Flow!

The thing about making something is that the more I do it, the more I want to do it, and the more I want to do it and the more I do it, the more likely I am to make something new.

Yesterday's and today's metal and paint shots inspired an Aha!

The next time I shoot a single something odd and get a snap that I really and truly like, I will challenge myself to find other subjects on the same theme, until I take a photo of some other odd thing, . . .

. . . and today, I found it quite by accident.

Plastic!

Daily Rituals

1.
A fresh morning pot of black tea.

2.
A favorite mug, dolloped with milk first before tea.

3.
Checking in (throughout the day): email, Facebook (and posting -- as a former student said, "You're still teaching," but I think of it as a kind of "book" club in which everyone shares), The New York Times, Feedly.

4.
Reading and commenting on compositions.

5.
Walking.
















6.
Taking pictures.

7.
Looking at, deleting, working on pictures.

8.
Blogging.

9.
A little something before dinner.

10.
Dinner (and sometimes work).

11.
Netflix.

12.
Litter box duties.

13.
Reading.

14.
Bed.

Of these, six are for me for the necessary actions of my creative life, something of which I was reminded today when my friend Jane posted to FB an article from The Washington Post about Mason Currey's book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.

His ideas aren't new, and I'm no artist.

But this much is true: "crafting . . . routine[s has] minimize[d] the distractions in [my] life and maximize[d my] ability to think creatively."

Especially the bold ones.

Intersections

I

A former student, from many years ago, sent me a message that said, "You always were interested in advances in all areas. I recall in English class your telling us about black holes and what scientists were learning about them." I don't remember this, but I trust her. I have always wanted to know more, especially about the physical world.

II

In tenth grade, I sometimes spent lunch in the biology lab, not because I had to but because I wanted to. I looked, and looked, and looked at anything I put under the microscope. 

III

A camp friend posted a video on her Facebook today of Tim Minchin, an Australian musician/actor/comedian making a graduation speech. In his life list of "nine life lessons," he told the audience that science and art are not separate: "Science is not a body of knowledge nor belief system. It is just a term which describes humankind's incremental acquisition of understanding through observation. Science is awesome."

IV

Another friend alerted me to a New Yorker article titled "Creativity Creep." Joshua Rothman writes, "This watchful, inner kind of creativity is not about making things but about experiencing life in a creative way; it's a way of asserting your own presence amidst the much larger world of nature, and of finding significance in that wider world. By contrast, our current sense of creativity is almost bound up with the making of stuff. If you have a creative imagination but don't make anything, we regard that as a problem -- we say that you're blocked. . . . Among the many things we lost when we abandoned the Romantic idea of creativity, the most valuable may have been the idea of creativity's stillness. If you're really creative, really imaginative, you don't have to make things. You just have to live, observe, think, and feel. Coleridge, in his poem "Frost at Midnight," uses, as his metaphor for the creative imagination, the frost, which freezes the evening dew into icicles 'quietly shining up at the quiet moon.' The poem begins: 'The Frost performs its secret ministry, / Unhelped by any wind.' The secret, silent, delicate, and temporary work of the frost is creativity, too. It doesn't build, but it transforms. It doesn't last, but it matters."

V

People always ask me two questions: "Do you sell your photographs?" and "Who is the intended audience for your blog?"

I want to answer What does it matter?

What matters is that both transform.

Day 22: Another Day That Changed My Life

Almost any Saturday in my childhood: one brother painting in oil; one brother working on a motorcycle; Mother sewing vestments; Daddy on the lathe or table saw or drill; me playing the piano -- all of us tinkering. 

Creating things matters.

Rev. B. F Perkins

Today, looking at my Friday/Saturday mail, I read a beautifully illustrated folk art auction catalog. On the front is a painting of a bedspread I have been lucky enough to see in person.

I knew the artist, a preacher named B. F. Perkins, who lived in Bankston, Alabama. I first visited with a friend and her then-mother-in-law on a cold, rainy January day at least 20 years ago. The sight of his property was enough to bring all of us cheer and some spiritual warmth, if not physical.

His compound of buildings and sculptures consisted of a church called Hartline on the right, with a hand-painted clock reading 10:00; to the left, a clapboard building serving as a church hall; between them, a red-white-and-blue concrete-block-and-painted-gourd recreation of the tomb of Jesus (complete with opening); behind it, three life-sized crosses representing the site of the crufixion; and further up, on the left and at the top of the hill, Rev. Perkins' house -- a fantastic ramshackle two-storied building on which he had painted stars and stripes and flags in red, white, and blue.

We knocked on his door and waited, not knowing what to expect. He greeted us warmly and welcome us inside. What we saw defies description. Every surface, from floor to ceiling, furniture included, had been turned into art: yellow-gold Statues of Liberty; American flags; Biblical quotations and warnings and other texts; hearts for Hartline; crosses; globes; red, white, and blue stripes; paintings and signs with patriotic and religious messages. Everything was decorated. Rev. Perkins was painting his kitchen when we arrived -- appliances and cabinets and floors.

He showed us the entire house, which except for his art, was dark until we reached the treacherously perched cupola-like second floor, where his paintings on stretched canvas covered the walls. He escorted us to the balcony and pointed out the garden where he had planted gourd vines for his painted birdhouses, his workshed, the site of his "tombstone" in the front (he had been denied a church he helped to found).

As I sit at this computer now, blogging, through my study door I see four of the five paintings he created. When I select a book from my bookcase, I see two of his gourds. When I sit on my couch and watch the birds and deer outside my front window, I see a large unfinished painting I bought from him three months after meeting him (by which time his house had been stripped almost bare by galleries). Every object reminds me of his warmth and vitality.

The urge to create is, I think, the most ennobling of human urges, and knowing Rev. Perkins has ennobled my life and does so every time I see his work.