When I write or paint, I glean information from the electrical impulses that have entered my brain. Unless there was something installed before my life experiences, that is all I have to go on. I extrapolate meaning. I move the puzzle pieces around.
My brain doesn’t see. It resides in the darkness, enclosed in my skull. It receives electrical impulses from my eye, and usually believes what my eye tells it. It interprets what my ears strain to pick up, and for me, this is a somewhat less reliable source of information. The nerve endings in my skin help me deduce the physical nature of objects. My olfactory nerve and gustatory system give me clues through smell and taste. Based on these impulses, my brain builds an interpretation of the world around me.
I was recently told that my brain hallucinates my reality through this information.
When I paint, I select from the colors I find on the shelf in my studio. I mix the paints together, and I try many combinations of brushstrokes. The supplies are limited, yet the possible combinations are infinite.
I don’t have a favorite color. Every color is important both in its own right and also for its role in combining to make other colors and shades.
For a while, people thought yellow was my favorite color, and yes, I was obsessed with it. Still, it was not my favorite. For a while, it was my signature color. Here’s what happened:
I decided to buy a bike. For me, style is sometimes more important than function. I wanted something like the bike I had as a kid. Fat tires, single speed, coaster brakes, saddle seat, full fenders. The owner of the bike shop said he didn’t have anything like that, but I found one in his catalogue. The Atlas bike.
Oh, that’s more of an industrial bike.
He said those were heavy duty and usually used as rental bikes. Sounded perfect to me.
They only come in one color. Safety yellow.
I bought the bike, and had him add big baskets on the sides, and a chrome headlight. I felt like Pee Wee Herman. Then I got a matching yellow helmet and a yellow bell. That’s how my yellow phase began. I even bought a yellow car.
That bike was fun and stylish, but it was heavy, and I couldn’t ride it up the hill from town to my house.
In the early 1990’s, I went through my red chapter. That’s because I ran a coffee shop and art gallery out of a red caboose.
In the late 1980’s, I had my black and white period.
I don’t have a favorite color. I like magenta but I dislike mauve. I don’t like green for cars, and rarely wear green. I use it a lot when I paint trees.
People regard me as a creative person because I paint and exhibit my work in various locations around my small town. I have done a few pieces of public art as well. I believe I am a creative person because I feel a drive to express myself creatively.
My art has changed a lot over the years, and continues to evolve as I go. Sometimes I look at my older pieces and cringe, and sometimes I see an older piece that feels very satisfying. We can’t change the past, and I don’t know if I would if I could. I definitely want to set myself up for a future that is open to adaptation. I want to take risks.
By creating with fluidity and flexibility, I can learn from every brushstroke. I can transform so slowly that it is imperceptible from one day to the next. Year to year, or decade to decade, there will be innovation. I don’t want to reinvent myself. I want to be me, but with a freshness that is compelling.
I often paint over old work, or sections of it. As long as I have it, it is never done.
Lines can be erased.
It’s not always easy to realize my vision. Sometimes it is too easy. I question myself when I focus on a result or a reaction, when I am hesitant, when I am afraid of messing it up. That’s when I need to loosen up, or maybe go do something else for a while.
Sometimes enlightenment comes in a casual comment. It comes from mundane things, and from unsuspecting delivery people. Sometimes the right word or phrase hits me at just the right time.
My brothers have a unique ability to inspire me, because our upbringing was similar and yet our impressions and responses are so different. I can get a new perspective on myself from them, and every one of them is articulate and reflective.
I can’t trust my own memories. They are colored and flavored.
I don’t think I have been accurate in assessing my own history. I’ve tried to measure up to a philosophy which was chosen and taught by imperfect people. I’ve amended that constitution where it did not ring true for me or speak to my mission in life. Instead, I’ve gone with my best judgement. I’ve arrived at conclusions that diverge from my early teaching.
It is validating to learn that I am not the only one. That the problem was not all with me.
The grid that I layered over my own thoughts and experience only masked my view of the world and my self identity.
The transparency was rigid, and because it didn’t line up, I believed I was not good enough.
By peeling away the unwanted layer, or wiping away the dry erase lines (I’m picturing an overhead projector), I am free to see my experience without the unwanted, unrealistic, unkind expectations that were superimposed against my will.
I don’t try to convey my emotions through my art. Emotions change all the time. They are my weather. I want to convey my climate.
I’m sure my emotions sneak into my art or my writing, but if I am feeling too strong of an emotion, I most likely won’t be creating. My energy will be distracted by the experience of intense sadness, anger or even joy. That’s the living that I may write or paint about later.
Emotion is very different from creative energy. I think emotion can be influenced by external sources, but creative energy comes from within.
The flurry of disappointment, the shadow of grief, unbridled joy have to go through the filters and join with everything else I have felt in order to come out again as creative expression. They have to seep through the layers and contribute to the stalactites that hang in the cavern of my skull. You see, not everything sticks. Not everything is remembered. Even less is remembered accurately.
I can’t guarantee facts. I’ll give you my version of things.
Inspiration finds me. I rarely go looking for it. There are times when I grab my camera and go for a drive looking for something to photograph, but that’s not what I call inspiration.
