Category: Creativity

Creating something every day for 365 days

Summer Countdown: Day 38

Posted on by Dale

Lichtenbergian goals:

  • filled some pages of the sketchbook with studies of eyes and noses, both generic/anatomical and specific. It was interesting to me that while I think I was able to capture the specific shapes of various Lichtenbergian eyes and noses, I don’t know that you could identify the Lichtenbergian from his isolated feature. Mike’s eyebrows might be a giveaway, maybe. Or maybe I’m just not accurate enough yet.
  • read some more Power of Now and Art & Fear.

Today I’m working on mouths, and I may try painting some details as well.

Lichtebergian procrastinations:

  • reset the clay pots at the cardinal points of the compass deeper into the ground, so that I can mow over them. (These are the pots I put the citronella candles in.) Having mowed over one of them and nicked it still, I may have to set them deeper.
  • stripped ivy from the trees where it had taken over. This was not as time-consuming as I had feared: all that foliage is produced by very few strands, although on the cherry laurel up by the table the stems were as thick as a sapling. Still, it’s a soft kind of wood and easily cut and easily removed.

Art & Fear: 2

Posted on by Dale

And artists quit when they lose the destination for their work, for the place their work belongs. [p. 9]

Longtime readers of this blog will remember the creative crisis precipitated by the decision of my friend Stephen Czarkowski’s not to return to GHP in the summer of 2008. He had asked me to try my hand at writing a symphony for the orchestra, and I had reached a point of having finished (i.e., stopped) the third movement and being stuck with the final movement when the news reached me. (The first two movements never got written.)

For most of my creative life, I have been guarded in my output. I am not a fast composer; I have to struggle for everything I write. And so it has almost never made sense for me to attempt to write something that I know will never be performed. A full-scale symphony? Who would play it?

So Stephen’s offer was a gift from the heavens. If I wrote it, they would perform it. I could write without holding back. In fact, having heard Stephen conduct GHP students in playing Strauss’s Death & Transfiguration, I figured there was nothing that came out of my head which would pose any difficulties whatsoever. The news that it would not be performed that summer was like hitting a brick wall. It meant that it would never be performed.

Whoever the new strings person was (and it turned out to be a former GHP student of mine), I would be his boss and not his friend: I could not ask him to devote so much class time to the performance of my piece without a very real appearance of impropriety.

It was more than a year before I wrote another note of music. The 24 Hour Challenge was an effort to move myself out of that dreadful stasis, and I think it succeeded in many ways. For one thing, I was able to take one of the pieces, “Club-Foot Waltz,” and turn it into the “Waltz for Bassoon & String Quartet,” which then became this spring’s “Pieces for Bassoon & String Quartet,” and which I printed out as soon as I got home on Tuesday and mailed to my former GHP student at GHP, since I am not his boss for the summer (and am in fact now his friend) and can ask him to read through a piece just as boldly as any other third-class first-rate composer.

The problem of destination is illustrated in my work by A Visit to William Blake’s Inn. As much trouble as I had finishing that, particularly the epic “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way”, thoroughly documented on this fine blog, I persevered to the astonishing conclusion, because I believed that it would be performed. I believed that it had a destination. If I had known that no one would have the slightest interest in it, I would have shelved it.

Now you would think that I would learn the lesson from these two episodes that Bayles and Orland try to teach in Art & Fear, that you have to aim your work at a destination that may not exist in your current universe, but I have not. Maybe as I progress through the summer and knock out the Ayshire Fiddle Orchestra piece in no time flat, and suddenly have the skills and inspiration to finish the Epic Lichtenbergian Portrait (not to mention the necessary reference photographs (ahem, Mike, Kevin, Matthew, et al.)), then perhaps I will look around me and decide, hey, why not? I can throw myself into projects that don’t have a light at the end of the tunnel: the Symphony in G, the mini-opera Simon’s Dad, and whatever else I can imagine.

But it’s going to take a lot of success with projects that do have a destination before I trust the universe to create things that don’t.

Summer Countdown: Day 39

Posted on by Dale

A slow start, but a start. I’m still in “getting down to business” mode, which includes running errands and tidying up my environment.

So for Thursday, June 17, I read and responded to Art & Fear, and did some reading in two new books, The Power of Now and Walking Meditation.

As for my creative goals for the summer, I did get three pages of sketches done: one line drawing, one gesture drawing, and some attempted details. No progress, really.

Thoughts on Art & Fear: 1

Posted on by Dale

I have begun rereading Art & Fear, by Bayles and Orland. If you have not read this book, stop reading this blog and do not rest until you have your own copy in your hands. Do not borrow it, do not check it out of a library. Buy it. You need it.

