Weekly Inspiration Digest: open space

I spent a lot of time by myself in middle school and high school—my parents worked a lot, often at night, and my sister is four years older than me, so she was often out, car keys in hand, spending time with her then boyfriend/now husband. I was always also somewhat shy and quiet, so I never had a ton of friends.

I felt like I was alone by default—I hadn’t chosen it, and so I felt lonely. Even though I liked to write, draw, and cook, the time seemed unending. While I was happy to have a break from school, the long, empty days of summer magnified this problem, until I was old enough to get a job.

In college, I found some people to whom I stuck like glue, so the problem continued similarly—I relied on other people to make me feel happy. Then as fate would have it, I found a great guy, but this great guy had an obsession that took him away from me for longer periods of time—rock climbing.

Away to the mountains he would go for long weekends and sometimes even whole weeks. Through that honeymoon phase of dating, I grinned and bore it, but then it became an upheaval between us—something we “dealt with” through which neither of us felt very supported.

We graduated from college, moved together to different cities, and changed jobs, but the conflict always followed us. Everything would be wonderful as we cooked together, went hiking, and enjoyed the everyday bits of life—that is, until Mike announced that he would like to go off on some mountain jaunt the following weekend. I would fly into panic mode, worried about what I would do with all of that time alone.

And then a funny thing happened—that little seed of discontent grew into a bigger one, as I tried to figure out what was missing from my life that made my free time alone so unbearable. It didn’t seem unreasonable for Mike to want to go off for a weekend here and there—it did seem unreasonable that I got scared every time I had more than a few hours alone—something just wasn’t being fulfilled.

Through no grand epiphany, but just the slow seeping of discontent, this is the point at which art waltzed back into my life. Not that it had ever completely left, but it had become just a small glimmer in the back of my mind, with little outlet. As I slowly realized that making art was an essential part of me, and I started to let that part of myself loose, other parts of my life began to change too.

Through art, I found a place to go in that free time, and I started craving more and more of it. I would spend evening and weekend hours drawing and painting (and then later, blogging and Etsying), and all of a sudden, Mike leaving for a weekend didn’t seem so difficult. I began to realize that the problem was never him going away—the problem was how I viewed free time with myself—like I was being deserted. It made me feel alone, bored, and frustrated all at once, and feeling those feelings made me worry that I would never really enjoy my life.

I started lusting after wide open spaces of free time—time to run my errands, do art, and do nothing. Open space became like that time it takes a seed to germinate—it’s quiet and private, hidden from view, but absolutely necessary. It’s like needing room to breathe, or room for a plant to grow into—it feels abundant and rich, like a vast room full of my favorite things.

Oh, to wake up on a Saturday with absolutely no obligations to anyone or anything—I covet it, fight for it, protect it, and much to my gaping surprise, sometimes I even look forward to Mike’s weekend trips away. I can while away hours with my weekend standards—the farmer’s market, the public library, gardening, drawing, blogging, walking my dog, and scheming up a feast for dinner, as well as watching any silly movie I please.

While I used to wish I was someone else—a socialite with a million friends moving in and out all the time, I’m beginning to understand that us introverts need an abundant inner life with plenty of time to feed it. Although I really value relationships where I can talk and laugh with someone, I can go whole days without talking to anyone but my dog, and my life feels rich.

It is especially amazing to me how things turn during life—to begin to crave something I hated as a kid, viewed as some sort of punishment, like broccoli or baths, is one of the most surprising things about living, and I’m sure things will turn again, as I ride this wave that is life.

Weekly Inspiration Digest: reading and writing

If you have been reading this blog for a while, or you know me outside of the blogosphere, you probably know that one of my passions is writing. While I do write on this blog, the main focus has been visual art. Well, I’ve decided that I would like to start doing a little more writing, and I though that a great way to do it would be to start writing a weekly post on things that inspire me, in the form of a longer personal essay.

This may not seem like a big change, and hopefully it will just flow with the natural rhythm of this blog, but it will also give you, the reader, something more to think about, enjoy, and use as inspirational fuel for your life. All of these posts will be tagged and titled “Inspiration Digest” for you to find easily. I will plan to post them by the end of the day every Sunday, with some allowances for weekend trips, etc.

Since one of the big points of this is to exercise my writing muscles, I thought there was no more fitting first topic than reading and writing: two great sources of inspiration to me. So, here it goes—enjoy!

I can’t remember a particular event that slingshotted me into the world of words, but there was one summer when I clearly remember moving from not liking to read, to inhaling books. I was ten. It was the summer before sixth grade, and there was a long list of books I was supposed to read before entering junior high in the fall. I can’t even remember the name of the first book, but I can remember the feeling. Hot, humid nights sitting in the wind of a fan, the cool sheets of my parents’ bed where I would hide out because it was cooler than my bedroom.

The girl in the book was young like me, and I dropped into that book and followed her around. There was that urge in my belly, pushing me through each page—that feeling where you almost start skimming because you must know what happens, how it all ends up. You look from the clock, to the page, to the clock, as you cut into the night, traveling into that other dimension. After that summer, there was never a day when I wasn’t reading something.