Inspiration seems to come from anywhere. It doesn’t often come to me from the big events of life. Those are the weather. When I feel something long enough that it becomes a part of me, it withstands the emotion. Then one day, maybe several decades later, it comes bubbling up with quiet significance. I can look at it with comfort, whether it caused me happiness or hurt. I can come to terms with it. I can own it and defuse it or celebrate it.
My ideas come from my life. Everything that I have sensed is stored in my brain. Details can come forward to tell a story. You’re not going to get the literal account from the composition, but I ponder while I paint, and I feel that those thoughts somehow get expressed in brushstrokes. When I’m painting, I often feel like I am meditating. This is when it works best. In my head, I’m traveling back in time or dreaming of the future, but the parts of me that manipulate the brush are right in the moment.
I am often surprised by what comes to mind. Sometimes a past joy or horror, sometimes a detail that seems insignificant until I realize, by spending time with it, that it is attached to something else. Something big or important. Of course they are all attached. Life is fluid, and nothing is isolated. Every day has been in context. Every moment has actually been part of the flow.
This is true for everyone. My life is touched and influenced by others when we float down that part of the river together for a while.
It is not a leap from the idea in my head to the action of painting any more than the leap from thinking words and moving my mouth to say them aloud.
Painting is very personal. It’s rare that anyone would see the initial stages, and an onlooker would not know what I am thinking about. When I paint in public, I pretty much talk the whole time, so that is a very different experience.
At some point, I share the work I’ve done in private, and I often share the story.
If you relate to what I’ve done or said, chances are you will superimpose your story, and if you share it with me, we may both be richer for the contact.
If you don’t relate to it, that’s just fine!
I don’t use creativity to escape, but to understand and to forgive myself. That’s actually a sort of escape, isn’t it?
When I look back on my life, I can see that art was always important to me. Before I saw letters as symbols for sounds that could create words, I saw their shapes and drew them on paper.
When I finally learned to read, things got more complicated because there were so many words, and so many rules to govern them. Pictures were more friendly for me. I could enjoy an entire book of pictures, but pages full of words were overwhelming.
I don’t know that I had an ambition for my art. I thought of becoming an art teacher. I don’t remember wanting to be an artist.. I saw myself as an artist until I went to art school. I’d been trying to copy things… attempting to render likenesses of objects on paper. I hadn’t realized that I could interpret those objects, or tell my own story through the images. This was frustrating for me and for my instructors. So many of the other students had distinctive style, not only in their work, but in their fashion and their presence. I had none of that, because I had no confidence. I didn’t have anything to say.
This seems so sad to me now, because at 23 years old, I had already had rich experiences, living on the farm and living abroad.
At Bible School, they told me everything they wanted me to know. I just had to remember it long enough to recite it back.
In Art School, they wanted me to think for myself. They wanted me to take risks. I didn’t know how.
Maybe my unrealized ambition was to do what I am doing, and continuing to learn to do now.
I like to overturn things, like putting fish in the trees, or a school of corgis beneath the waves.
I sometimes wonder how different my art school experience would be if I could go back and do it over now.
You can’t get anywhere without a journey.
Preplanning a project is more like digesting a meal. The sketch is in my head, and I generally work from that. The ideas come quietly, bubbling up waiting for me to notice them. Sometimes there is no sketch, there is just play.
We can’t truly know anything. What we believe is based on a preponderance of the evidence. We make observations and then we take our best guess, weighing what is believable to us. I might change my mind about anything when new information comes in.
As a child, I was taught to believe what I was told, and not to question it. I was told to reject scientific fact wherever it conflicted with our chosen or inherited dogma. Young children are predisposed to believe what their caretakers tell them, because, for example, a toddler doesn’t know the danger of a cliff or a hot stove. At that age, survival may hinge on abiding by the “DON’T!” or “STOP!”
Those early childhood lessons tend to stay with us, as any religious leader or teacher knows.
I often heard the answer “because I said so,” and as an adult I informed my mother that that was no longer good enough.
There is a belief in my family that I was told in art school to renounce my faith. It didn’t happen exactly like that. I was urged to open my mind, and to express my demons as well as my angels… my feminine side as well as my masculine side. I was offended at that admonition, because I wasn’t ready to hear it yet.
I still held tightly to what I knew, and I didn’t know much. I had very few options. I had a lot of doubts, which I begged God to remove.
I was influenced very much by the opinion of others.
There may have been some culture shock when I moved from Michigan to Liberia, or from Liberia to Nigeria, but let’s face it, we brought our culture with us.
The big culture shock came for me when I graduated from Bible School, and was, for the first time in my life, outside of a formal religious institution. First, there was family, and always church. There were Christian schools and camps. I graduated from a very conservative Bible School that was all about the rules. I accepted it all, even with the abuse.
I felt like a failure when I escaped from an abusive organization, and was told as I boarded a bus the morning of my 18th birthday, that I was walking away from God’s will for my life and would have to settle for second best from that day on.
All of this plays a role in my creative efforts now.
It is not my job to tell anyone what to believe, and no one has the authority or permission to tell me what to believe. All I need are the facts, and those are subject to change.
It’s like natural selection happening in my thinking. When better information comes to me, I adapt.