My Lichtenbergian nature will not let me plunge directly into the artmaking that I have promised to do. I must have something to distract, to postpone. Cras melior est. So here’s the first of personal responses to my reading.

Basically, those who continue to make art are those who have learned how to continue, or more precisely, have learned how to not quit. [p. 9]

That’s what I like about this book: it states what is obvious once it’s been stated. Learning “not to quit” seems like a truism, a statement so clearly true that it needs no explanation, like “the sun rises in the east,” or “Dick Cheney is the embodiment of evil.”

In my Arts Speech, I make the equally unassailable case that not only do all children in every culture constantly draw, sing, dance, and pretend without let, so did all of us. Why is it that some of us, most of us in our culture, stopped?

In my own case, I know that I never did. I never stopped creating. So why is learning “not to quit” an issue for me?

For me, the answer lies in a subsequent statement in the book: “Artists quit when they convince themselves that their next effort is already doomed to fail.” It’s not that I believe necessarily that the next painting is doomed, or the next composition, but I know that I am more than likely facing a series of small, unrelenting disasters. I know that when I’m finished, the painting or the music will work just fine and in fact will probably be better than I first thought. It’s just that all the successive approximation I am going to have to hack my way through is just another way of saying, “Oh look, another failure” over and over and over.

That’s tiresome, and it’s no wonder that I fear it. For one thing, I have to assure myself that I have time to hack my way through the mini-failures on the way to success. I am not, at this point, a person who can just drop into the Flow. It takes a while for me to unhook the split focus that comes from sitting down to work when I know that any minute I’m going to be called back into the Real World to Pay Attention to Something. If I don’t sense that I have a sufficient block of time to go past the boundaries of everyday life into what Dissanayake calls the “liminal phase,” then I hesitate, fearfully, even to start the process.

A part of this is not having a space permanently set up for my activities, so that if I choose to compose, I have to clear a space on the desk for the keyboard, get out the score paper, etc., etc. If I want to paint, I have to set up all my painting crap, and since I’ve started using the labyrinth as my studio, it means hauling it all to the back yard, and then saving enough time to break it all down.

I know, that’s foolish, and one of the good things about this Summer Off is that I will be able to set up a regular schedule and have my space set up for that schedule. I think probably that I will compose in the mornings, because I can do that with my coffee; and paint in the afternoons, despite the heat.

To be continued…

Musing & planning

Posted on by Dale

People have assumed, with reason, that my separation from GHP this summer must be emotionally trying for me.

It’s not. From the moment I decided last summer that I needed a break, I have not had second thoughts. I awoke one morning a couple of weeks ago from a dream about the opening meetings during preplanning that caused a twinge, but this past week, as I helped everyone get the program up and running, I had no regrets nor waves of bittersweet nostalgia.

On the contrary, it was a very good eight days, omitting always the glitches that recur every year no matter what we do to try to prevent them. I was happy to see all the returning staff and to meet the new ones. I discovered the pleasures of CJ’s Pub & Pool. The students arrived on Sunday, and it was as marvelous as always. “Good,” I thought, “the kids are here. But they’re not my kids.” And I was totally OK with that.

It was very odd driving out of the campus and passing West Hall as I left Tuesday morning. There was a sense that I was not supposed to be doing that, that strands of my being were being pulled back towards the campus. And of course being at GHP is like the best dramedy series ever, so I felt as if I were turning off the TV in the middle of an episode: you always want to know what happens next.

But that soon passed, and it wasn’t even a major twinge, to be honest. No, my decision to stay in my labyrinth this summer was the right one, and now I’m getting ready to do all those things I said I would do.

It was with some alarm, therefore, that I looked at the calendar in the kitchen this morning and realized that it seemed that many days were taken up with out-of-town duties (some back at GHP), which would preclude my getting any work done at all.

I have exactly seven weeks before I have to report for preplanning at school. Of those forty-nine days, ten are unavailable as work days. (Four more days I’m out of town, but I’m with my painting teacher from GHP: she’s going to teach me all those things I failed to learn forty years ago.)

That leaves thirty-nine days to do my work. I should probably do a daily post cataloging in boring detail what I accomplished each day. It won’t interest you, necessarily, but it will help keep me focused. We’ll call it Summer Countdown. Unless you can suggest a better name for the series in the comments.

