Bearing Witness – Art that Hurts, Art that Heals

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art, bearing witness, creative process, creativity, Deborah J. Brasket, From the Far Ends of the Earth, healing, pain, writing

So much of art-making is bearing witness–to things we love, to things that wound. And often they are the same things: The beauty that breaks your heart. The brutality that tears it open and lets the light in.

The image above, Rodin’s seven-foot bronze study for his most famous sculpture “The Burghers of Calais,” is art that hurts, and heals. It tells the story of how six citizens during France’s Hundred Year War with England volunteered to sacrifice themselves to save the town. The sculpture shows the pain and suffering, self-doubt and determination of the men as they are led away to captivity. It bears witness to that cruelty, that self-sacrifice, that love. How it’s all wrapped together.

This need to bear witness to how it’s all wrapped together is not new. It’s been written over and over again by poets and artists though the ages. I’ve written about it here on these pages, in my homage to Marc Clamage’s paintings of the homeless, in my meditations upon a deer’s scream and my mother’s death, and the beauty and brutality in the hills of Vietnam.

Not surprisingly I write about it in my novel From the Far Ends of the Earth. And I write about it there in terms of art-making, how turning the underbelly outward in our art can be a healing process, how it lets the light in. For the artist and the viewer.

“If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?” Franz Kafka once asked. “What we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves. . . . A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.”

Gwendolyn Brooks wrote:

Does man love Art? Man visits Art, but squirms.
Art hurts. Art urges voyages–
and it is easier to stay at home,
the nice beer ready.

What we see and experience out there in the world and in our own hearts bears witnessing. Not only the beauty, but the brutality as well. While the first lifts us up and makes us soar, the latter throws us down in the pit. It confounds us, it confuses us, it demolishes us.  It makes us want to stand up on our hind feet and howl. It makes us want to cut open our wrists and bleed out our anguish on the page. It makes us want to splash our pain in brilliant colors across the canvas.

It makes us rage against the night, and at the very same time trace the frgile broken bones of the milky way across the sky with awe and wonder.

It’s the roil of chaos that boils over into stars and star-dust, and becomes the tender, naked beauty of an infant’s breath.

We cannot help writing about it, welding it into our art, because it is us, and we are it. It’s the thing we were born to bear witness to, when we are awake to do so.

 

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Perfect Pairings – Klee and cummings

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abstract art, art, creativity, e.e. cummings, inspiration, painting, Paul Klee, poems, poetry

I’ve long been a huge fan of Paul Klee’s paintings and e.e. cummings’ poetry, and for similar reasons: their playfulness and sense of excitement, as if “bursting with something very important and precise to say.,” as one critic writes of cummings’ work.

They dared to take their art in new and often jarring directions, playing with syntax and form, with color and composition. The reader/viewer is forced to see things in a new way. To question old ways of looking at the world.

Beneath the playfulness, something deeper is going on. Each bends toward the light.

“Everything passes, and what remains of former times, what remains of life, is the spiritual. In everything we do, the claim of the Absolute is unchanging.” – Paul Klee

“Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star.” – e.e. cummings

A few favorites of each follows.

[in Just-]

BY E. E. CUMMINGS

in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s
spring
and

the

goat-footed

balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

By E. E. Cummings, 1894 – 1962

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands

Ta-Da! My New Home Studio

Tags

art, art studio, creativity, inspiration, office space, painting, personal, writing

After having pumped it up, I hope it isn’t a let-down to those who have been waiting to see it, as promised.

Ir’s certainly not as exciting or whimsical as so many of the studios posted on these pages that have inspired me. But it’s mine. And it does say something about me, I think, being practical, inexpensive, yet filled with color and things I love that inspire me.

My husband made me this long wall-to-wall desk top out of pine planks stained a red oak. It sits on inexpensive Ikea knock-offs, purchased online through Office Depot that are surprisingly solid and well-made.

My studio features two work stations, one for writing and one for painting. I bought inexpensive cubes on Amazon to keep my desktop organized and to keep photos of ;my loved ones near. An odd assortment of cups and jars and baskets keep my paints and brushes tidy and handy.

I re-purposed this portable laptop table as a way to extend my painting work space. It slips under the desk when not in use.

The focal point of the room is this large blue wall hanging featuring two colorful molas from the San Blas islands when we were sailing through the Panama Canal.

The many layers of fabric cut and sewn together with such  tiny stitches amazes me.

Another fabric favorite hangs next to this old blue couch that I bought at Pier One Import years ago. It folds out into a single bed, not very comfortable, but well used over the years.

