Learning by doing

A couple of people have commented that I seemed down in the last post.  No, not at all.  Sometimes facing unfortunate realities is depressing, but that wasn't one of those times.  Sometimes facing reality is freeing.

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For starters, I've resumed art-making... working on a lino print.  For those who aren't familiar with what that is, you carve out a design on a piece of linoleum, then you make a print from it.  Nothing to it, right?  Not so, as it turns out.  

One of essences of a lino print is that it reduces the image you have in mind into colour vs. absence of colour -- or, colour vs. the whiteness of the paper.  You imagine an image, then you must "see" it in binary terms: black and white.  (Although, of course, you could use coloured ink, but for the moment let's keep this simple.)  Therein is the first challenge: how to translate the nuances of light and shadow into their extremes.  What part of the image needs to be dark; what part light?  

Sounds easy enough.  Imagine a little house, with a front door and windows on each side.  Obviously the windows and door would be white and the house black; let's put a little black doorknob on the front door, hmm?  Now let's put a tree beside the house and three flowers on the other side.  The trees and flowers are black; so far so good.  Next we'll put a couple of puffy clouds in the sky.  Hey, wait a minute.  So far the background is white, which means the clouds have to be black... but who wants black clouds floating over our bucolic little house?  The clouds should be white... which would mean the sky would have to be black.  But the house and tree are black, so how will we distinguish them from a black sky?  Okay, white outlines around them; problem solved.  Unattractive solution, maybe, but no more problemo!  Wait, now that the sky is black, should the clouds be moon and stars?  Oh, fer crying out loud!  As you can see, even in this simple example things get complicated.  

There is another binary to consider in planning the image: the high points and low points.  Lino prints, like woodblock prints and others, are called relief prints.  Carving out the block "relieves" material from it, and the high and low points of the resulting surface are what create the image.  The high points will take the ink; the low parts, where you carve away the lino, will be ink-free and will be pristine white in the print... or so you intend.  In reality, it's not that simple.  The carving tools leave marks in the low points, and paper is flexible and will bend into them.  If you have any large expanses that you want to be white, especially around the edges of the image, it's near-impossible to avoid traces of ink showing up where you don't want them.  You have to plan the high points and low points of the image accordingly.  The foreground in my little house drawing would be very difficult to keep clear of unintended marks.

Moreover, while it's not hard to carve out a thin white line in a field of black, the reverse is extremely difficult.  Lino is relatively unforgiving.  In my little drawing above, the mullions on the windows, the stem and leaves of the flowers and the flagstone pattern of the walkway would be near-impossible to carve as I've drawn them.  That cute little doorknob?  Good luck with that!  No doubt all of them could be done if you have the carving skill; me, I haven't got there yet.

Okay, with all those considerations duly considered, eventually you settle on the details of the image.  Then, it has to be reversed onto the carving block in order to appear the right way around on the paper.  You already have a headache from sorting out what the image will look like and now you have to create its mirror image?  How?  There are several ways and I won't go into the technicalities; suffice to say that despite some careful-but-not-careful-enough planning on my part, my image ended up the wrong way around, which turned out to have an interesting consequence (more later).

Once you have your image transferred to the lino block, the next step is to carve it.  In this case, the lesson is painful and bloody: always carve away from your body parts.  Damn, those tools are sharp!  Until they're not, which is when you get so wrapped up in pushing them harder that you forget to carve away from your fingers.  Great!  Once the blood is mopped up, you'll get to practice your sharpening skills.  

Several bandaids later, if you're a slow learner as apparently I am, the carving is done and you're ready to print.  You use a roller to spread ink across the surface of the lino block, lay it face down on the paper, flip the whole business over and rub the surface of the paper to press it against the inked block.  Bingo.  The inked image transfers to the paper and you have a print.

