Doing

I spend a lot more time on the Web now than I used to. It's dangerous for me. When I want to learn or practice something that's out of my comfort zone, I tend to spend too much time doing research and reading about it instead of doing it. Research and reading are way fun; they're also a safe option to taking action .

As with most things in life, this issue has two sides. The other side is that I'm a learning junkie. There's little else that I prefer over learning. And, boy, was the Web ever made for someone like me. I can dig as deeply as I have time to spare into any and all topics that strike my fancy. Interesting details surface that enrich what I already know, and altogether new and fascinating subjects emerge -- all the time. The Web was made for inquisitive and curious people; and for procrastinators.

Making art is the big thing outside my comfort zone these days. Inspiration is everywhere -- on the Web and off. When I was working at BLF (Big Law Firm), I could work for twelve hours straight without skipping a beat. Part of it was my nature, and part of it, admittedly, was that there was always something more to be done, but a lot of it was the mastery I felt in what I was doing. Doing something I know how to do well feels terrific -- almost as good as learning.

But the type of art I'm exploring now -- working with paint and ink, combining fabric and paper, manipulating digital images -- brings no sense of mastery with it. I'm starting from scratch, and while a certain amount of R&D is good under the circumstances, too much can paralyze. It can even fool you into believing that you're doing something. And the clincher: I don't even know if I'm going to like what I'm doing even when (and if) I learn to do it well.

What's the solution? I'm not sure there is one. In any case, not a quick or easy one. Getting comfortable with what I'm doing is the only solution that truly makes sense. And you get comfortable by doing. I know this. I KNOW this. So I suppose this post is, more than anything, a public pep talk. Studio time first thing in the morning, regularly. Got that? You heard it here first.

The Penland Experience - Part 3

I finally managed to take photos of the books I made at Penland, and here are some of those images.

I'd worked only briefly with acrylic paint in the past, so I was looking forward (although with a bit of trepidation), to my two-week Book Arts workshop at Penland, where we were going to paint papers for our books. I wasn't disappointed. We spent days and days painting layers of paint on both sides of large sheets of Arches Cover. We used various techniques and tools to create texture with each new layer. We cut up the papers and used them as pages for the books we made. Altogether, we made about a half-dozen books, each a different structure, each a little more complex than the last.

We supplemented this with other processes: printmaking (making collagraphs on an etching press), carving rubber stamps for mark-making, and using handwriting as graphic imagery. I loved it all. I loved it and I was anxious about it. "Am I doing it right?," I kept wondering. After a while, I stopped wondering. I still wasn't sure, but I'd decided to treat what I was doing as an experiment. After all, if you can't experiment during a workshop, when can you?

So though perfectionism and I are on a first-name basis, I told myself that wanting to achieve perfection at something that others -- notably, our instructor, Laura Wait --had been doing for years was just a titch overambitious. The self-talk helped, and there's something about Penland itself that encourages you to take risks and try new things.

I didn't lose all my fear when I was in the studio (fear of failure, of embarrassment, of whatever else scares us when we feel vulnerable), but what was left was healthy. It was the kind of fear that pushes you to create even though you're not sure of the outcome. And since by nature and habit I really like to know the outcome in advance, managing to live with the ambiguity was a big deal.

I read somewhere today that, in art, the most important thing is to start, and the second most important thing is to finish, and that if you do those two things, everything else will take care of itself. In a fundamental way, that's what places like Penland give you: a start and a finish. And that makes the next time all that much easier.

More to come.

Drum leaf binding (developed by Tim Ely) - the book is approximately 15" high by 3 1/2" wide.

The first two-page spread from the book. We worked with signs and symbols.
I focused on the triangle and the letter 'M'

A close-up of another of the spreads from the book

We overpainted mylar that we'd used underneath our pages as we painted.

A two-page spread from another book

A head-on view of the pages of another book