9 days and I can tell you with firm certainty that this is my limit for not having a shower. There is only so much a little bottle of Dr. Bronners and freezing cold stream water can do. I came to the trailhead at the only major paved road ten minutes before a hail storm and nine days in and that was it. The second car by was a nice woman with two dogs who, though she did turn on her car vent a couple minutes after I got in, did not complain about my smell. Straight to a hotel through a hailstorm I went. Clean clothes, shower X2, pizza... all was well. Though I got off one day before I intended to, it was the unknown shower wall that demanded it. Nine days is the limit.
I had one of those bookstore moments last week where a book on the very bottom of the new releases shelf caught my eye. I picked it up, and it went home with me. (I feel good it was an independent bookstore. Just saying.) The book was
This is the Story of a Happy Marriage
by Ann Patchett. It turned out to be well worth my time and money.
I want to share something in my own experience I heard Ann say in the book. It is about art and how it becomes real in our heads and then when we try to put it into a tangible form, it loses its glitter. I know because this happens with every single tapestry I weave.
I design largely in my head.
For a long time.
Little bits of this and that come together over time and an image forms. I can see it in all its beautiful form. I can almost feel the yarn and my muscles know what weaving it would feel like. Then I finally do the hard work of putting that beautiful idea into a cartoon and choosing the colors and yarn for it. And then I start to weave. And that is when it happens. Ann Patchett, who is a writer, puts it this way.
For me it's like this: I make up a novel in my head.... This is the happiest time in the arc of my writing process. The book is my invisible friend, omnipresent, evolving, thrilling. During the months (or years) it takes me to put my ideas together, I don't take notes or make outlines; I'm figuring things out, and all the while the book makes a breeze around my head like an oversized butterfly whose wings were cut from the rose window in Notre Dame. This book I have not yet written one word of is a thing of indescribable beauty, unpredictable in its patterns, piercing in its color, so wild and loyal in its nature that my love for this book, and my faith in it as I track its lazy flight, is the single perfect joy in my life. It is the greatest novel in the history of literature, and I have thought it up, and all I have to do is put it down on paper and then everyone can see this beauty that I see.
And so I do. When I can't think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down against my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it. It's not that I want to kill it, but it's the only way I can get something that is so three-dimensional onto the flat page. Just to make sure the job is done I stick it into place with a pin. Imagine running over a butterfly with an SUV. Everything that was beautiful about this living thing--all the color, the light and movement--is gone. What I'm left with is the dry husk of my friend, the broken body chipped, dismantled, and poorly reassembled. Dead. That's my book.
I know that sounds kind of stark, but it really is kind of like that. I have a beautiful image in my head and it is perfect. And I know it is going to be the best tapestry ever. The design has evolved over months and I have tweaked it endlessly until it is just perfect. But in the translation to a real, tangible piece of art, it becomes something that does not bear a great resemblance to the thing that I saw in my head.
Ann goes on to talk about how "art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art you must master the craft" and then to talk about forgiveness.
Somewhere in all my years of practice, I don't know where exactly, I arrived at the art. I never learned how to take the beautiful thing in my imagination and put it on paper without feeling I killed it along the way. I did, however, learn how to weather the death, and I learned how to forgive myself for it.
Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life. Every time I have set out to translate the book [...] that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper (which, let's face it, was once a towering tree crowned with leaves and home to birds), I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.
Forgiveness for ourselves. Practice. Continue.
Reference: Patchett, A. (2013).
This is the Story of a Happy Marriage.
New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers. p. 24-25, 29-30.
Skunks have been a constant in my life the last three months. I want to say right up front that NO skunks were harmed in the making of this debacle. There were no babies or adults or corpses under the house when I finally crawled under there with my respirator on. None at all.
The story continued with another horrific spraying and a landlord who, after three months, finally showed up with a little guy named Buddy. I think Buddy is his real name. The landlord needed the littlest guy because the hole under the house was (before recent enlargement) only about 20 inches wide, recessed in a flower bed, and 18 inches high. The space under the house which I can personally attest is filled with black widow spiders and other crawling critters, is not much larger. Buddy was drafted to crawl under the house and look for skunks. He saw none. He even stated, "it smells worse in the house than it does under here!" After crawling under there myself, I have to argue with that one, but Buddy has spent his formative years working as a painter, and the toxic fumes may well have addled his smeller. And likely also his brain as he and the landlord decided that dumping multiple boxes of naphthalene mothballs under the house was a good idea. After calling poison control, I had to convince him that they weren't a good idea and Buddy had to crawl back under the house to retrieve them.
The smell continued and I started looking for a new rental. Then my sister and brother-in-law had series of brilliant ideas. Call the skunk expert. Vent the underside of the house. We bought a fan and the skunk expert (there is a guy who has trapped over 800 skunks and continues to play with the little stripey kitties--god bless him in every way) concurred that this was the best way to rid the house of smell. I had the landlord cancel the also-toxic ozone treatment he was planning and last evening my most excellent brother-in-law installed this fan in the previously ugly hole at the side of the house.
