I felt bored for the past several weeks. If you remember the Lerner and Loewe song
from Gigi, “It’s a Bore,” sung by Gaston
and his Uncle Honore, you will understand how I felt.
Here are the first few stanzas:
H: Look at all
the captivating fascinating things there are to do
G: Name two.
H: Look at the
pleasures of the myriad of treasures we have got
G: Like what?
H: Look at Paris
in the spring when each solitary thing is more beautiful than ever before! You
can hear every tree almost saying, "Look at me!"
G: What color
are the trees?
H: Green!
G: What color
were they last year?
H: Green!
G: And next
year?
H: Green!
G: It's a bore!
H: Don't you
marvel at the power of the mighty Eiffel Tower knowing there it will remain
evermore? Climbing up to the sky over 90 stories high.
G: How many
stories?
H: 90
G How many
yesterday?
H: 90
G: And tomorrow?
H: 90
G: It's a bore!
I dragged around doing what I had to do, but mostly going
through the motions. I had no ideas for
a blog post, I had no enthusiasm for painting, and even teaching the traditions
class at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute felt routine rather than
innovative.
I blamed my malaise on the shorter fall days with
the resultant decline of sunlight, on approaching my 75th birthday, on
being burned out with painting, on having nothing left to say about art
appreciation.
I rationalized that posting 79 essays on my blog
since 2010 was a remarkable accomplishment.
Maybe it was time to quit.
Still, I loved writing them, and I missed that.
I remembered how I used to see painting subjects
everywhere I looked, and I worried I might never again get excited by a new
visual idea. I also knew I did not want to grind out paintings I did not feel
inspired to make.
I felt even more enervated after I visited Edward
Loper, Jr., the 80-year-old son of my mentor, Edward L. Loper, Sr. There to retrieve some tomatoes he had grown
in his garden, I looked at the abundance of paintings and pastel drawings he
had produced since I last saw him. “I
work day and night,” he told me. “When I wake up at 2 am, I go to the studio
and start another picture.” He found everything
around him worthy of his effort—the window to his backyard; the objects on his
living room table; the photographs of friends and colleagues he used to paint
their portraits.
Edward Loper, Sr., used to insist an artist could
make a painting out of a pile of dirt if he knew what he was doing. However, I knew Loper, Sr. had dry spells
similar to the one I was suffering through, and he went long periods without
painting, filling up his time with teaching.
And complaining.
I did my share of complaining.
A few days after my visit, Eddie asked if I could
stop by so he could take some photos of me for him to use as his subject for a
portrait. He had me stand in his doorway
so I caught the light, and he asked me to face left. Then Connie, his better (very patient) half, took
several more with me looking directly at her as Eddie grumbled in the
background he did not like that pose.
As it turned out, he started this picture using the
photo Connie took:
In an email, Connie wrote, “he began on Sunday and has
rarely left it . . . an artist possessed.”
I wanted to do something, anything, which might allow
me to feel that way again.
I decided to send an email to my grandson asking if he
would pose for me with his two cats. I
knew he might not be willing to do so himself, because he did not like the last
painting I did of him. But he loved his
two cats, Ming and Mae, a brother and sister with feline exuberance. He
immediately emailed back saying “sure.”
My husband and I arranged to come to his house to
take the photos.
When we arrived, my son cautioned, “You’ve heard
about herding cats, haven’t you?” I had,
but I had no idea what that really meant. I soon found out.
The cats would not curl up in his lap, sit on his
shoulder, or stay still for a second. We
took many pictures, but they all had both cats leaping on or off my grandson, or lots of other arms and hands in
the picture trying to keep them somewhere near him.
Finally, Josh stretched out on the floor, and Ming,
the larger of the two cats, curled up next to him.
When we arrived home, and my husband started showing me
the photos he had transferred from his camera to his computer, I watched them
go by. I felt more discouraged than
before. None of them appealed to me,
until he showed me this one.
“STOP,” I shouted. That’s it!
I could feel my heart race. I had
an idea.
It came, not as a tap on the door of perception, but as a
BIG BANG.
In that moment, I also knew what had been wrong with
me.
Habit and routine had deadened me. It does that to all of us.
The only antidote is action.
Rollo May, in The
Courage to Create, wrote that “Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Camus and
Sartre have proclaimed that courage is not the absence of despair; it is,
rather, the capacity to move ahead in
spite of despair.” (pp. 2-3)
And when an artist moves ahead, a vital element in
the creative act is the strength of the encounter, an experience characterized
by an intensity of awareness, a heightened consciousness. As May wrote, “Absorption, being caught up in, wholly involved…are used commonly
to describe the state of the artist or scientist when creating….” (p. 38)
While we do not know why an idea emerges at a given
time, we do know that when one occurs, it strikes us as true, as important, as
valuable, even though we have no idea what it is exactly, and we have to, in my
case, paint the picture to discover it.
Stravinsky said this best: “Step by step, link by
link, it will be granted [the artist] to discover the work…. All creation
presupposes at its origin a sort of appetite that is brought on by the
foretaste of discovery. This foretaste of the creative act accompanies the
intuitive grasp of an unknown entity already possessed but not yet
intelligible, an entity that will not take definite shape except by the action
of a constantly vigilant technique.” (Poetics
of Music in the form of six lessons, pp. 51-52)
Stravinsky also said a composer “improvises
aimlessly the way an animal grubs about.
Both of them go grubbing about because they yield to a compulsion to
seek things out…So we grub about in expectation of our pleasure, guided by our
scent, and suddenly we stumble against an unknown obstacle. It gives us a jolt, a shock, and this shock
fecundates our creative power.” (pp. 56-57)
I had been grubbing about.
No more.
Now I am painting my picture.
In the past few days, I wrote this post.
As I happily did both this week, I presumed Eddie,
in the same few days, finished his portrait of me and completed several more
paintings.
In the next post, after I finish my painting, I will discuss both Eddie’s painting and mine.
Sooner than later, I hope.
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