The Pleasures of Collaboration

It's the hot hazy days of summer here with temps scrolling over the 100's, grass crisped to a dull gold, trees and bushes thirsty for whatever moisture may come their way. The best places to cool off are low at the ocean or high in the Sierra. Failing that, I'll take my studio, fortified with air conditioning, glasses of ice tea and mineral water.

Recently, my friend Linda Clark Johnson* joined me there for an afternoon. Hauling her Mary Poppins bag of art supplies up the stairs, she commented on the virtue of stairs as an exercise device. We'd planned this day together for a month and neither of us stinted as we placed double lines of acrylics, brayers and paper on the tables. Linda sifted through prints with primary layers, pondering her next move for each, while I tore thick, white sheets out of my notebook.

There's something wonderful about sharing a space with another artist for a few hours...a time of no specific agenda, no attempt to forward the "serious work," simply experimenting, to see what might happen working side by side.

Walking down my back alley to gather plant materials, we discovered some bounty of the Central Valley spilling over the fence: grapes, figs, oranges, and pomegranates.

Wishing I could simply place a ripe fig on my printing plate and squish it, I experimented with dried seed heads of fennel, using color combinations of mustard, tangerine and rose.

Linda enjoyed some time with fuchsia and pink, bringing in purple shades, which reminded me of the dusky blue grapes ripening on the hot wooden fence.

We worked until we'd covered a good portion of my floor; we noted the hits, the misses and the sweet surprises. I discovered that the seeds of the fennel created little spots that remind me of using salt with watercolor. Linda tried out a new color, warm gray, and found that it worked elegantly as a top layer for the subtle underpinnings of purples, blues and greens.

Later, harvesting a bag of succulent figs for Linda to take home, I reflected on the afternoon, thinking how important it is to make things in the company of others. Perhaps the artistic variant of jamming, working together stirs up ideas, offers new perspectives and a rich exchange takes place. What kind of artist jams carry you away?

*If you'd like to see more of Linda's gorgeous prints, you can catch her at the Sacramento Open Studios Tour, the weekend of September 19th and 20th. to find out more information, click here.

Enso: the "O" in Transformation

When we drove up to Enso, a wood shingled yoga studio, my husband, Monty, asked what Enso* meant. I said that I didn't know, but I liked what I saw in front of me: the ocean. Located in Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco, Enso was sponsoring a yoga workshop.

I'd long wanted to study with the teacher, Bhavani Maki whose home studio is in Hanalei, HI. I liked the care and attention she gave to the poses as well as the spiritual underpinnings of yoga.

When I saw she was teaching a workshop over 4th of July, I leapt and signed up. My goal for the weekend was to test my physical limits and to extend the limits of my patience. (I often appear calm and patient, but people who know me well will tell you that patience is NOT one of my virtues.)

I had little idea of what to expect, other than that Bhavani (who has spent a great deal of time studying Patanjali's Yoga Sutras) was going to be weaving them into the weekend.

My relationship to the practice of yoga is ambivalent. Though I've practiced and taken classes over the years, the minute I'm in a yoga class, I find myself wondering how long until it will be over. Until, that is, I reach that point where my muscles are melting into the poses and I realize how great I feel.

Enso is extremely charming and the beautiful, old building holds a wood stove in front of a wall of windows facing the beach. The thing was, someone had fired up that stove and it was blasting heat. If my goal was to test my physical limits, I had come to the right place! After a strenuous series of poses, I realized that they'd heated the studio in order to warm up our muscles, and I was dripping like a Bikram devotee!

I spent two days, focused on the poses--and making sure I was going to survive. Following each session, Monty and I took long walks on the beach and I wondered what I was doing. Was I getting any joy out of this effort? Was I only panting to keep up? I certainly felt cleansed, but what did it mean?

The wonderful power that it opened in me also reminded me of my intention to stretch my patience. On the third day, the day we were to return home, I awoke in a cloud of gratitude surrounding me.

I looked back over the stretch of years I've spent in the hospital working with children and felt profoundly grateful that UC Davis had provided a home for me the whole time. I felt an acute sense of the time remaining for me there and the preciousness of that time. I need to be awake for it.

And following on that gratitude, another intention presented itself: some part of my core took hold and vowed to become the best artist that I am able to be in whatever years remain for me to create. I'm recovering from a lifetime drawn to comparison. For someone who's spent too much time judging their work against the yardstick of others, it is profound to feel that pull losing its grip. More about that later, but for now, here I sit, drenched in meaning. 

*Enso is the symbol of the empty circle of Zen

*The sutras compose a guide book of classical yoga, written some 1700 years ago by the Indian sage, Patanjali.

