Of Dots and Falling in Love

This collage is another of my recent series. I’m rather fond of it. Perhaps this will be the one I keep for myself. I feel an interest in dots coming on….finger painting is so tactile. Perhaps a dotty name for this collage will come to mind.

Dave King at Pics and Poems blog brought up a discussion about liking art. Do you need to understand art to like it? Or is it enough to know you like it? That issue was pretty well discussed at his blog. I must say, Dave is good at causing me to think about things.

Years ago, I took a week long class at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. It was a large gathering, with many individual classes. It was a symposium of contemporary basket makers from all over the country. The structures made by contemporary basket makers are wondrous sculptures. I’ll add some links to some of my favorite artists.

The course I took was all about nurturing and developing ones own creativity. I was really excited! Here I was flying across the country and going to one of the well known national colleges of arts and crafts, to attend a gathering of many of the best know artists in contemporary basket making. I would be part of all that creative energy!

So I looked around for examples of my teacher’s work. And I discovered that, well, it was ugly. Really, well, ugly. I thought about changing classes. Still I was so very interested in working around development of my own creativity. So I just went anyway. I told myself I could work around the ugliness of the teacher’s own work. I would just ignore that part.

The first day in the class we did a lot of exercises. We “drew” with whole arm motions in the air. We drew lines with charcoal on paper, expressing emotions and qualities such as joy, excitement, and calm. Soon we had an assignment to make something using items in their opposite function. If it was a material usually used as a fastener, then we used it as the structure. If it was usually the structure, we used it as the fastener. I wound coils of metal wire and placed metal binder clips affixed to the wire, but the clips didn’t hold anything. It was a stretch to think in opposite directions, and I could tell my brain was working. We learned about critique, which is an art in itself; expressing truth while honoring someone else’s vision and execution in making an art object. We began to learn about telling a story, about having something to say with our art.

By the evening of day two I was invested in what I was doing, excited, and really getting value from the teacher’s guidance. And I really enjoyed who she was. I stayed up late at night along with everyone else to talk about art and creativity, to share what we were doing and to be part of that intense energy. The excitement in the air was palpable. The multiple conversations created a din of noise. But still, in the back of my mind, was the knowledge that my teacher’s own work was so unattractive to me.

Wednesday morning our class went to the auditorium and saw slides of our teacher’s work and listened to her talk about her work. She had started out as a painter. Her paintings were of faces of people, somewhat abstracted in a Picasso type of style. And the faces were always in relationship, looking in a similar direction, or at each other, or away from each other. Then her path took her to making of structures. Her structures were unique, made of thousands and thousands of knots of waxed linen, and did not have a cavity as a traditional basket. She called them contemporary baskets. And her structures were usually in relationship to one another. Touching, or leaning, or wound round one another. Or very alone. She began to tell us what these structures represented to her. They were her family members, her loved ones, in relationship with her. They experienced struggles as always occurs in families. Conflicts. Love. Hate. Differences. Breaking away and coming together. These were reflected in her work. No words, no objective images, but relationship, proximity, and gesture.

During the course of that work shop and in the hours we studied our teacher’s work I began to fall in love; with her work, and with her vision. Because I learned about the artist, and about her vision and who she is, my response to her work had completely changed.