One of the first rules of an infinite game is to adapt all parameters to maintain play. Even the book with my list of year-long creative challenges encourages rewriting the rules for a better fit. The author's blog follows her journey into making a skull a day for her year. She is a visual artist who thrived with the challenge of working in constantly changing media. Her year quite literally changed her life. (She has a book deal, after all.)
I got to Day 3, the not-vagina, and after posting the earlier image, proceeded to throw a tantrum. I slammed my creative journal to the floor, I stomped up to my bedroom and swore at the walls. I wept in the shower. I went to bed early and could only sob piteously while Martin cajoled me back into speech, and even then I spoke in angry whispers about how I was a pathetic, lazy artist with no sense of precision or remotest inkling of genuine talent. I was a failure who couldn't make a buck off her abilities while my brother is designing video games.
Drama queen, maybe. But I believed every harsh and bitter word.
I told Martin the story about my brother and his childhood scholarship to Saturday art classes at the Columbus College of Art and Design. CCAD hosted a day when any children interested in attending the classes could come in, grab a sheet of paper and a pencil and draw the still life of random junk on a table in the classroom. Based on the drawings, some children were offered the free classes. Our family was barely making ends meet, so when Jason got picked and I didn't, there was no making fair.
I wrote about the inequity of our creative abilities last year, in a brief “memoir” project I worked on in mental and emotional preparation for my divorce, and which I have included the following excerpt:
When I was nine years old, I gave up being an artist.
I remember the solemnity of the moment as I stared at the picture my brother drew earlier that day. Jason and I learned to draw by tracing Disney characters off the TV and stickerbooks. His talent launched well beyond mine. And that night, I looked with seething envy at his pencil rendering of two cartoon people, a man and a woman staring dubiously at each other, underneath the splash label “The Blind Date”.
It was the nasal labial folds that did me. I couldn’t draw like that. Further, I could never draw like that. I should just give up.
That lasted only a few months before I was doodling in my margins and tracing leggy superheroines from comic books. But I realized the creative rivalry between my brother and I existed solely in my head. It fueled much of my motion, despite the medium changing from the ones he excelled at, (everything but writing) and the ones I excelled at, (you guessed it.)
Artistic retirement notwithstanding, creativity surged through me. My waking thoughts danced through heroic adventure and tumbled down my fingers and onto whatever surface they touched. I drew, I painted, I dabbled unsuccessfully with sculpting. Pens, pencils, sharpies, cardstock, printer paper, all of it gathered into a heady treasure trove of dream making. To this day I still hold a shivering moment of silence to the unlocked potential upon entering an office supply store.
But mostly, I wrote. I grasped at my tumultuous but ever growing vocabulary and plucked from the ether the words that fascinated, the ideas that inspired, the details that titillated, (though a good, Christian girl isn’t actually titillated. She is moved by the Holy Spirit. Perhaps like a Rook.) I wove together meandering, cursive-smeared stanzas of woeful, melodramatic verse that struck me with the same vital drama as the stories I watched on TV or voraciously consumed in books and comics. It also struck my teachers, who more than once bustled me off to a confused counselor to find out if I had somehow been embraced by suicidal thoughts or witchcraft, (as somehow these were one and the same. Suicidal witches seem a solution to their own problem, if you ask me.)
What would have been Day 4 of my 365 Day Creative Challenge found me driving home from an early shift at the bookstore, dreading my next challenge and the self-hate it would bring. This, I surmised when I picked the journal up off the ground and examined it, is not the life-changing experience I was expecting. I am wary of depression, having escaped a life long lived choking upon it, and a recent bought of homesickness-fueled holiday blues still shakes me. No, this will certainly not do.
I will be writing every day instead. I have a few different sources to help encourage me, and I'm certain I can adapt the daily challenges from the journal into ones meant for written word. And if it strikes me, I'll still bust out the art supplies and see what mess I can create. But I'm changing the rules here to suit me as an artist and remind me that I'm not a failure, the lesser-creative child. Perhaps the reason my brother is succeeding at what he does is that he chased his talent fervently and found opportunities to foster it wherever his life took him.