I bought the fabric hanging at a county fair years ago. Again, the tiny details amaze me.

The room also features the flags we saved from our around-the-world sailing adventure. They’ve been stored rolled up in a box till now.

When entering a new port it was protocol to fly the flag of the host county as well as our own. My daughter made several of these on an old portable foot-pumped sewing machine that fellow yachties gave her.

I’d planned on buying a counter-height craft table full of fun cubby holes for storing stuff that I found on Amazon. I wanted a place where I could stand to work when I wanted and extra space to create collage paper and spread out the pages of my novel-in-progess when in the process of reorganizing and revising pages.

But I couldn’t bear parting with the super-handy lateral filing cabinet that had been part of my old office. So my husband used that as  base for an island, putting it on wheels and using the old desk-top perched on extenders to create a large island that I could roll out of the way when not in use.

In this photo it’s holding the two thick binders with drafts of the novel I’m currently working on. In the cubbyhole beneath I store old paintings, magazines, etcetera.

When we bought this home in foreclosure all the closet doors were missing for some reason. So I put up a curtain instead and decided that I like it, and so it remains.

There’s my bookcase, of course, one of several throughout our home, more books than I’ll ever finish I’m sure, especially now since my Kindle is put to such good use too.

And then there’s my own artwork, scattered through-out the room. I have to hang it somewhere, and it does inspire me to want to create more.

I hope you enjoyed this little tour. The room is still a work in progress. I need new window coverings and a new desk chair. And I’m eager to shop through some flea markets and antique stores for more fun and inspiring containers and curiosities to add to my shelves and desktop. But essentially it’s done, and I’m happy with it.

Wrapping Up 2017, Embracing New & Old Loves

Tags

art, Blogging, creative arts, creativity, Deborah J. Brasket, music, painting, passion, writing

Discovering New Loves – Painting

2017 was the year I revealed my newly discovered passion for painting, and dared to share my work on these pages. So I thought it fitting to end the year with an unfinished painting of a passionate embrace, inspired, no less, by the works of Emil Nolde, Edvard Munch, and Marc Chagal, as follows:

Nearly half my posts in 2017 were art related, whether of my own work, or the work of favorite artists, or just about the craft and love of painting. One favorite, my own and others, was a rhapsody on Naming a Painting, “Like Two Lovers in Conversation.”

Several posts paired art with music, starting with Friday Pairings – Butterflies & Vivaldi and including Almost Blue, Jazz & Art, which, along with Artists & Writers in Their Studios, were two art-related posts that made the Top-Ten chart in my blog sidebar, a list that traditionally does not move much.

Renewing Old Loves – Playing Music

But 2017 was also a year for reuniting with old loves, a passion of my youth, playing piano. I treated myself to a baby grand, something I never dreamed I would own, and began relearning to play. Old favorites like Beethoven’s For Eloise and Moonlight Sonata were flowing from my fingertips once again.

In pursuit of my music I discovered, amazingly, two master pianists that you would’ve thought I’d already known: Bill Evans (jazz) and Martha Argerich (classical). I wrote about them and shared their music in Playing Piano, a Full-Body Workout for the Brain and Perfect Pairings, Evans’s “Peace Piece” & Sapiro’s Skies.

In a way, 2017 was the year for making time and space in my life and my home for all my loves, old and new, which I also wrote about. But it wasn’t, isn’t, easy.

Returning to My First Love – Writing

As new loves (painting), and renewed ones (playing piano), took center stage in my life, there seemed little time for my first love, writing, apart from blogging. And so I made a concerted effort to increase my blogging output.

When I started blogging, I averaged one post every 7 to 10 days. But in 2015 and 2016, when my life changed in a dramatic way, my blogging fell off, and once or twice a month became the norm.

This year I made a concerted effort to pick up the pace. Inspired by my 5-year blogging anniversary in July, my posts nearly doubled over the next few months, with 8 posts in August, a new high.

After that flurry, I’m back to about once a week now, and this feels like a good, satisfying and sustainable, pace.

But as much as love blogging, and I DO think of it as “real” writing, I miss creative writing. The novels that have been pushed aside, that wait patiently for my return, still call to me, as I wrote about early this year in Which Would You Choose, My Art or My Novel? Clearly, art won that contest in 2017. But I promised myself that I would return to my novels in 2018. It’s a promise I mean to keep.

