I hear this all the time from people who do creative things: "I'm not an artist! I can't even draw a straight line."
Who taught us that straight line rendering was the only yardstick?
Watching skaters skate at The Rollercade, it occurred to me that I'd like to walk up to every non-skating observer and ask, "What's your art?" I was thinking that the world would be so much sweeter if people claimed their artist-parts as skaters claim their spaces on the rink. All the skaters--and all the watchers--were swaying to the music and smiling, happy happy.
At California Pizza afterwards, our waiter reminded me of Elvis. He wore all black and had about six bracelets on each wrist. "I make these," he said--before I even got a chance to ask him the question--as if my un-asked question had summoned him!
I pointed to the turquoise one and said, "That's my favorite color."
Without hesitation, he snapped it right off and gave it to me--a string of turquoise with one clear glass bead!
Today at physical therapy, Josh--one of my therapists--was singing along to the radio. "Wow," I said. "You have a good voice! Sing louder!"
As people do, when complimented, he acted all humble and teased me: "Something wrong with your ears, Linda?"--but he looked pleased.
I call this thing I'm doing "artsy stuff," but l I stop short of calling it "art." It doesn't need a label. I can dart from one thing to another.
Last week I spiffed up an old rusty toy telephone with paint and plastic "jewels." Here it is with Humphrey beside it....it makes me happy.
Then I painted the 24 round wells in a metal tray meant for baking pan dulce. I had gotten the seed of the idea from one of the Wanderlust teachers teaching us "steampunk," but it wasn't entirely new. I remembered painting exactly the same squishy circles fifty years ago--in styrofoam egg cartons.
Elena and I made "clay cookies" to add to our trays along with old keys and odd objects we've picked up on walks. She cut a little heart out of a bigger heart and when they dried, she showed me how the little heart could be put inside the big heart, taken out, put back in....
The best artist/teachers on the video tutorials make beautiful images. And yet, in the tradition of art journaling, they usually top off their pages with a cliche word or phrase, relegating all the visual art to "background."
I usually stop the video when I see the word or phrase coming. Trite messages (that can be purchased on mass-produced tablets of words and phrases, like "Dream" or "Believe" or "Trust yourself,") are glued on top of the much more interesting collage they've just made.
Still. Here they are, all these wonderful people, making things that inspire me to make things. Nobody is saying "it's been done before" or "it's kind of messy." And their videos are getting thousands of viewers. It's the Super Bowl of making.
Back in my former life, when big bold gestures were discouraged, when coloring inside the lines was the only way to go (on pages and in life), back when art was graded on neatness and following directions, "art" was about as intriguing to me as sports, nil.
I learned early to stay inside the lines--when my first grade teacher chided me for painting the courthouse purple, coloring outside the lines, and pressing too hard with my Crayola. "Paint light even strokes," she said. "Pushing too hard is not ladylike!"
To bring the lesson home to my first-grade classmates, she held up my colored mimeographed courthouse to show them how I'd strayed. "The lines are there for a reason," she told us all.
Elena already knows what it's taken me a long time to learn:
"My art teacher doesn't let us do real art like we do. She wouldn't even let me draw those funny faces we learned from that video! I want to tell her, 'Lady, I know how to do art already!'"
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