Transformation

Just writing the word transformation is magical. I imagine a butterfly making its way out of a wrinkled brown cocoon and beginning to move its wings, fluttering them open, letting the air dry the bits of moisture clinging to those tissue thin filaments. That's me--the butterfly with the tissue thin wings. In a matter of months, I too will be making a transition out of my role as a hospital art therapist, and into that of studio artist.

In my last post "Circle Game," I was circumambulating (playing around) the topic. Until I had made my departure official with my manager, I didn't want to mention it in public. No coming out of the pupa before you're hatched! So, although I waxed eloquent about the ways in which we look forward to events, I didn't say that my return to the studio full time is what I'm looking forward to the most. I think that I will always be an art therapist because I can't separate the act of healing from making art, although, believe me, I've certainly tried. It doesn't work. I'm just very lucky to be able to reset the balance.

Making the Countdown series allows me to process this change and make it explicit. As I create rows of circles, gluing them onto the panels, each circle represents a passing of time; a month, a day, an hour, a minute. Each measures a period of letting go.

And yet, as I make each part, I find that I have to retrace my steps constantly. As I enlarged some of the circles, then discovered that they didn't work, I created more circles, and as I glued them down, I realized I'd forgotten to change the ground beneath them.  I had to take up those circles as well and replace their backgrounds. The whole process is rife with metaphor, as it should be.

I like this challenge. Every time I come up to the studio, I tell myself there are no mistakes and each step forward is the gateway to the one after that. How else can I learn?

Circle Game

There are  many things for which I count down--the time 'till I get to hit my studio again, a few days off or a get together with friends. My favorite: thinking about transitioning from the role of art therapist to that of artist and teacher.

I've used the circle in my work for many years and in my new series, Counting Down, I'm using the circle as a symbol to represent the act of counting. In Counting Down, the circle functions as a clock form, in which the circle is divided into four parts, each part slightly offset from the other.

The various circles function as a series of crazy clocks in which time flies both forward and backward; into the future and back into the past.

The pieced together circles are made using monoprints. This process serves a double function. I save many of the prints that don't quite turn out right. When I print over them with a solid color, you can see the shadow of images below--as if through a screen or a veil. They have an ethereal quality--as if you could almost touch them, but not quite, much like the future for which we conjure dreams, but can only guess what it will really feel like.

And I love the irony of the series title and the process. When I think of counting down, I'm looking at time passing, but I'm not in the present (how can I be?) Yet, on the other hand, the act of putting together the circles places me squarely in the present, neither reaching backwards into memory and history or ahead in the time that is yet to come.

This is what I love about art. It has the ability to transport us; as a viewer into the past or future, or, as the maker, directly in the place in which we stand.

Mercury Goes Retrograde in the Studio

Recently, people have been talking a lot about Mercury Retrograde. An event that takes place 3-4 times a year, the planet Mercury appears to slow down and actually move backwards. It's an optical illusion, because the planet continues to move forward, its just doesn't look like it from Earth's point of view. It's like when you're in a slow train and a much faster one speeds past. It seems like you're not moving at all.

One of my favorite commentators on astrological events, Cathy Coleman, wrote the following about Mercury Retrograde:

Mercury symbolizes communication, and its retrograde motion beckons us to pause and re-think, re-organize, and purge the Inbox and remnants of lists undone rather than start new endeavors. Communication can get snarled and confused, so be patient with mistakes and with those who make them.

My own adventures have been limited to garden variety computer glitches (how come I can't log into the electronic medical records with the same password I've used for 2 years?) the i-phone (no matter how many pics I delete, I still can't take any more??) and my favorite one, the studio.

When I made it up to the studio this past weekend, I thought that I'd successfully set up four panels with monoprint collage bases. I used 12-4"  squares on a 12" x 12" panel and 24 squares on a 12" x 24" panel. Um hmm. I completely forgot that those squares I planned to turn into segmented circles were actually supposed to be 6." I didn't remember that part of the plan until I'd glued on almost all of the circles, and dammit--they looked really small!

At that point I had a choice, freeze up and curse and jettison the whole lot or...pause.  I thought about a passage I'd just read in Pema Chodrons's book Comfortable with Uncertainty.

The central question of a warrior's training is not how we avoid uncertainty and fear but how we relate to discomfort. How do we practice with difficulty, with our emotions, with the unpredictable encounters of an ordinary day?...We regard disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, jealousy, and fear as moments that show us where we're holding back, how we're shutting down. Such uncomfortable feelings are messages that tell us to perk up and lean into a situation when we'd rather cave in and back away.

Indeed. I calmly peeled away all the little quarter circles, measured and began again. And here's what I found. Rather than screwing up my plans, the confusion between my math facts lent the work in progress a kind of complexity that I could not have planned. Working with the difference between multiples of 4 and 6 was like working with music in different time signatures--fun, exciting, stimulating. So I'm going with it. Leaning in and discovering what happens when I welcome the random challenges of Mercury Retrograde.