Tenuous connectivity #resist #indivisible

I admit I am in the throes of a late life (61) identify crises. It feels of similar magnitude to what I went through in my late teens, as I entered my twenties trying to sort out my life direction.

At that time I was a vulnerable, pregnant 19 year old with minimal family support, a few acquaintances from sibling relationships, and the 20 year old father of my daughter. It was 1975. I had quit high school a couple of years before, and had basically been on my own with my boyfriend living in a backyard tent, shared houses, and eventually, a 1956 Dodge bread van converted to camper.

Today I feel vulnerable, but the fact is I own a house under renovation in Vancouver, I have survived 12 years of graduate school, and I have an impressive, if eclectic portfolio demonstrating the breadth of my decades of work and pursuit (digital management systems, painting, drawing and music, education research, carpentry, and project management) and the depth of my inquiries (BFA, MA, PhD, 3,500 hours carpentry, pursuing project management certification).

My crisis arises from sorting out my next career path. What do I invest in now? What do I pursue? Is it spiritual to have ambition? Do I meditate and hope for the best? I have worked hard all my life. I expect to work up to the ‘deadline’. Where is my path? Where does it lead?

I sat down the other evening to make a drawing. I flipped through my thousands of possible photos and this is the one that spoke to me. The mainsail is under load. It is cleated to the boom. The boom is shackled to the sheet rigging. All this connectivity makes it possible for the boat to cut through the water and move us forward.

I love this drawing. The seeming inviolability of the hardware and fasteners is rendered as a tenuous thread of connectivity. It is these connections, these relationships that withstand the sometimes gale forces of nature, that enable us, empower us to move forward.

 

Another 3 Pears

 

Pencil crayon. Watercolour paper. Watercolours.

2 Pears

Drawing paper. Carpenter’s Pencil. Watercolour: Payne’s Grey, Prussian Blue

The relationship between object and ground. Building subjectivity into the objects, between the objects. How the ground contributes to subjective interpretations. Building character, the qualities of the objects emerging through the process of building form.

A Red Pear

Coloured ground. Prussian Blue. Payne’s Grey. White Crayon.

Work in progress.

Water colour on construction paper. Experimenting with line, tone, colour, and form. The painted areas were soaked so I had to stop to let them dry.

The gesture of the white crayon is as important as the colour and waxiness of the material. The brush line shifted from implied line to outline. I wasn’t happy with that. I worked on it upside down so the paint dribble appears to defy gravity. I like that. Defying gravity.

Using the size and shape of the brush, and the intensity of pigment in the water to build dimension.

self portrait 2016 12 22

drawing calms my brain

I use drawing as a form of meditation. The process of close observation and rendering is an exercise in mindfulness. Mindfulness is the central feature of meditation. Thus, drawing is a form of meditation.

I have noticed that it doesn’t matter what I am closely observing. I can be sitting in a forest drawing from life. I can be sitting at my dining table drawing a pear. I can be sitting in my studio drawing from a photo of an apple on my laptop screen. I can be tracing a projection of a photo of a portrait. It is the process of close observation that works its magic on my depressed, anxious brain.

Another part of the experience is the satisfaction of making a mark. Drawing the pen across the paper and the ink traces my movement. Peeling the paper off a wax crayon and building up depth of colour to create the illusion of 3 dimensionality. Soaking the paper with translucent washes of colour. Layering brushstrokes of acrylic paint to build volume. My brain struggles with the idea of existence. On some level it believes I am invisible. When I draw, my body leaves a mark. Tangible evidence of visibility.

The final experience of drawing is stepping back and seeing what I actually rendered on the paper. There is something awe-inspiring and funny about what I have drawn. I read multiple meanings into the juxtaposition of objects, the colours I chose, the lines and shapes that emerged from the process. I am always surprised by the result. Usually to laugh and shake my head in disbelief. However, the object of my expression, the drawing itself, is precious to me. It has captured something of myself that I could not otherwise put into words.

It sits on my shelf, propped up against the window ledge. I glance at it, coming and going, and with each glance, I am reminded. I did that. It felt good. I exist. I am funny.

Sunday Morning

The simple act of putting pen to paper is transforming. My embodied brain activates along the neural pathway extending from hand, through fingers, pen, ink and onto paper. It is as if my mind flows through these pathways to express itself in tangible evidence of activity.

It is similar with the act of writing, but drawing excites different areas of cognition and allows different languages to appear on the page.

It is strange, baffling and mysterious – in a good way.

recording

Apparently it is a common phenomena for us to hear a recording of our voices or music and think, “that doesn’t sound like me!” I have had that feeling whenever I tried to record myself playing music and became somewhat phobic toward recording.

I got to the point that whenever I would try to record myself I would become instantly self conscious about how I thought the recording was going to sound. Not only that, my imagined listener was the equivalent of a sold out audience at Carnegie Hall. So, hitting ‘Record’ on the device was triggered self conscious imaginings of performance that weren’t even in my realm of experience. I wasn’t imagining a poor performance in a coffee shop or busking in a transit station. I was imagining a poor performance in a venue and for an audience that I had never encountered. The result was that I became avoidant of recording.

At the same time, I have not played music for many years, all during the intensity of a decade of graduate work. Now that I have graduated and my life is reforming back to some semblance of ‘normal’ I am experiencing these musical stirrings. It is deep and mysterious, amorphous, except when I tell myself, “That is it!” I am starting in a new place, a place that conforms my musical practice to something that I have never done before.

