The Art-Writing Connection: Part 1

I spent this summer immersed in teaching children the process of creating art. I taught them how to observe the things around them and work with different materials and imagination through a series of steps to produce their own unique visual art. The projects has now specific "end" product as the activities were open ended allowing the children to create pieces which were truly theirs, but the process was what took them from beginning to end.

I began drawing around the same time I began writing, around the age of 7, and soon began experimenting with creating things in 3D as well as dabbling in paint. But drawing was always at the centre. In the past few years as I've begun getting back into creative visual pieces (very slowly)I have noticed that the different use of my creativity spills over into my writing and kind of spurs it forward a little. However, it wasn't until I took a workshop with Maria Lousia through the LLAMA Project that I began from her description of process to wonder if artists, like writer's get epiphanies about their work and what that looked like. Click here for the post I wrote about my experience.

This summer, even though I myself created little work as I taught and worked with the children attending my program, Adventures in Art. I began to get a glimpse of this epiphany because I gave leash to myself to explore without bounds what I could do and I'd have to say the most exciting epiphany I got was from a shirt I created for someone else that took on a second and third layer of meaning which related to culture and stories.

This shirt was to be a gift for a baby one of my partner's co-workers had given birth to. He told me he wanted it to be dyed black and orange and to have some kind of print on it - the suggestion was hockey sticks. My response to that was that I would dye the shirt and if I was printing it I wanted a design I was going to use again. So I got out all my dyes, tied it and died it - imagining in my head how the colours may turn out. Then I got out the block cutters and the vinyl printing blocks and draw a design of a young Raven, or it was supposed to be. Then it hit me. Black, orange, Raven, Sun. The shirt, if it turned out would be "How Raven Stole the Sun," which is a very well known aboriginal story told in the Yukon. I was on air. The shirt, like all first attempts needs some work, but the process was a journey I'll never forget.

About the pictures: Top - I began this one almost 3 years ago and am slowly working on it. It hasn't really spoken to me about what it's about yet - I have a few ideas that's all. My mother asked if it was a self portrait and it might be.... Bottom - the experimental shirt. I'm still trying to find a way to make the printing ink adhere better so it's darker and there are many other flaws I'm not happy with, but that's what happens... it's all part of the process :) 

Words

Notes. How can one begin to describe the sound of a tune, the pitch, the tone so clear to our ears? The background chorus of a song. O-ee-o-ee-oo-eee. The feeling of the deep rich notes reverberating up from the diaphram with an emotional power so great it threatens to break through your chest and carry you away. Music that profound expression of emotion beyond words, tears, joy, and depth of being.

Purple. Yellow. When mixed these too colours make a golden brown. The more yellow the golder the brown, the more purple the richer the brown. Add black or white and you get various shades. From these two colours come shades to numerous for words. A painting for a thousand unspoken words, it speaks to our eyes.

Art. Music. Talent. Each set apart by their own limitations. The frame work which informs and defines them as rules define athletic skill. What would be the skill in playing basket ball if there were no rules by which to govern it? The very guidelines of the game allow the player to delight us with his skill in mastering the elements, twisting the variables, bending the game to his advantage stretching the bounds of his skill to make that impossible shot.

Black ink. Pages. Flat. Words. They break from the boundaries of the page to touch our hearts and enlighten our thoughts.

What Makes a Writer

A recent comment by Jozien, who writes "Keeper of Wild Places," caused me to contemplate this. A creative writing instructor I had once said "readers read and writer's write." I would add that in order to be a writer it is integral that one reads and studies lots of writing in all different genre’s and forms.

Writing is an art. And like any art there are many forms and levels of writing and writers: journalists, columnists, bloggers, non-fiction, creative non-fiction, short fiction, novel, copyrighters, business writers, policy writers, the list could go on.

Not every writer desires to be published, but this doesn't make them less of a writer. What makes someone a writer is much like the question what makes an artist. Is it the painting which makes the painter or the painter who makes the painting? Is it others that deem whether or not someone is an artist or how the artist views themselves. I believe is it’s a bit of both. And I think it depends on the reasons you are a writer how this process of acknowledgement works.

I started writing at the age of 7. Inspired by the "Little House on the Prairie," books. I was amazed by the idea that someone wrote about their life and people wanted to read it. I wish I knew where the two or three draft chapters of my life, lovingly created at that time in a homemade newsprint book, went; lost in some move.

But, it wasn’t until I realized at 33 that writing, at the deepest part of my soul, is an integral part of who I am, something I have to do everyday as much as breathing, that I truly saw myself as a writer. And after that personal epiphany I was surprised to be informed by everyone who knew me, they’d “wondered when I was going to figure that one out.” (Yes, for those who heard my fiction story, The Wall, at Brave New Words this month... that particular part of the story was true).

People write for many reasons including: self-expression, work, enjoyment. For some it’s simply the joy of putting words on paper, creating characters, discovering who those characters are and imagining their lives. For other's it’s a way to work through things, understand and make sense of the world.

Great writers such as Hemmingway, Dickens, Twain, Attwood, aside from achieving the fame and report many of us dream of, have also become masters of their craft like the great painters: Angelo, Di Vinci, Rembrandt.... They have broken through the bounds of convention and created something larger than themselves and their art in how they connect with the reader.

I know I have a long way to go to achieve what I want for myself as a writer. But, I'm constantly pushing my bounds, growing, trying new things, finding out where my limits are as a writer and stretching them. My aim isn't fame, but perhaps it is the stars. My mother was right, for me as a writer, I have something to say to humanity... and I will say it.