Title : Mess-Making or Art-Faking or "Just" Plain Child's Play? A Peek in My Journal
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Mess-Making or Art-Faking or "Just" Plain Child's Play? A Peek in My Journal
To revise my writing is to tighten it, hopefully, to become as clear as I can about what I want to say, and then make the saying as precise and concise as I possibly can, while maintaining a voice that is as authentically me (however problematic that notion might be) as my skills allow. It involves a metaphorical x-acto knife as much as it does a pen . . . Sprawl is not what I'm trying to do there, and the time is past for sloppy indulgence. Discernment becomes tougher the closer I get to saying what is really important, but the work demands that discernment. My "Mean Inner Critics" -- as I've joked about them before in regards to my sketches -- serve a very usual function when Draft II must emerge from Draft I.
Hence the need for some messy play.
Evidence of mess above, my gear spread out across the dining table in the early morning -- I muck away while he's still sleeping. . . .
Below, two pages from my Illustrated/Junk journal as I turn it from January to February.
Across the top: Ran today, 5.5 km total, but that included a 5-minute walk as warm-up and cool-down
Perpendicular, to the right of the snowdrop: Reading: Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1; Knitting: A pair of socks for Rachel. I'm on the second sock but spent 90 minutes tonight frogging what I'd knit in the previous hour; Watching: We've just started a Netflix series called Black Earth Rising.
Below the stamped word "snowdrops": And that's the only snow we've had in this first month of the year...
Trying to work out how to keep all the creative balls in the air without feeling I have to do each activity every day because that's impossible. . . .
Also blooming on the terrace: One pink hellebore and one white one, the sarcococca -- headily fragrant, the wallflower, all scraggly coloured scent.
And here's the start of my February pages. My almost-four g'daughter gave me two paintings earlier this month after I'd let her use my Travel Kit of watercolours. She'd dismissed my foolish offers to show her how to use the paints and just dove in, soaking up pigment like nobody's business. . . Compared to the fine-motor concentration I've seen her bring to colouring-in someone else's drawing, her painting concentration had a more flamboyant, exuberant energy.
My supply of kids' art is always greater than fridge or frames can accommodate, but I couldn't bring myself to throw these pages away. And this morning, as I clipped the letters "P L A Y" from an Opus Art Supplies mailing, I decided this was where E's creations belonged, but the only way to make them fit -- and to make my art from her art --was to bring out the scissors and glue.
Transcription:
Left page, top left: So we're already into Month 2 of this year -- it's no longer the "new" one. And in January, I managed 23 journal pages in 31 days.
Bottom left: Some of my January pages really please me and others make me cringe. Some of my collages seem crude, messy, grade-school-ish. Some pages are full only of hand-written prose, no illustrations at all. . .
Middle right, then curving down to the bottom of the page and up the spine of the right-side page:
Compared to some of the wonderful journal pages I see on Instagram, so many of mine strike me as sloppy, messy, embarrassing, so I've collaged elements from E's watercoloured pages. She took her play so seriously. So seriously and joyfully at once.
Top right: She completely committed, convinced that she knew how to paint, despite never having used similar brush or paints before.
Centre right, a quotation from David Bayles and Ted Orland's Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of ArtMaking: The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars.
Bottom, slanting upwards: So here's my commitment to another month of making messy journal pages, of playing despite the fear of ridicule or censure.
Because when I get past my fear of ridicule (or simply accept it as a slightly irritating companion that I try to ignore), I find these efforts at something I'm not particularly good at (not false modesty, as you can see. I'd say I'm muddling-middling amateur) humbling, instructive, exhilarating, and liberating all at once. And I hope that they might be yielding results that can't be seen on the page. They're changing me in ways I can't know yet; I need patience and faith in the unpredictable discipline of regular play.
So tell me, have you found time for pursuits you're not especially good at? Do you think there's any point to this, or would you prefer to save your time for those activities at which you're more likely to excel? When's the last time you did something with very amateurish results? Was that okay? Fun? Upsetting? At what point does the frustration of trying something new cancel any enjoyment? No right or wrong answers -- awkward, messy, thinking-out-loud is allowed here, as in my journal ;-)
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