You peel the paper off the block and reality sets in.  First, there are marks on the print that weren't in your plans.  You reach for the tools and carve down the offending high points, re-ink the block and try again.  Shit.  Now you're seeing the image you (more or less) intended... and it ain't singing.  You thought you could get away with those white areas at the edge, but no.  You carve away some more and try again.  Now there's so much ink on the block that the shallowest carvings aren't showing up.  Simultaneously, there are places that obviously weren't inked enough, so they're patchy.  Damn.  Several tries later, you have a print that more or less suffices... at which point you can stand back and see the actual drawing as it has translated into a print.  Well, there's no getting around it... it looked a whole lot better in your imagination.

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A couple of days after all of this, my studio buddy, Peter, mentioned that he had seen the print so I asked him for his comments.  His first and only question was: did you print the image backwards?  Shit.  Yes.  My earlier failure to transfer the image onto the lino block properly transmitted distinctly into the finished print.  Of all the things, Peter could have picked up on, he discerned that the image should have faced in the other direction?  Wow.  Therein is much, much to ponder.  Can a drawing's mirror image be "wrong"?  So it appears.

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Does this sound discouraging?  Heck, no!  I haven't made a print in four years... and having learned (or re-learned) so much, I simply climbed right back up on the horse and moved on.  Redrew the image, changing the dimensions.  Corrected the proportions (so I hope).  Eliminated the white expanses at the edges of the block.  Used a different process for transferring the image to the lino block and thereby got the orientation right for printing.  Loosened up on the carving -- an experiment that may prove flawed.  Tomorrow, I'll print.  If it turns out, I'll post it.

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So much to have learned, simply by having tried.  Making art is a process of continual learning if one is attentive to the lessons... continual instruction by the art-making itself.  I am so glad to have been to art school and to have gotten a BFA, but the learning never ends you dance at the edges of your comfort zone and pay attention!

Seven weeks of silence

It has been that long since I last posted.  There have been distractions.  When I revived this blog, it was in part to talk about the journey into becoming a practicing artist.  Distractions, I admit, are integral to that process; another word would be avoidance.

Around the time of the last post, I started to feel a sense of imbalance in my life, more particularly a dearth of worldly obligations.  The first part of my life was spent diligently and earnestly trying-to-make-the-world-a better-place.  Eventually I learned: the "world" is much, much bigger and more powerful than I am... so I laid down my tools.  Took myself off the hook.  Surrendered.  And that opened the door to taking care of myself for a change.  Among other things, I went off to NSCAD University to pursue what I had once considered an impossible dream.

Fast forward to January 2016, and all of a sudden I began to feel over-weighted on the self-indulgent side and a little too indifferent to the common good, so the first two distractions stepped to the fore.  First, I volunteered to help with the Syrian refugee resettlement initiative under way in Saint John, trying to bring my organizational skills and experience to bear on a situation that was generally one step ahead of catastrophe at that point (children unattended on the roof of the hotel, a family with lice, three children that had to be hospitalized on arrival near death from starvation, unattended children in the hotel pool... you get the picture).  That meant driving into Saint John, an hour and a half lost to commuting every day.  It meant hours at home on my computer, poring over lists of volunteers... It brought relatively little contact with the Syrian families, a short-term job offer that I declined, and a sharp reminder about what life in the work force is like. 

The second distraction arose out of federal politics when the Trudeau government established a committee to review Senate nominations, having earlier announced that it will eventually appoint "ordinary Canadians" as senators.  I've always thought I'd make a damn good senator, not under the historic political patronage system of appointments because as a non-partisan, former public servant, I have zero credentials in the game of party politics.  But if you want public policy analysis and sober second thought, well!  I'm your gal.  So I promptly did the homework and yes, there are two New Brunswick Senate vacancies.  That led to a serious re-work of my CV and some deep thought about suitable personal attributes and experiences I have, the kind you don't put in a CV... some emails to a prominent New Brunswick Liberal politician (still unanswered)... some entertaining flights of fancy... and some sober second thought.  If I was finding a temporary volunteer gig... um, trying... how would I manage working to age 75 (or death, whichever came first) in a demanding public service position?  Where was an artistic practice supposed to fit in that scenario?

