It's always exciting to return home after vacation to see what the studio has in store for me and I for the studio. It's a complex mix, this relationship. While I've been away, the pieces have been sitting accumulating presence and I've been storing up new ideas. Each moment away is a movie frame; this large leaf, that tree, the way in which a woman wears a strand of pearls. Images are stored to be retrieved in the studio, popping up in a seemingly random order, as in a dream.
I like thinking about the meaning contained in the book title "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki;" the sense that no matter how many times you've started and stopped a project, you can always begin again. So I am, inspired by the Blastoff class I'm taking with Alyson Stanfield, I'm selecting and clicking away and feeling as if I'm painting with keys instead of a paintbrush. I'm excited about posting entries on a regular basis now that I'm back.
Art therapy in the pediatric setting not only helps children to cope with the hospital experience, but also allows them to take an active part in their own healing. Art therapy places the value on art as a tool and not as a fine art product. During individual sessions and the daily art group, children engage in a wide variety of mediums and techniques which are both developmentally appropriate, enjoyable and open to the entire family, thus allowing families a place to participate in normal activities.
I'm trying to find a new thread for my work. Last I left off, I was thinking about how to combine the very rough paper quilting with the more sophisticated quilting that I've learned in fabric. The very complicated twists and turns that are possible in cloth are incredibly seductive.
Well, that was interesting and trying to use the panels to carry that out on was a good idea--but time and migraines have slowed all that down. Now, I'm trying to pick up that thread and I'm stuck--or trying to find a thread that will untangle the mass of yarn, the yarn being the mass of possible projects.
As I've turned the loose bundle of yarn over and over in my mind, several thoughts have come to my mind:
1) a small piece of stitched fabric: perhaps about 5" x 8" sewn from of faded stripes of color pieced together.
The references: a shirt that I remember my mother wearing when I was perhaps 5 or 6. the stripes of wide and colored black, watermelon pink, teal and white. This made a deep impression on me, the stripes etched deeply into my visual memory. the second reference is Joseph's "coat of many colors" a reference from Bereshit (or Genesis). I've always found those simple words to be tremendously evocative.
2) The most obvious thread is the migraine, a condition that is trailing along with menopause for me. It's a provocative rather than evocative subject, something I'd rather not deal with but have to. I feel the way I would if someone said something terribly offensive. I'd want to grab them by the shirt collar and let them know just how offensive their words were. In the same way, I want to grab the migraines (or the vessels in my brain and let them know how infuriated I am by their swelling. What would the form be?
In the art group yesterday, there was a volunteer I haven't worked with. He came with a reputation of being somewhat childlike himself and I groaned inwardly when I saw him. It is the begining of the quarter and its a good idea to introduce myself to the volunteers and explain what our afternoon art group is about. I forgot to do this and instead, I got involved in an elaborate discussion of contemporary politics, the result of being somewhat contrarian myself. The art group got off to slower start than our political discussion and as we wound our way through butterfly windsocks, one of the participants commented that the two butterflies she needed to glue together didn't quite match. "Operator error" I said. ""Or, perhaps different operators" she replied. "Yeah, but it gives them personality" I added. The volunteer broke in: "Who needs personality?" I wondered if this person had any idea of the effect of his words. Next to the grandmother sat her granddaugher who was experiencing the effects of a prolonged siege of cancer. With no eyebrows, no hair, no eyelashes, and missing one limb, she might well be wondering if she still had a personality. After all, these are some of the marks that we unconsciously combine into our understanding of personality. Appearances are unavoidably connected with our understanding of personality. "I've got wild curly hair, I'm intense and sometimes overeffusive I might say about myself." or, "I'm often serious and when you see my eyebrows wiggling up and down, you're going to wonder if I'm not overreacting." With the excuse of picking up a package of oil crayons from my cart, I excused myself and walked into the ChildLife office. After expressing myself with a few choice words, one of the women gently but firmly took me in hand with her words. "You've got to explain to him the importance of language." She explained that he probably wasn't aware of the effects of his words. I heard everything she said, and I listened carefully, but what hooked me in were the words: "the importance of language."