As for me, I tried a little bit of everything, mastered none, and write about it.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Entry for Challenge My Pen
For one thing, she was kissing a statue.
Though never given to supporting slavery and Indian removal, the red-haired woman offered up a sumptuous southern welcome to Old Hickory as she danged from his outstretched arm. Moments ago, the overcast calm in Jackson Square broke upon the russet wave of her dress as she darted from the gray of St. Louis Cathedral. A cluster of school children scattered in her wake and she stumbled, her hat tumbling from her head in a cascade of ginger locks. She slowed at the monument and scaled the marble plinth with an ease belying the propriety of climbing a bronze horse while wearing stays and six layers of petticoats.
Her captured hat waved from the clustering children, who hooted and called to her excitedly. Two ladies taking the afternoon air covered their gaping mouths and clucked judgmentally. Across the street, wind tousled the white smocks of the priests who filled the grand entrance of the Cathedral-Basilica, the once thunderous tread of their feet slowing to a stalled, stunned stop.
Andrew Jackson saluted, balanced upon his steed's rear legs, no less an engineering marvel than the woman's near-calamitous dismount from her brief, memorial romance. She fought the wind to retrieve her hat, which was offered up with some amused giggles, and glared the northern path at the parishioners lingering over Charles Street. They gusted back to their cloisters and she, following suit, turned on her heel and marched south through the square, where she did not stop until she reached Cafe Du Monde, sat, and demanded strong chicory coffee and sugar-suffocated beignets.
“Smooth as silk, eh Ferrier?”
The tangled gossip flowed at the edge of the cafe and bound lip to lip, slid along furrowed and shaken brows. She stared up at the man sitting at her table.
“Were you watching the entire time?”
He nodded, the lights playing over the dark texture of his skin and the amulet at his throat. Now the broken shadows loosed a new set of rumor, which collided with the story of the crazy woman's kiss.
“Not the way I would have convinced the spirits, but the lwa require improvisation.”
She grinned into her coffee, though the waiter turned his ear and waited for her reply. “I'm not a soldier, Faciliare. I'm a gambler.”
“And a lover,” Faciliare added. “As Old Hickory over there can attest.”
Someone laughed nearby. “Along with most of the Haitian men on Bourbon Street!” someone else said.
She blinked as the poorly whispered retort cut through the din of the cafe. Miss Ferrier straightened in her chair and casually swept at the bouncing tangle of her hair. “I think my reputation is catching up with me, friend.”
Faciliare leaned on his skeletal cane and peered over her shoulder. “That's not the only thing. You'll need to run, child. Head up the river and then back west to the house on Burgundy Street. I'll see if I can't slow them down.”
Though never given to supporting slavery and Indian removal, the red-haired woman offered up a sumptuous southern welcome to Old Hickory as she danged from his outstretched arm. Moments ago, the overcast calm in Jackson Square broke upon the russet wave of her dress as she darted from the gray of St. Louis Cathedral. A cluster of school children scattered in her wake and she stumbled, her hat tumbling from her head in a cascade of ginger locks. She slowed at the monument and scaled the marble plinth with an ease belying the propriety of climbing a bronze horse while wearing stays and six layers of petticoats.
Her captured hat waved from the clustering children, who hooted and called to her excitedly. Two ladies taking the afternoon air covered their gaping mouths and clucked judgmentally. Across the street, wind tousled the white smocks of the priests who filled the grand entrance of the Cathedral-Basilica, the once thunderous tread of their feet slowing to a stalled, stunned stop.
Andrew Jackson saluted, balanced upon his steed's rear legs, no less an engineering marvel than the woman's near-calamitous dismount from her brief, memorial romance. She fought the wind to retrieve her hat, which was offered up with some amused giggles, and glared the northern path at the parishioners lingering over Charles Street. They gusted back to their cloisters and she, following suit, turned on her heel and marched south through the square, where she did not stop until she reached Cafe Du Monde, sat, and demanded strong chicory coffee and sugar-suffocated beignets.