Even before I became addicted to reading longer books, I was in love with poetry. Some Sunday nights, my family would read poetry around the dinner table, and I was always a dreamy, sensitive child, so it stuck with me. And in the end, poetry is what really did me in—by high school I was onto Sylvia Plath and T.S. Eliot, and my journal was never very far away. I was an odd and quiet type, and writing poetry was the main place I could be free and honest and fully myself, so every night before bed, nestled up against my window, I lived out my dreams through writing.

It’s funny to look back on that time because I didn’t know it then, but writing was what saved me. It was a need, maybe more important than breathing. I’m not sure how people made it through high school without writing—drugs, violence? I could scream in my journals, beat people up, shout and swear, without hurting anyone. I also started to really fall in love with words, and that feeling that happens when you read good writing—that arresting gasp that knocks the wind out of your heart when you read something so beautifully truthful, like the writer had visited inside your heart and recorded the whispers.

This is why I write, why I ready—why I studied reading and writing in college, and why I keep reading writers like Isabel Allende, E.E. Cummings, John Updike, Anne Sexton, and Billy Collins. This is in large part, why I live—good writing can stop all clocks for me, as the words fall down on me like rain, arrive around me like a cool Spring breeze, and weave themselves into me.

That afternoon

I seem to have gotten into a pattern-drawing phase and haven’t been doing any word drawings over the past month. Well, I knew that just couldn’t be, so here’s a new one for you wordies:

“That Afternoon,” 8 x 10 inches, pen and ink, available in my shop

Also, on the subject of words, I’ve started posting quotes on my right sidebar under “Some Thoughts”—take a look—I just put a new one up there today and will try to remember to change it every week or two.

I hope you’re having a wonderful day!

Experiments in Type

Yes, it is Thursday, which means I get to stay home from work work and do the work I love: art. I do love the holidays, but they definitely throw my art-making schedules off, so it is with great relief and joy that I find myself inside a whole glorious day dedicated to art-making.

Last night, and this morning, I have been playing around with different handmade typefaces, inspired by hand typography in two books: Kate Bingaman-Burt’s typography in the Handmade Nation book by Faythe Levine and Cortney Heimerl, and the foreword typography by Michael Mabry in the book Fingerprint: The Art of Using Hand-made Elements in Graphic Design.

I will leave you to go out and look at these books yourself for typographic and creative inspiration (I found both at my public library), but here are some of my experiments at trying to make different typefaces that convey moods:

The “Happy Thursday” type at the top of this post is a personal interpretation of one of Bingaman-Burt’s type faces, and the rest are just me messing around. This exercise was highly fun, so I recommend it to all of you creative types. There is always more room to explore!

I think I will be using the “Happy Thursday” typeface for my wedding invitations (for those of you who didn’t know, I’m engaged and getting married next Fall!). I’m very excited to design various paper items for the wedding. I’m starting in on the brainstorming phase right now—more to come on that in the next several months.

The Letter “A”

What better way to pass the time at work, while the IT guy was fixing my computer, than to draw the letter “A”?

Just in case you think I’m entirely crazy, other than the fact that I love letters, I have been working on different incarnations of all of the letters for an alphabet book of food. I came up with this idea a while ago, and it is slow going, but every once in a while, I pick it up and work a little.

On another note, I have been starting to put originals in my Shop, so check it out when you get a chance. I am putting them in slowly, so stay tuned– many more originals (and prints) to come.

I hope you are having a wonderful beginning to the week. I am very thankful for a wonderful breeze this evening–it made walking my dog so relaxing and cool.

Who You Are

I was just drawing and thinking about how easy it is to be someone you’re not. Sometimes it just seems easier to be what people expect of us, or what would please someone else, or what society attaches value to, instead of being who our hearts shout out to be. While I was thinking, this poem by Mary Oliver kept ringing in my head, and I thought I would share it with all of you:

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Sue

Well, finally, a new post and in good color too! I’ve been having some issues with getting true color in the photos of my work. My boyfriend helped me this time around, and the picture look much truer to life. Also, I just went back to some other posts and tried to revamp the color– check out my last post and the Pandora’s Box post to see a closer reproduction of the color in the actual pieces. This piece is another in my series about putting poetry and visual arts together. It’s so fun to pick a sound and really mess around with it. I do love language and specifically the variation in the English language. All of the variable spellings are a nightmare when you’re trying to learn how to spell in English, but they are a goldmine for a poet.

And to follow, here are some things that inspire me:

sunset behind my house

and part of a driftwood dwelling someone made on the northern coast– they even took the time to make blinds for the windows!

A Long Time In Coming

This post has been a long time in coming. I’ve been working little by little to finish my project “The Edge of California.” What started out as one piece grew into three. I am having fun figuring out how to use words visually. To give you an idea of the scale, all three pieces hung together form a square of about 2.5 feet or 70 cm. I love the color blue, so this was also an exercise in mixing different shades of that color- especially in the third piece (the sea, sea, sea piece). Here they are: