For a while now I’ve been taking a walk early every morning. I do it because it’s beautiful outside and because I think it’s good for my mental health. And who knows, it might just keep my hippocampus strong for longer.
I’ve been writing and drawing, but nothing exciting is happening on that front. I’m in the learning stage of things. I realized I needed to get a better handle on light and value and it occurred to me that taking my camera walking might help with that. You look with a whole other attention if you carry a camera. It was wonderful to find that all those boring things, I walk by in alleys, are quite beautiful with the right kind of attention.
Freckled Girl, digital, photo reference from Pinterest
A few weeks ago I wailed about not being able to paint. I’m not going to tell you that it’s all come back to me and I’m flying. But I am painting, and I’ve been completely immersed in it all week long. Everything is different, the medium, the style, the type of painting, but I’m learning, and I’m old enough to know that learning is one of life’s most important things for me. If I’m not learning, I lose interest and everything is washed over in blues.
Above is a digital piece worked in a painterly realistic style.
My whole art education was about abstraction with elements of either the sublime and/or expressionistic. I feel like a traitor to my education, and my mentors, but man, there’s a whole other world of art out there.
There was a period of time in my art life that I worked almost exclusively in collage. In the early stages it was partly because I couldn’t afford a lot of art materials, and partly because I was having trouble with acrylic on canvas, which is what everyone else was using. Of course that isn’t what I told people. I told them I was doing the ecologically decent thing, and recycling.
The early collages were built entirely of bits of paper and pours of diluted acrylic paint, ink and whatever other medium came to hand. I would stick the bits of paper–newspaper, flyers, phonebook–onto a sheet of polyvinyl, and when the painting was dry, I peeled it away, creating a work that was one piece without a backing. Some of these works were very large–8′ x 12′. The problem was how to display them. As time went by I used canvas as a backing, allowing me to stretch the work on a stretcher.
Magic Carpet is approximately 3′ x 3.5′ and has a canvas backing. Funny how I like it so much better now than I did when I created it.
After years of creating art, usually with my head bent over a panel placed on a table or on the floor, I have succumbed to serious neck and shoulder pain.
As mentioned in my last post, I’m not painting in the traditional way right now, though what I was doing wasn’t exactly traditional either.
For years I’ve worked in encaustic. Encaustic is a mixture of beeswax, damar resin and pigment, which is heated and applied in various methods on a panel. I preferred to use regular bristle brushes to apply my wax, but because it solidifies very quickly I found that the best way for me to work was to have my panel flat on a table. A slight angle was fine too, but a vertical panel didn’t work well.
Hence, my 7 pound head was hanging over a table at a degree that made it feel more like 35 pounds and hey, I’ve got one of those nerdy, long, skinny necks, which means I was creating a lot of trouble for myself.
Now, I’m mostly working digitally and I’ve been striving to find a way to keep my posture neutral. No slumping shoulders, no out-stretched neck, no reaching arm and bent wrist.
To that end I modified a small computer table I bought at Staples. In the picture above you see it as it would be if I use it for my drawing tablet, but I took off the side panel (where the mouse would normall go) so that I could put a drawing board in this same table and use it for analog drawing too. This little table-top tilts to a 45 degree angle, and because the whole thing is small and on wheels I can easily move it out of my way when I need to use my computer for writing.
It’s early days, but I think this might do the trick. Now if I could just figure out how to get the lighting right.
In the mean time, as you can see, I’ve decided to practice. I may not have anything to say in paint right now, but drawing for me is meditative, so for now, I’m doing the equivalent of scales: drawing hands, feet, gestures, contours, and so on.
Oh and I made this very strange lady. I stole some bits of her from a drawing by Wylie Beckert.
You know that optimistic post last week? And the excitement about trying comics the week before?
Bleh! Crashed and burned.
Something has happened in my studio practise. Something I haven’t been able to talk about because I keep thinking ‘don’t be such a baby’. It’s been going on for months and months now. For more than a year.
I can’t paint.
This week I tried again. As before my efforts ended in disaster with me in terror, sure that finally it’s gone forever, this thing that has sustained me my whole life. Gone in waffley washes, in screeching colours that subside in mud and wander like zombies across my panel.
“Alright,” I say, “You can still draw. So draw. You can write…well, you can sorta write.”
And all the dominoes fall.
So last week ended on a way down note.
I don’t mean for this new week to follow its path. This morning I wrote my morning pages, I went for a walk and I hit reset. I will remember to breathe. I will go gently and be kind to myself. And I’ll do it all again tomorrow and the day after, and the one after that…
We often admonish each other to be kind to others. Life is hard. Remember to be kind to yourselves too.
As I mentioned a few posts ago, I have a partial manuscript I call The Chronos Project that I plan to revise.
The story is about Anna Wassar, a young ethics enforcer who works at a time-shifting facility, where historians of all sort shift to other time periods to do research in their particular field of interest.
Anna becomes aware that someone is bringing treasures from the past into the future, and that if she doesn’t stop them, the Temporal Ethics Commission will shut down the Chronos Project.
Anna shifts to 1940s Germany in pursuit of her suspect, and things do not go well.
Okay, not a bad premise. Maybe a bit Timecop, but the theme is different and I like it.
A number of years have past since I wrote the first version. Hey, I even tried a second version, and one hundred and twenty thousand words into it I still couldn’t make it work. Time has passed and I am ready to give it another try.
I printed the whole thing and began to read it back to front. To my surprised I have many excellent scenes, and surely I can…but Anna, Anna doesn’t have enough agency, and what about the murder bus and the children at Görden at Brandenburg an der Havel? How am I going to make that all fit?
Never mind. I’ll be systematic. I will separate the story into point of view sections (there are five–OMG, way to many?) and then I will read each section and see if I have a decent character arc for that character and we’ll go from there. Right. That’s a plan.
Days pass and I don’t work. “Nope, will not,” says that recalcitrant brat in my head. “Can’t, can’t, can’t. Won’t! You know what? I don’t really like writing. I don’t want to write, anymore. Heck, I’m retired. I don’t have to do hard work and I won’t. Done. I’m done.”
Except that I begin to wake up dreaming writing. Yes, thoughts in another characters head, third person.
Then this morning in my journal:
Sunday, 3 June, 2018
(ping)
It was the third of June another sleepy, dusty, delta day
I was out choppin’ cotton and my brother was bailin’ hay*
And I’m there. Yes, in the Mississippi delta, but no, not only there, but where ever the work is hard, where the air smells of fresh-mown hay, where dust lifts off a roadway and hangs in the air, where heat shimmers in the distance of—my daddy’s farm. I’m home.
(ping)
In an instant I remember others who catch me like that. Stephen King is one. Always, his words make me feel as though I’ve lived them myself. I’m two-hundred and eighty pound, gay Julianne Vernon, in my pickup truck, horse trailer behind, driving down a quiet highway. In the distance I see a car stopped on the roadside, and I know what to do. I’ll stop and lend a hand. It’s what I do, what I’ve always done. It will be my undoing, but I don’t know it yet.
Synchronicity
I look over my Facebook feed and I see a post by a printing company. It’s a link to a blog post by Meribeth Deen. Meribeth talks about writing mentors and how we all need one, and maybe if we copy their words they’ll bring us to our words, and—ding, ding, ding.
I know what to do: Read Stephen King’s words, write Stephen’s words, and then write Anna Wassar, just a little, not much, not a great long thesis, just as much as I can see in a one inch frame.
That’s how it works, creativity. One small thing leads to another thing, and still another and these things spiral and gather, swarm, swoop and excite and suddenly you can’t wait to write, to paint, to dance your dance and sing your song.
*In 1967 Bobby Gentry wrote and performed Ode to Billy Joe and I loved that song. Bobby sang it beautifully, but what I loved most was the story. A whole and complete story in the lyrics of a 4 minutes song (it was longer in the original writing). It had everything necessary for story, including a mystery. What were Billy Joe and that girl throwing off the Tallahatchie Bridge?
My first real comic. I’ve wanted to learn to make comics and cartoons for a long time, but the amount of knowledge I don’t have is overwhelming.
Finding myself without a blog topic—AGAIN—I decided to give it a try, knowledge or not. In this case the story is one that happened to me about a week ago.
Heart Attack!
Honestly, I don’t often think I have a catastrophic health issue, but hey, age makes these things likelier. I’d been feeling so tired for a number of days. Along with the tiredness I had dizzyiness and a feeling of heaviness in my chest—a feeling as though I wasn’t getting enough air.
As you can see from the comic above, I aced all the heart attack tests. I was not having a heart attack. Thank goodness. The Medic decided that I was likely tired because I’d been working hard and that all those wonderful spring smells, like leaf mold, lilacs, lily-of-the-valley—blossoms of every kind, were giving my lungs a hard time. Hence, difficulty breathing and tiredness.
Yay! It’s all good.
So what do you think? Should I keep on with the cartooning? Did the story come through? Were the drawings interesting?
I completed the novella, Hannah’s Hearing about a week ago, and this week it was time to chose a new project.
But which one? They’re all clamouring for my attention all the time. Every silly idea, big or small wants prescidence and as I mentioned last week, I’m feeling entirely overwhelmed by all the work there is to do.
Jessica’s book is full of good advice on how to narrow down and do one project–ONLY ONE–in order to focus and complete your work.
Can I stick to just ONE Project?
Snort. Of course I can’t. But I can take all those little ideas, write them down and promise them I’ll get to them in time. (Maybe not, but what do they know?) In the meantime, I’ve chosen one project to focus on.
Some years ago, I started a novel I called The Chronos Project. It is a time travel novel that takes place in 2087 and 1940 Germany. It seemed like an excellent idea, but I couldn’t make it work. It got too complicated and I didn’t have the chops for it. I revisited it a while later, but again, I set it aside for another shiny new idea, or was it because I couldn’t figure out how to end the story? At 120,000 words it didn’t feel as though it was coming to an end any time soon.
This week I pulled that story out again, and I’m reading it, back to front. Yes, weirdness. But I wanted to see it in a new way. I’m finding to my surprise that the writing is good, the story is coherent and has tension. And the idea is still exciting.
So, I made a small plan. As per Jessical Abel’s suggestion, I chose this project, and I will break it down to its small parts. This week and part of next week, I will continue to read the story and make a brief note about each chapter. The next project is to read each pov characters pages in order so that I can see their story arc and find out where I can strengthen them and where they’re story needs to go.
That’s all the plan there is for now. I’ll make more as I come to the end of a goal and am ready to move on to the next.
Oh, and while I’m reading I’m listening to Minor Matter. Do yourself a favour and give them a listen.
Well, no, not really. But I am a little overwhelmed with all the work that comes along in spring. I have a huge yard and vegetable garden that needs all kind of attention this time of year. Not complaining, I’m very lucky.
I spent this morning buying seeds and looking for trees I might to plant in a bare spot. This afternoon I’ll need to reseed grass where Caro, my dog uhm…burned it out.
On the plus side I finished Hannah’s Hearing, my fantasy/boomerlit novella, yesterday and sent it out to beta readers and I managed three small sketchbook drawings (one was awful) and a cover mock-up for Hannah’s Hearing.
Spring is truly here! It’s astonishing to have temperatures of +27C so early in the year. With this marvelous weather comes birdsong, budding trees, and a tonne of yard work.
Between bouts of raking and digging, I continue to revise Hannah’s Hearing, a novella featuring a boomer-aged woman (think: Fredrik Bachman’s, A Man Called Ove) and I managed to get out to do at least one urban sketch.
It’s lame, I know, but I couldn’t bring myself to plant a stool on the sidewalk to draw, so I parked my car at a nearby mall and tried sketching a senior’s high-rise. I need to get over my fear of having people watch me do my work.
The bear was a digital practice drawing. I’m trying to expand my abilities and repertoire. Like many people, I gravitate to drawing faces or figures. It’s nice to change it up. For instance, I hate that my ability with perspective drawing is so iffy, that’s why I’ve been going out to draw buildings.
I’ve been listening/watching Youtube videos while I draw. Some on drawing, some on publishing, and many on thinking, philosophy, and psychology. It’s a bit like being back at university—without the writing papers bit—and I love it!
What about you? What do you listen to while you are doing your creative work?
You know that optimistic post 
Well, no, not really. But I am a little overwhelmed with all the work that comes along in spring. I have a huge yard and vegetable garden that needs all kind of attention this time of year. Not complaining, I’m very lucky.
Eve Barbeau 