People sometimes ask me where I got the nickname Timouth. I used to have a collection of vintage cars, mostly Plymouths. So I merged Timothy with Plymouth. I was showing some of the cars to a friend tonight, and I’ll post them here. There were many more. Plus the campers and boats.
I’ve always been imaginative, and have attempted to document my creative musing in a variety of ways, in a variety of mediums. Imagination doesn’t always mean dragons and unicorns. I think of imagination as envisioning things that aren’t physically in front of you. This could mean conjuring up my recollection of what a Coke bottle looks like, or what a horse or a dog looks like. These are familiar shapes. I can draw a dog. More specifically, I can draw a corgi. I can use my imagination and paint a school of corgis swimming below the surface of the water, or a family of corgis in a station wagon, or flying a Cessna over the Grand Marais harbor.
I use my imagination to solve problems unrelated to art. I use my imagination to help me understand and decide my next move in resolving an interpersonal conflict, a house repair or interior design idea, a question of employment, travel, or just about anything outside of my autonomic nervous system. We all do. It’s called thinking.
Being an artist, imagination is generally understood to have a more specific meaning in regards to creating visual (no offense to musicians, foley artists and music producers) pieces that will convey the desired message. That message could be simply the likeness of a landscape, still life or model, or a more personal or historic message from the artist. The nature of the message is unlimited.
Obviously, my art reflects events in my life. My life is all I have to draw on. I benefit from what others have discovered, because I can read books, view art and watch film. This reading and viewing are part of my experience.
The most bizarre, the most fantastic object or beast I can manufacture will be made entirely of pieces of information I have seen or otherwise sensed. That is the way it works. Input/output. You can’t picture a new color, you can only mix from our primary colors and make them lighter or darker.
George MacDonald used that new color idea in his story The Golden Key, and I borrowed it in Flash Meridian. I can’t ask my reader to envision it.
Like so many other things, we improve our ability with practice. I also find it helpful to read books and listen to podcasts about creativity or by creative people. You might pick up an idea here, or a trick there. Even if you try to copy it, it will come out of your hand in your way. The amalgamation of all your inspirations will come out looking like you, because it will be you.
Honestly, the opinions of others rarely influence or change what I create. I create alone in my studio. I do enjoy feedback and constructive criticism, especially from my artist friends. When it comes to criticism, no. I try to let that roll right off my back.
Sometimes a critic has a valid point, and they may open my mind to a new way of thinking. If I distill something valuable from it, it’s my own openness and subsequent consideration that turns the annoying piece of sand into a pearl.
Over the weekend, I found a collection of my poems from 29 years ago, along with a manuscript of an autobiography I was working on in 1992 and 1993. It wasn’t lost, but I hadn’t had any interest in reading it until last night. Now I need to decide what to do with it.
It reminded me of details I had almost forgotten, and prompted me to reach out to a few significant people from an earlier time… more than 40 years ago.
I was so lost.
So unhappy.
It really feels like the story of a different person. If I ever publish this, it will need an edit.
Here are a couple random poems, unedited. The spacing, punctuation and capitalization are as they were originally written:
FREE FALL DROP
Clinging to the glass on a rainy day,
No mud puddle for you.
You were like an acrobat
Plummeting from a dizzy height
and just happened to land
on my window pane.
Was it your plan to evaporate
so you could have a second jump?
CURTAIN
Night falls like a silent
black curtain
shrouding the stage of day
A velvet shadow
of cool peace and
echoing spaces
The porch light burns my
own giant shadow into
the sleeping grass
Nature
so close
so unspoiled
rich smells of moist earth
the sound of the wind in the leaves
I hear a woodpecker
see the lake
I’m walking on granite and moss
A granite floor
speckled with pink, gray,
white and black
like the soil rich with
decaying wood, crumbling rock,
leaves and needles
Tree trunks surrounding me
like columns, church walls,
tapestries of greens and browns.
This woodland chamber lit
from above. Clouds glowing
with the light of heaven
glowing blue forever. Filling me
with eternity. Something bigger
than myself.
THE VIEW
The light of morning touches my pane
illuminating what is within
Though my eyes are covered
With a haze of dust and grime
a soft glow fills me like
a ghost town in the desert afternoon
The colors are gray and still
but something scurries somewhere
afraid to be seen. I set a trap
Hoping to capture a bit of
myself without killing it
but even then, I could get a good
look at it. Or a cloth and
soapy water could clear the view
About thirty years ago, my father described my art as “mumbo jumbo”. I just looked it up.
“senseless or pretentious language, usually designed to obscure an issue, confuse a listener, or the like.”
I know my dad didn’t say that to hurt me. He went on to say that he didn’t understand it.
My art has changed a lot in thirty years, but I’m not sure that the intention behind it has changed. I also think my dad has changed. He’s painted his share of mumbo jumbo now, too.
Of course I know it’s not mumbo jumbo.
He and my mom have heard me talk and seen me cry over my art, and art I have collected. He knows it is not meaningless, even if it is not his taste or he doesn’t readily understand it.
It is so easy to criticize things we don’t understand. Your view is not the only view. You can’t complete an education.
I sort of had plans for today. I went to the basement to look for a palm sander to work on a project. I didn’t find the sander, but I found a couple of photographs and some old recordings I had made with my family in the early 1990’s.
We used to play this game called Life Stories. When you get to the end, it’s called your homecoming, and everyone is supposed to say something nice about you.
On one particular night, I passed a cassette recorder around, and we recorded the homecoming comments.