“Smooth as silk, eh Ferrier?”
The tangled gossip flowed at the edge of the cafe and bound lip to lip, slid along furrowed and shaken brows. She stared up at the man sitting at her table.
“Were you watching the entire time?”
He nodded, the lights playing over the dark texture of his skin and the amulet at his throat. Now the broken shadows loosed a new set of rumor, which collided with the story of the crazy woman's kiss.
“Not the way I would have convinced the spirits, but the lwa require improvisation.”
She grinned into her coffee, though the waiter turned his ear and waited for her reply. “I'm not a soldier, Faciliare. I'm a gambler.”
“And a lover,” Faciliare added. “As Old Hickory over there can attest.”
Someone laughed nearby. “Along with most of the Haitian men on Bourbon Street!” someone else said.
She blinked as the poorly whispered retort cut through the din of the cafe. Miss Ferrier straightened in her chair and casually swept at the bouncing tangle of her hair. “I think my reputation is catching up with me, friend.”
Faciliare leaned on his skeletal cane and peered over her shoulder. “That's not the only thing. You'll need to run, child. Head up the river and then back west to the house on Burgundy Street. I'll see if I can't slow them down.”
Monday, December 27, 2010
365 Day Creative Challenge - Day 3
"Make something out of paper, but don't use scissors or glue or draw on it. What now?"
What now indeed.
First, I fiddled around with a piece of green construction paper, making random folds with my hands still greasy from eating pizza. It made for some nice smudges, but nothing arty. After some time spent futiley hoping the paper would become something other than a hot, tranny mess, I googled Origami Vagina.
To be fair, his doesn't actually look like a vagina, either. But I was doomed.
Martin had the best quote, "I'm reminded of She-Hulk."
So I unfolded the damned thing, snapped a pic, and fooled around with MS Paint to no remote success either. (Photoshop ain't on the laptop and I don't know how to use it anyway.)
In the end, I cheated and broke a rule in order to not merely make something out of paper, but to make a statement.
What now indeed.
First, I fiddled around with a piece of green construction paper, making random folds with my hands still greasy from eating pizza. It made for some nice smudges, but nothing arty. After some time spent futiley hoping the paper would become something other than a hot, tranny mess, I googled Origami Vagina.
To be fair, his doesn't actually look like a vagina, either. But I was doomed.
Martin had the best quote, "I'm reminded of She-Hulk."
So I unfolded the damned thing, snapped a pic, and fooled around with MS Paint to no remote success either. (Photoshop ain't on the laptop and I don't know how to use it anyway.)
In the end, I cheated and broke a rule in order to not merely make something out of paper, but to make a statement.
365 Creative Challenge, Day 2
Today's challenge was to seek inspiration from my favorite animal. I used a new ink pen on the piece of cardboard from the new blanket my mother sent us for Christmas. Convincing the cats to come over was difficult, but I did trace Ryoko's profile and adapt it to Batman, and then caught Eowyn's tale. I used the gold band of her eye for the mask thing. I cropped the image in MS Paint to eliminate the view of my dining table.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
365 Creative Challenge - Day 1
I was given a 365 Daily Creativity Journal for Christmas and have no credible reason not to go for it.
Today's challenge was to make something small that could fit in the palm of my hand with only the objects in my immediate environment. I utilized the gather and arrange method of development using Martin's aviator sunglasses, two scrunchies and a paper towel, completing the image in Microsoft Paint.
Today's challenge was to make something small that could fit in the palm of my hand with only the objects in my immediate environment. I utilized the gather and arrange method of development using Martin's aviator sunglasses, two scrunchies and a paper towel, completing the image in Microsoft Paint.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Viva
Book Magician at Charleston and Rancho is a damn cool used book store, with a surprise tarantula, ancient cat, random oversized banana, and the achingest mix of old school blues I've ever heard. Ahh, nothing like the sharp, mildewy smell of knowledge and the endearing, taciturn lesbian bookseller who split the $2 with me I found on a shelf.
I love it that this can be a simple adventure in my life now.
I love it that this can be a simple adventure in my life now.
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