Part of that return will be wrapped up in my blog posts. I find writing about writing inspiring. It gets my creative juices flowing.  When I’m thinking out loud on paper about my characters, my themes, their dreams, what drives them, I discover that they are also my dreams, my themes, what drives me essentially, as a writer, an artist, a blogger. Even the music I love and love to play comes from the same place that feeds my soul and fires my passion to create.

In a way, it’s all about exploring our passions, the things that set our souls on fire, and sharing those loves with others. Because love is not love if it does not spill out over onto everything we touch, and touches all who come within its reach.

Wishing you all a happy and passionate embrace of the coming New Year.

Three Favorite Art Studios

Tags

art, art studios, creativity, inspiration, personal

I. My art “home away from home”

Nearly every week I come to paint with friends at this art studio, tucked away in the vineyards of Paso Robles. My friend Deb had it built years ago. I met her and Paula when we took a pastel class together two years ago. Since then, it’s become my art “home away from home.” We sit and paint and laugh and chat and encourage each other. It’s been a blessing to have such friends in my life.

II. Terrill Welch’s Art Studio

Terrill’s artwork and studio has been an inspiration to me since I first met her over five years ago when I began blogging. I loved the way she talked about her work and her creative process on her blog at Creative Potager. And I loved the charming space that she worked in and her beautiful surroundings on Mayne Island in British Columbia

She created her own U-Tube video of her home art studio which I am happy to share here. Recently she opened her own art gallery to showcase her artwork.

 

 

III. Kelly Rae Robert’s “Soul Shine” Art Studio

I’ve never met Kelly, but I fell in love with the studio she shared with three other women when I was searching for inspirations for my own studio. I love the color, the whimsy, and all the creative ways of organizing and storing art supplies.

Her website and blog are full of lots of interesting and inspiring articles and podcasts. You can take a tour of her “Soul Shine” studio here. She has since moved on and tours of her new studios can be found here.

What inspires you in your work? Do you have any favorite art studios or writing spaces that inspire you to create?

Artists & Writers in Their Studios

Tags

art studios, artists, creative workspaces, creativity, inspiration, lifestyle, painting, quotations, writers, writing

Art studio of Alexander Calder

I’ve been collecting images of artist studios and writing spaces as inspiration for creating my own art/writing workspace. Some of these images are of famous artists and writers. It’s been so interesting to match the creative mind with the space that inspires it. Most of the creative spaces that have been most inspiring to me belong to people who are not famous, or at least unknown to me, and perhaps I’ll share those another time.

Here I’ve matched the spaces with famous quotes from the inhabitants. See if you can guess who they are. If you can’t, the names are listed below.

1. “With age art and life grow together.” 

2. “I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.”

3. “My library is an archive of longings.”

4. “My fan mail is enormous. Everyone is under six.”

5. “All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.”

6. “I think of my studio as a vegetable garden, where things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. You have to graft. You have to water.”

7. “I believe in deeply ordered chaos.”

8. “What you do when you paint, you take a brush full of paint, get paint on the picture, and you have faith.”

9. “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”

10. “Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?”

11. “Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?”

12. “In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love.”

Artists and writers: 1-George Braque, 2-Henri Matisse, 3-Susan Sontag, 4-Alexander Calder, 5-Karen Blixen, 6-Joan Miro, 7-Francis Bacon, 8-Willem de Kooning, 9-Jack London, 10-Frida Kahlo, 11-Annie Dillard, 12-Marc Chagall

 

 

Touching & Being Touched, Why We Blog

Tags

art, Blogging, blogs, Creative Nonfiction, creativity, humanity, inspiration, life, sharing, touching, writing

 

“The function of language is not to inform but to evoke . . . responses.”  So writes Jacques Lacan, the French philosopher and linguist.

But perhaps the same could be said of art, or music, or dance. Any creative endeavor. Certainly it’s true of blogging. We create what we do with the explicit purpose of evoking responses from some largely unknown Other. It a very human thing. The desire to touch and to be touched. To share what we love, what evokes responses in us, with the hope of evoking similar responses from them.

I wrote about this some time ago in Blogging and the Accident of Touching.  But I wanted to revisit it, to reassess why I put so much time into blogging. What is its value, to me, to others? Why do I persist?

What I love about blogging is being able to share the things that are meaningful to me with others–art, music, poetry, literature, nature. But also discovering from others new art, new music, new ways of looking at and being in the world. That reciprocity. That sense of connection. What do they love that I may love too? How will it deepen and broaden and enrich my own experience of life? Every day is a new discovery, a new love, a new insight into what it means to be.

