Expanding My Creative Horizons

They say that you're supposed to keep your mind active as you get older.  You're supposed to try new things.  It keeps the brain happy, the neurons firing, the nerve cells communicating.

I'm in favor of that.

I used to be embarrassed by my artistic efforts.  I think most people are shy about their artistic skills.  Nobody likes to be laughed at, understandably.  Nowhere else is your heart and soul put on display as it is in artistic expression. 

I feel comfortable putting my writing out there, of course.  I can take criticism in this area, because I know that the end result will help me to become a better writer.  I'm not as comfortable with drawing, or painting or even playing around with one of my son's computer apps.  That tendency to think that everything has to be perfect, that anything I do has to be a masterpiece is difficult to let go.

But I try.  

Developing the Artist

I try to encourage my son's participation in the arts.  I don't have a degree in art, but I have a fondness for it. I used to spend hours in the National Gallery of Art, wandering aimlessly through the galleries, reading about the artists and the stories behind the painting and sculptures. I fell in love with El Greco, wondered about Magritte, and contemplated Manet. 

An appreciation of the arts is the cornerstone of an inquiring mind, but I wanted Zane to enjoy art as well. The best way for a kid to learn is via play. A boy needs to squish the clay between his fingers, feel the texture of the paint brush vibrate along the canvas. I've purchased all the tools, and I regularly sit the boy down and let him go crazy. 

Sometimes the results are...interesting. I like interesting.

Writing Can Be Wacky

WWFT?  What would Freud think?  What did Freud ALWAYS think?

I think this is upside down. 

You never know with  modern art, do you?  The eye of the beholder and all that.  The actual person who painted the art might know which end is up.  Did Jackson Pollock ever flip out in a gallery because one of his paintings was displayed upside down?  How could he tell?  I'll be he cheated a bit and put one little dot right on the bottom of the canvas so he could orient his work properly. 

That's what I would do, if I were a painter.  I would also tell people that they had my work upside down, just to be contrary.  I hear that artists are supposed to be that way, but it's really only the painters and sculptors who get away with that.  Painters and sculptors can fling poop at people, or cut off an ear, and nobody even raises an eyebrow.  It's part of their genius to be whacky and mysterious and unpredictable like that.  They can be eccentric and we love that passion. 

Writers don't get to have all that fun with their audience. Writing is an introverted activity, and involves the painting of a picture in the reader's mind.  I think that is a more difficult task.  A writer can never throw a fit about people reading his book upside down, because that's not how books work.  Maybe a writer might demand that his book be read while hanging upside down, but that's about it.  No one would do that, of course, because it's impossible to read while all the blood rushes to your head.

But writers pour their personalities into their works just as much as a painter does.  It may not be instantly visible as it is in a painting, but by the end of a book, a reader often has strong feelings about what they've just read, and that's a reflection of the passions of the author, as much as it is for a painter.

What do you think? 

Backyard Dilemma

This is an artist's rendition of our dog, Maisy, in the back yard.  Okay, it's me, playing with a new app on my Kindle.  Fortunately for my artistic endeavor here, Maisy was very easy to draw.  That black worm-like thing?  Maisy's tail.  Maisy is a Lab mix(with German Shepherd, I'm starting to think),  but the grass has almost overtaken her.  It looks like it is growing at a rate about a half-inch a day.  I could be wrong about that figure, so don't quote me. 

It's not our fault.  We have good intentions of mowing the lawn on a weekly basis. Well, my husband does.  He's the one who actually knows how to turn the lawn mower on.  Very important.  He is usually very good with thinking about mowing the lawn.

"I think that I am going to mow the lawn," he tells me. 

"Okay."

I try to be supportive. 

Every single time my husband has made that statement this summer, it has rained at our house. 

Every. Single. Time.  One Sunday the sun was shining, and it was still raining.  (Aside: there's that old wives' tale about how when the sun is shining while it is raining, the Devil is beating his wife.  Where the heck did that come from?  And who the heck would marry the Devil?  Those old wives must have drank quite a bit. End of aside.)

You can't mow the grass when it is wet, because it does something wonky to the mower.  Oh, and interrupts the Space-Time Continuum.  Very bad.  So we have to wait until the grass dries out, and it is not raining.  Our neighbor is OCD, and he can't stand our grass to be taller than his, so he has been mowing our front yard for us when he mows his.  We are very grateful for this, but we still have the backyard. The huge backyard that we had to have when we moved in, because our dog needed to have a place to run about. 

We just can't have tall grass in our back yard.  Mice, snakes, and other critters love tall grass, and they will move right in and the snakes will invite the mice over for a luncheon.  Ick.  Also, Zane likes to play out in the back yard, and by the end of this week, the grass will be as tall as he is.  We will never find him in that mess.