First, I no longer labor under the illusions that my music is going to achieve Adele-level adulation. It is not. Second, I am noticing that when I make music, in many different forms, my brain feels different from before I start and when I finish a music making session. I enjoy how my brain changes. There is also a wider physiological experience with music making. My entire body feels different, in a good way. Third, as I enter my 70th decade (!) I am turning 60 next month, I have creative impulses that reveal themselves to me through practice, that is, not practicing scales and chords, or improving finger dexterity, but, rather, sitting down with an instrument in hand and noticing where it leads me.

My current music-making situation is this: I am not seeking a professional career and I am not pursuing a disciplined approach to music expression. Playing music is about experiencing music in the same way I follow a new trail in the mountains. I am walking at my own pace, with my good hiking boots on, and I curious to see where I am going to end up. Music is ephemeral, it is not like a drawing that leaves evidence of its passing. It is temporal and intangible in terms of its materiality – unless I hit the Record button. And then there is evidence, there is a material object that I can revisit and learn from.

At present I do not have a constellation of music making colleagues who stop by or we converge anywhere in particular to play. I am playing and exploring alone. In this effort, I only have myself to hear what I am playing. If I don’t hit the Record button, I have nothing to play with.

So this is what I am going to do to re-calibrate my relationship to recording. I am going to start with baby steps. I am going to use the same techniques I use to train my reactive dog to accept changes in the environment. I am going to hit Record and play one not. That is it. And I am going to listen to that one note. I am going to play along with that one note. And when I have run out of ideas, I am going to record another note. And build from there.

After Georgia O’Keefe graduated from art school she needed to strip away everything she had learned and get back to her own baseline. She disciplined herself to do nothing with colour, to only work in scales of grey through charcoal and pencils. When she had reached her point of saturation with that work, she finally allowed herself to move to colour.

This is how I am going to work with recording. No, I am not recording the viral campfire songs. I am recording my music so I can learn what my music is telling me. Through an evolving process of iteration, my music will let me know what it is that is demanding expression. I have no idea how it is going to turn out. My job is be curious and suspend judgement.

Of course, no recording is going to sound like what I hear in my head. What I hear in my head is the resonance of sound in my skull, my body, my sinus cavities. What I hear from the recording device is sound vibrations translated through electrical impulses. They are not going to sound the same and I am going to learn to live with the difference.

preparing to do something #art #music #drawing #painting #writing

I am less than two weeks away from defending my dissertation. I am loathe to talk about it because it is all so fraught with uncertainty. For example, I won’t get news of the external examiner’s comments on my dissertation until next week, and the defence is scheduled for Friday, November 20. This defence is the culmination of seven years of research and writing.

Coincidentally, I am also closing in on ending my 59th year. My 60th birthday is upcoming in January. I have always been interested in numbers and the significance of transitions and the meaning of numbers associated with them. I cannot help but interpret the ending of my doctoral studies and my 60th birthday as signifying the beginning of new creative work, work that will carry me through the next three decades. Yes, I am planning on working through until the age of ninety. Why not?

Ever since I submitted my dissertation for examination, I have been instinctively organizing and re-organizing my creative space and my possibilities for creative production. For example, I haven’t been listening or playing music in any significant way during the years of doctoral studies. But now I am starting to listen to new artists (new to me), and I have had one of my guitars and my ukelele serviced by a wonderful luthier.

I had my ukelele re-strung with guitar strings and tuned to the top four strings of the guitar. I am enjoying the size, shape and tone of my ukelele but appreciating the familiarity of chording according to the guitar.

I’m not sure what form my next creative effort is going to take. I am determined to let it unfold according to it’s own expression. For example, I finally tuned up my double bass and sat down to play. What came out of my fingers? Frere Jacques!

So, the process will unfold as it sees fit.

Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe #drawing

From “Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe” by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee: … all the world’s continents experienced a major increase in continental plate motions (the “drift” movement of continental drift) during the same short period of time… (p. 145).

There is a theory that life on Earth might have been triggered by a 90-degree change in the direction of Earth’s spin axis relative to continents: what we now know as the North and South poles were formally in equatorial positions.

I can understand why the earliest expressions of human creative imagination were drawings on the walls of caves. I can also understand why the drawings would represent important parts of human existence – the animals we would have depended on for life-giving sustenance.

Fast forward to early 21st century human existence and I am compelled to draw portraits. I am drawn to the eyes, to examining the direction of the gaze and the effect that drawn gaze has on my own psychological response to the drawing. No matter how many portraits I draw, there is always an ineffable (or very effable!) interpretation that changes what I intended to draw to what I actually drew. For a long time I thought this was an indication that I could not draw. Because I could not render a photographic likeness without using a projector and actually tracing the lines.

Now I think of it differently. As my embodied mind processes the image I am drawing, it inserts its own interpretation of the composite of my lived experience at that moment in time. There is a wry sense of humour that shows up, unbidden, into the drawings. For example, a gaze that was directed outward in the photograph I am working from, becomes a gaze directed inward when I make the drawing.  A hand that was being used to support a head because a had held to the face in a gestural movement – what was stationary in the pose became active in the drawing.

It is fascinating to me that the phenomena of continental drift and my modest efforts to draw, and my ability to post those drawings on the Internet to share them with others, all exist in the same universe.