A lot has changed in the 30ish years since we said these words, laying around on the floor of my parents’ family room. Most of my kids weren’t born yet. My brother wasn’t married yet. They have adult children now, too. I was married at that time.
Having lost my mom just over seven months ago, it was very emotional for me to hear her voice talking about me today. I wasn’t expecting that.
So I spent a good chunk of the afternoon making parts of it into a video so I can listen to it whenever I want to, and so I can share it.
It is really validating to hear that even three decades ago, people recognized what was important to me, and that those things are still important to me now. Family, specifically parenting. Art and creativity. Kindness and generosity. Saying what you think. Even writing made it in there.
Either the batteries died or the tape ran out while mom was talking.
There is a channel behind my house. Sometimes it is a raging creek, sometimes it is a gentle stream. Often, it is a dry trench where wildflowers grow. My arm is that kind of conduit for the creative impulses that flow down from my mind. Sometimes it is a turbulent river of paint. When the time is right, I make clay pots. If I am unable to set up all that is needed to paint or work in clay, I can always pick up a pen or pencil. Usually, regardless of what else is there, words float down the stream to accompany the images. My writing isn’t meant to explain the art. The art has to stand on its own. What comes out of me is like a Rosetta Stone… the same thing coming out in different languages or forms. Understanding one might unlock another for you.
During those times when you don’t see any new art coming from me, know that the wildflowers are growing. I am living, and experiencing wonderful things. This way, when I do pick up a paintbrush again, I will have something new to say.
Like I told you, my paintings come from deep inside me. You can see my heart in this one.
I feel like my whole life has been a creative endeavor. It’s improv. I showed up on this life stage and had to figure out who the other characters were and where the story was going. When that didn’t seem possible, I just made an exit and maybe tried a monologue elsewhere.
My brain doesn’t work the same as other peoples’ brains. I can’t give the answer they want to hear. On top of that, my hearing loss keeps me from knowing what has been said, even with my hearing aids.
In spite of all of that, I think a lot of people would look at me and think I’ve achieved a certain amount of success.
It has forced me to find another path around the problem, undetected, and to arrive at the answer. No one saw the elaborate shapes and diagrams I had visualized in lieu of memorizing my times tables.
They thought I was being lazy when I was probably working harder, though less efficiently, than the 9 out of 10 who understood the instructions.
When I write about my struggles or my self doubts, a lot of people respond, saying they relate to what I have said. They thank me for voicing what they have felt but have had trouble articulating. What this tells me is that I am not unique. “Mainstream society” is a myth. We are all individuals who struggle in some areas and discover our abilities and our gifts in other areas. Society isn’t made up mostly of flawless robots, and you and I are the only imperfect clearance items.
There are two ways to look at it. 1. Nobody is perfect. Everyone has challenges in life. 2. We are all perfect. We are perfectly us. What we see as imperfections are simply characteristics that are gifts nobody else possesses.
There is a very good chance that I am the only one that even notices the things I hate about myself anyway. What if I embrace them instead?
I have a beautiful painting on my wall. It is an oil pastel by my friend Anne Humphrey called The Beast Goes Walking. Without knowing the title, people see the creature, and point it out to me. They discover it, because it is not necessarily obvious. It is an abstract image. Anne could have more fully rendered the image of the beast, I’m sure, if she had wanted to.
Because the beast is not a fully rendered beast, but actually just a few jagged, dark blue lines, it requires the participation of the viewer to complete or add to the narrative. In a gallery setting, the title would serve as a guide if you were in a hurry or needed a little help, but this one was not difficult. It’s a friendly piece that offers it’s main character without much effort at all.
It has continued to illustrate my home and my life for decades.
The other day, I did a little mixed media piece in which I see a similar blue beast. My beast is going uphill against a strong wind, and in rough terrain. I could make the beast as obvious as I want it to be, but that is not the point. It is not meant to be the image of a thing at all. It is paint and various colored pencils, grease pencils and charcoal.
I’d been thinking about the paint and the lines. I’d been thinking about the color spectrum. When the piece was in progress, I thought about it while I was in my bed, and how I wanted to lay the colors next to each other. So while I was not thinking about a representational form, neither was it unintentional.
Once I felt satisfied… once I enjoyed looking at it, I saw the story that I was telling.
I see the beast. I do not feel compelled to make it easier for someone else to see it. This story is about a struggle. It is about my struggle.
I don’t always want to lay everything bare. It’s not that I don’t want to share it. This is how I share it publicly. Cryptically. I open the door but I don’t swing it wide open.
I don’t know what people think when they look at me.
We go through various phases in life as we cope with the struggles along the way. I think I fought a lot of imagined adversaries, whether I was the one who imagined them, or just believed in the figments that haunted the devout who taught me from a young age.
I no longer fear the monsters of this world or any future worlds. Maybe that’s why I can be calm and speak with confidence now. I am not afraid to be wrong… not afraid to alter my course of thought when it seems to make sense to me to do so.
My most trusted counsel comes from my gut.
But as I was saying, I don’t know what people think when they look at me. In this age of social media, there are many whose consciousness comes into virtual contact with mine, but they will only recall a me from decades ago. Thirty, forty years or more. Even in this town where I live, there are those who will recall a loud, dramatic… a flamboyant version of me. They will have seen and will remember only the armor.
I could cringe, but I won’t. I could apologize, but I won’t. Because I survived. I survived the wounds the armor hid from view.
Some of you know details of my personal life, some of you know less. This is simply because I have nothing to hide and nothing to prove.
I write a lot on my blog. I don’t share all of my intimate details, but I try to communicate with purpose.