Maybe we need to get one of those old fashioned mowers, the kind with the wheels and the blades, nothing else.  We would have to push it a little harder, but we also wouldn't have to wait.  Do they even make those anymore?  Or should I just go buy a scythe and get back to my farmer roots?

Picasso Reincarnated...

...or visual processing disorder?

That up there is a picture my son drew at daycare one day.  This is a picture of his mama, he said.

The sad part of this?

I think it's a pretty good likeness.   My hair actually does look like that. 

Mamakat's: Seven Wonders

Mamakat's Prompt: List your life's Seven Wonders. Describe the most amazing 7 things you've seen with your own two eyes. Okay, but it was hard to narrow it down to just seven.

7. The Sacrament of the Last Supper, Salvador Dali

I am not big on Dali's work; it seems to me that he did a few too many drugs. But I was struck by this painting as I walked through the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. There's just something ethereal about it, like you will reach out to touch it and it will disappear like smoke.

Source: en.wikipedia.org via Tina on Pinterest

6. Castle Neuschwanstein

This is the castle that Disney borrowed for his theme park. If I remember correctly, King Ludwig of Bavaria built this. He was crazy(he really was!), but his castle is breathtaking. He built a couple more, including a castle in the middle of a lake, but this is his masterpiece.

Source: en.wikipedia.org via Tina on Pinterest

5. Washington, D.C.

Forget the politics for a moment. The capital of our country IS history. When I lived there, I spent hours of my free time just exploring. Everywhere you turned, a piece of our past was there. I walked out of a training session, and there was Ford's Theater. I got lost one day, and there was the Octagon House. It used to be that you could just walk into the White House during the Christmas holidays; they had an entire room full of gingerbread houses. I hate that some idiots ruined that for all of us. It would have been great to see the look on my son's face when he saw those houses.

Source: google.com via Tina on Pinterest

4. Statue of David

Yes, I actually got to visit Italy and see this gorgeous work of art. And it is truly beautiful. It's bigger than you might think. I mean the statue. Michelangelo must have tapped into the divine that is in all of us when he created this.

Source: google.com via Tina on Pinterest

3. The World Trade Center

My friend won a trip to New York City, and we got to stand pretty close and just look up. And up. And up. I will never forget the sense of awe that I felt that day. It was a symbol way before it was knocked down.

Source: media-1.web.britannica.com via Tina on Pinterest

2. The Basilica of the Immaculate Conception.

My father got his masters degree from Catholic University in Washington, D.C. I went to his graduation, and I got to sit in the cathedral. This is called "America's Catholic Church". Even if you are not the least bit religious, tell me that you wouldn't be awed. I was! And I'm pretty sure that those eyes were following me, too!

Source: nationalshrine.com via Tina on Pinterest

1. And the greatest wonder of all...

My Miracle. He's just plain awesome.

Silly Sunday

My son, like all kids his age, brings home thousands and thousands of pieces of paper. Most of these papers have scribbles or paint or glitter on them. Occasionally there is glue and what remains of whatever was stuck to the glue(Glue use must be supervised by the teacher. You cannot just give a three year old a bottle of glue and walk away. Serious shenanigans often result.). The mass of paper is kind of appalling; his daycare appears to be sending home a tree a week. However, this is my precious baby boy, and all these scribbles just reveal his inner creativity, so I must save every scrap!

Nah.

My mom didn't save every single item I ever brought home. She saved a piece of string art that I did when I was five(you dip a piece of string in paint and then put it on a piece of paper and fold it). She decoupaged it onto a piece of wood, which was pretty cool of her. But most of my 'masterpieces' went into the trash, because we were in the military and moved often, and the military makes you meet weight requirements for your stuff.

When Zane started bringing home his little art projects, I had a plan: save the good stuff and toss the rest. By "good stuff", I mean art work that actually looks like something recognizable. I'm no art critic, but if I can't tell what a picture is supposed to be, and Zane can't tell me, then it's probably just busywork. That goes into the recycling bin. But sometimes I get stuff like this:





It does sort of look like a bear, although I don't think that Zane is the one who put those googly eyes on the page. What likely happened is the teacher put the eyes on the page and then let the kids do their thing. Maybe it was supposed to be something else and Zane winged it. Whatever, it's a cool picture, I think. I can't imagine how his teachers manage to get him to sit still to complete art projects, since I haven't seen my son sit still and color longer than two minutes.

Zane's constant movement is just a boy being a boy, I've come to realize. Girls explore their world through language, boys explore their world through movement. I've got a typical boy doing typical boy things. When he starts kindergarten, I pray that he gets a teacher who understands that need to move around, that need to explore through movement. If he gets that kind of a teacher, he will blossom.