In that original post I likened blogging to “those conversations we have in the wee hours of the morning . . . ”

“. . . when the party is over and all have left except for those few lingering souls who find themselves opening up to each other in ways they could never do when meeting on the street or over dinner. Those 3 AM conversations, you know.

That’s how blogging often is done too, late at night when we can’t sleep, or after we’ve put our novel to bed, or when we wake early and are seeking the company of other early risers, or those living half-way round the world from us.

We can share our thoughts and evoke responses in our own time, and others can respond in the same way, with a quick “like” or a longer comment. And we can respond in return.

It’s a way of reaching out to others that for some feels more comfortable than the spoken word. I feel I may be getting “the best” of them in those wee hour revelations, as they are getting the best I have to offer, a side of myself I seldom share apart from the written page.

There’s another part to all this, why we write, why we blog, which a woman who would not be forgotten wrote about a thousand years ago:

“Again and again something in one’s own life, or in the life around one, will seem so important that one cannot bear to let it pass into oblivion. There must never come a time, the writer feels, when people do not know about this.” —Shikibu Murasaki, Tale of Genji (978 – 1014 AD)

Touching and being touched, yes. That’s part of why we blog. But also passing along to a larger world something of ourselves that seems too vital to pass into oblivion. In some small way, perhaps, this blogging about our lives, our loves, our insights, our art, is a way of passing on through the minds of others a part of our larger self. Letting it echo out there in the universe for a wider while.

 

Making Room for all My Loves – Music, Art, Writing

Tags

art, creativity, lifestyle, music, painting, personal, writing

Piano by Rene Margritte

A year and a half ago I blogged about Learning to Play (Again) and wrote this

I played piano as a girl and always regretted giving it up. Lately the thought that I may never play again, never experience the pure pleasure of music slipping out through my finger tips onto the keys–-to lose that forever– -seemed too sad to bear. So I bought myself an electronic piano, something I could set out on my dining room table to play.

Nothing so romantic as a baby grand–-but it has the touch and feel of the real thing. I can close my eyes and listen and imagine that heavy-breathing instrument bowing beneath my body as I play it.

The music I want to play is the kind that sweeps you away–Chopin, Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven . . . . What I yearn for, and seem to remember, is the kind of playing where body and music meld, where the notes sway through my body and spill out on the keyboard, like some lover I’m caressing. A musical love-making.

Sad to say, I did not play my keyboard as much as I had first thought I would and eventually it was put away to make room for my painting, which I also pursued on the dining room table.

But I regretted not having a permanent place for my keyboard, where I could go whenever I wanted and just sit down and make music. I still longed for a “real” piano, but it seemed, even in this large new home of ours that there just wasn’t a good place for one.

Then this summer my daughter came for a visit and stole back the large antique cabinet that I had been storing for her all these years. I knew she would be taking it now that she had her own home to fill up. But what could fill that empty space in the corner of our foyer, which was so much larger and “grander” than any home we had ever had.

And then I knew.  Why a grand piano, of course! Which is what I had always wanted but never thought I would have.

I discovered that used baby grand are not so very expensive.  And antique baby grands are so inexpensive that some are given away for free. So we found a beautifully cared-for antique on Craigslist and moved it into the corner of our foyer. Now it takes center stage in our home where I pass by numerable times a day. It’s always there, beckoning to me as I pass by, and now I play, not only daily, but several times a day.

But my dining room table is still a mess, covered with tubes of paints, and brushes, and palettes. It’s time to make a permanent home for the newest love in my life, my artwork.

This fall we plan to add an “art studio” to my home office where I do my writing. We’ll build a counter-top across one wall and halfway down the center of the room, to create a T-formation and two work stations.  On one side will be my computer and printer and all my writing paraphernalia, and on the other side will be room for my artwork.

When it’s done I finally will have a permanent place to play with all the loves in my life. Sometimes it takes a lifetime to do that, to even discover what all your loves will be, let alone make room for them. My only problem then will be finding time each day to enjoy them.

How do you make room and time for all your creative endeavors?

My new piano

 

“Slow Swirl at the Edge of Time”

Tags

abstract, abstract art, art, creative process, creativity, Mixed Media, painting, watercolor

“Slow Swirl at the Edge of Time” watercolor and oil pastel by Deborah J Brasket

This naming of this painting did not come “like a conversation between two lovers,” as the name of my last painting did.  The one came suddenly, serendipitously, like a gift.