The third distraction was a more pleasurable one: a nine-day trip to Isla Mujeres in Mexico with my St. Martins friend, Kate.  It was a milestone event: at 65 years-old, this was my first international travel other than to the US.  Ahead of the flight, I was pinching myself: I'm going to Mexico? me? really?  It was lovely, about as benign as a first international trip could be.  When I got back home a week ago (ish), Kate's husband, Jim, joined her, leaving me to play Auntie to their dog, Chica, for the month of March.  Arguably, Chica is a fourth distraction, but not nearly as preoccupying as the first three were.

Chica catches some rays in my yard, March 6, 2016

So what is this blog post all about, really?  It's about avoidance.  It's about what I've been pre-occupying myself with in order to be too busy to make art.  Let's call a spade a spade, here.  I have been gifted with a studio space, a huge gift that most artists would crave, and yet I've spent hardly any time there since Christmas.  I feel a resistance within, without knowing what that's all about.  Artists need fallow periods at times, but this feels more cathartic than mere rest.  There's something I'm working through that has to do with finding my own voice as an artist.  It was telling that I had planned to take a sketch book with me to Mexico but "forgot" it.  I had a chuckle at my own expense over that one.

But I haven't been entirely idle: I got an urge to make a relief print, worked carefully on a drawing for it, and have started the carving.  It has been a way to avoid painting, which seems to be at the heart of the knot.  Having set aside painting at NSCAD in order to do a photography major, I lost touch with paint... literally, how paint feels at the end of a brush.  NSCAD wasn't going to teach me about the materiality of how to use paint, so I decided I could figure that out through other means after the degree.  Now, here I am, and for some reason I'm resisting the obvious next step which is to abandon all expectations and "play with paint" until I find a comfortable vernacular with it.  What is at the heart of the resistance?  Is it fear of failure?  Is paint the wrong medium for me?  I don't know; there's an itch, but I don't know yet how to scratch it.

I'm reading a book at the moment, Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland, both practicing artists.  This quote seems to sum up my present conundrum:
     Making art now means working in the face of uncertainty; it means living with doubt and    contradiction, doing something no one much cares whether you do, and for which there may be neither audience nor reward.  Making the work you want to make means setting aside these doubts so that you may see clearly what you have done, and thereby see where to go next.  Making the work you want to make means finding nourishment within the work itself.  This is not the Age of Faith, Truth and Certainty.

In other words, somewhere within myself I'm trying to reconcile the potential meaninglessness of making art (neither audience nor reward, nor any making-of-the-world-a-better-place) with the possibility it holds of being one of the most meaningful things I could ever do with my life.  

These are the closing paragraphs of the book:
      Today, more than it was however many years ago, art is hard because you have to keep after it so consistently.  On so many different fronts.  For so little external reward.  Artists become veteran artists only by making peace not just with themselves, but with a huge range of issues.  You have to find your work all over again all the time, and to do that you have to give yourself maneuvering room on many fronts -- mental, physical, temporal.  Experience consists of being able to reoccupy useful space easily, instantly.
     In the end it all comes down to this: you have a choice (or more accurately a rolling tangle of choices) between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot -- and thereby guaranteeing that it will not make you happy.  It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty.  And curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice.

These are the issues that are at the centre of my resistance, avoidance and raising of distractions to keep them at bay.  No wonder I'm stalling; these aren't small matters.  My earlier life came with a built-in sense of meaningfulness and there were built-in rewards and recognition -- in the former case as prosaic as money and the latter case, as seemingly trivial as a specific job classification.  Those things are what the conventional work world gives you, none of which are to be sneezed at and to all of which I'm thoroughly conditioned after an adult lifetime in the work force.

Perhaps my younger art student buddies have it easier, not having been habituated to the norms of a "career" outside of the arts?

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Now, having distracted myself further for a couple of hours by writing this post, it's time to... put the next load of laundry on, check the wood stove, put clean sheets on the bed, make a batch of soup, take Chica for a walk...