I’ve already emailed the director of the Ayrshire Fiddle Orchestra to ask if it’s OK for me to include some solo work in our piece, and a piano if we provide the pianist, and he’s already responded affirmatively to both. My plan, in case I haven’t said, is to work up five fragmentary sketches so that he can choose which one would be most interesting and most playable, and then I’ll compose that piece.

Of course, I’ll also have four other sketches that I can eventually turn into full pieces, so that’s all to the good.

Also yesterday I did a couple of sketches, just to keep going with that project. Mike will be glad to know that they actually look like him. Either I’m getting better or Mike is just easier to draw.

So there we are.

Life, the Universe, and Everything

Posted on by Dale

I just had a transcendent experience listening, to all things, Prof. Peter Schickele.

My iTunes had selected 1712 Overture and other musical assaults to amuse itself with, and I was only half listening to Bach Portrait, which Schickele wrote for the tricentennial of J. S. Bach’s birth in 1985. It is a hysterical (of course) parody of Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, with majestic music interspersed with quotations from writings from the great man, tagged with the phrase “And this is what he said.”

Only with Bach, it was from his letters to his employers, constantly carping about his pay in escalatingly specific terms. The portrait is overwhelmingly of an underpaid, embattled, and cantankerous artist. We surely know what he felt like and what that kind of situation can do to our creativity.

Finally, Schickele narrates, “Johann Sebastian Bach, umpteenth musician of the Bach family, is everlasting in the memory of music lovers. For, surrounded by adversaries, this is what he said. He said:” and then Schickele starts to sing the melody from “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” in its entirety.

And all you can do is weep in gratitude and awe, knowing that what any artist “says” is largely unrelated to the travails of his quotidian existence.

Sumer is icumen in

Posted on by Dale

My summer of Myself is on the horizon, 1 month 2 days and 17 hours to be precise, and I find that it cannot come quickly enough. (Note: my “summer” doesn’t begin until I return from helping set up GHP on Tuesday, June 15!)

What are my goals?

  • sketch five proposals for the Ayrshire Fiddle Orchestra piece
  • sketch, if not complete, the designated proposal for said piece
  • make headway on the Epic Lichtenbergian Portrait
  • further explore my “Field” series of paintings, and even finish the one I promised a young friend this time last year
  • build a “party patio” on the upper lot
  • finish a couple of things in the labyrinth, especially the westpoint
  • begin writing the journal I’ve chosen to call A Perfect Life
  • establish some kind of exercise routine

Given that I have six weeks to do all this in, I don’t think I shall have to worry about what I’m going to do with myself.

Dream music

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I’ve been asked whether I’ve ever dreamed any music that I’ve gone on to actually write. Yes, the opening theme of “Sonnet 18” came to me the night before the students arrived at GHP that summer. It was so insistent that I got up and scribbled down something to remind me of its contour the next morning.

Recently however I have been dreaming quite large orchestral pieces, and that’s frustrating, because I know I do not have the skills (nor the time) to capture them. Last night was a lovely work indeed; I was even able to manipulate it, extending the theme and developing it.

It’s gone now. I remember only a vague impression of its effect. Most frustrating.

Nothing to say

Posted on by Dale

I keep thinking I need to write more. I keep wanting to write more. But I don’t. Dozens of quick ideas float into and out of my head every day, but I don’t get them out of my head and into the blog. Perhaps I need to do just one-liners until something real pops out.

I’ve been working on a post about Beethoven’s symphonies, but it’s hard to put into words. Maybe this week.

In the meantime, I just came across this poem hidden away on my computer. Weirdly enough, I remembered it earlier in the week and was wondering where I had stashed it. I wrote it when Garrison Keillor had a sonnet contest, and then promptly forgot about it. It was in a program called WriteRoom, a fabulous little program that I used for a while when I had to write without distractions, the purpose of which was to completely blank out your screen with the page. Just you and the words.

And then today I was showing Summer Miller all the little writing programs I had littering my hard drive, and when I opened WriteRoom, up popped all these little notes I had completely forgotten about, including the poem.

So, until I write something real, here’s a poem:

My back yard. Night. The vernal equinox.
We sit, all men, around a fire of oak
and last year’s Christmas tree. Our talk unlocks
our thoughts, and musings sift through light and smoke.
We drink. We talk: our lives, and what’s to do.
We talk of art and music, God and cause.
Someone’s removed his shirt. Now I have too.
I don’t know why this comforts, but it does,
to sit bare-chested, flesh exposed like mind
around the crackling light. Another drink,
I want to know if all these thoughts behind
these other chests can make me see, not think.
These men I love, and more than that, require:
we slowly start to move around the fire.

The last two lines should be indented, of course, but html prevents that.