While pondering what to call this painting, I opened a post by the Humble Fabulist and saw this whimsical painting by Rothko, and it’s equally whimsical naming. I fell in love with the name.  “Slow swirl at the Edge of the Sea.”

Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, 1944. Oil on canvas || Mark Rothko

Having had such a long romance with the sea, it conjured up all sorts of ideas and images that I immediately wanted to paint, a whole series, I thought.

But then I glimpsed my unnamed painting waiting so patiently there, propped on top a bookcase, leaning against a wall.

In another post writing about the process of painting it I wrote:

In the end, this piece reminds me of the night sky, with its swirling galaxies, shooting stars, and so on.  Although intentionally, as hat wasn’t what I had started out to create, I think my love for the night sky, that mystery and romance, was expressed here subconsciously.

All that deep blue and turquoise and swirling motion still makes me think of deep space, the edge of the universe, the end of time, and how in reality there is no “edge,” no “end” to any of it.  The thought of that “endlessness” seems to swirl around and around in our minds because we cannot quite grasp the fact of it.

So I knew then what the painting was trying to tell me, and so named it.

But the idea of a series of paintings about the sea, the ocean, remains. About what it brings up out of me, the gifts it lays at our feet, the ease its motion gives our eyes, our bodies, our minds. It’s unfathomable depths and expanses. It’s hidden treasures.

I’m keen to see what this idea will bring forth.

Naming a Painting, “Like Two Lovers in Conversation”

Tags

abstract, abstract art, art, Creative Nonfiction, creativity, Mixed Media, painting, the creative process, watercolor

“Warm and rich, rich and warm, which is which?” Like a mantra, these words echo through my mind as I stare at my painting, trying to discover its name.

I’ve hardly bothered with naming other paintings. They seem content with brief descriptive titles: “Sea Cave as Seen from Highway 1,” “Blue Bowl with Dancing Poppies,” “Landfall, the Marquesas.” Some I never name at all, or having scribbled something on the back of the painting before framing, have since forgotten.

But these recent abstracts seem to want more. Or maybe it’s me that wants more. We have a complicated relationship.

It began with a playful intent, the desire to enrich myself with color, to see what these two vibrant colors in juxtaposition had to say to each other, and how they made me feel as they danced across the page and spilled down the edges.

It started with oil pastel, a ribbon of red, a ribbon of yellow, swirling across a blank page. Then a line divided them, not evenly, but generously. Each color sat side by side, like lovers in conversation. But what they had to say swirled around them, crossing lines, and mirroring each other.  Each crossing enriched, lighting up and warming the other. They seem separate and distinct, yet the swirls of pastel beneath them, the patterns that play across the line, unite them.

They seem two but are many. On one side, first vermillion, then scarlet, then crimson, each layer texturing and deepening the other. On the other side, cadmium yellow,  quinacridone gold, drips of vermillion. Streaks of French ultamarine blue on the left, then a swathe of it at the center washed away. More gold on top of that. A glittering of yellow oil pastel at the center creates a single, subtle eye.

The whole process is like a conversation between myself and the painting that emerges on the page. The paint and brushstrokes, like words we use to speak to each other. Do you like this? Not so much. How about that? Better, but I need something more. No, not that. Yes, this. I love, love love this! Big smiles all around.

Making, erasing, dripping, glacing, washing away. On and on it goes, not knowing when to stop, where to stop. Then stopping.

Once it’s complete, the question comes. How do I know it’s done? What makes it complete? Is there simply a sense of resolution? Of satisfaction? Or the sense that any new mark-making will be its unmaking? A made-thing would be undone, so therefore, no more making? I do not know. The painting itself seems to tell me it is done, and I cannot translate the words.

But now the naming. How do you name such a thing? Can it go unnamed, untitled, a mere number? Why not? In truth it is nothing. Paint, paper, play. It’s not even art. Who is to say it’s art? Who can proclaim with absolute authority, this is art, this is not?

There is but one creator. One I. It spills through each of us, every day, every moment, each time we pick up a pen, a brush. Each time we walk into the kitchen and pour a cup of  tea, a cup of coffee. What is this? A new thing.

I am the only one who can name this new thing. It came from me, or at least through me. It swirls around me. All that crimson and gold, warm and rich, rich and warm, but which is which?

All that spilling together, washing through me as I view it, as I take it in, this painting, this new-made thing. A part of me, speaking to me. Creation to creator. What is it saying?

“Like two lovers in conversation.”  It speaks and I complete its thought, I speak and it completes me. And so we name it.