Process over product, book/story making group, a velvet party dress, chairs ....

Process over product, book/story making group, a velvet party dress, chairs ....
11/25/11
11:24 am

She had briefly settled or decided how she would cope with her dissatisfactions with teaching for the time being. The last class had pleased her because she had created some art in the process of the class. She was always telling her students it was process not product that they should be striving for. It seemed she was not immune to that desire for product. Maybe one needed to always working for both, or at least to know one was always moving forward on each aspect. She would have to keep looking for ways to do both - to make use of the opportunities to practice that she had in class, and to create art in a way that she could complete in the time allotted. Perhaps it would help to have a list of ideas and approaches handy so that it would be easier to make a quick choice. It also helped to collect the work into a more formal unit so that the fragments then became part of a continuum which formed a whole, or several wholes, as soon as it gathered enough segments. The binders of lessons she had started collecting over the past year had helped a lot in that way.

The experience of watching the raccoon painting sitting out waiting to be finished for days on end had been disheartening. She believed it was that she had written about it that had gotten her to act upon it and complete it. She had been on the verge of deciding the single raccoon in the upper left hand corner of the page would have to be cropped out to make a whole. Once she had made the move to work on it, she saw immediately that what had really held her back was that the interruption had allowed her to hesitate about continuing. The first coon was nicely painted. She had feared whether she would be able to paint another one as nicely. Perhaps she had realized that even if the second coon was no good, she would still be able to cut out the good coon to make it into a whole.

While she would continue carrying on with the classes and keeping her personal purposes in focus, she would keep in mind her vision of an ideal. Did she even have such a vision? The thing that most got to her was the apparent constant battle with schedules, deadlines, due dates, the passage of time. The passage of time did not really matter except that it was so prevalent because of the nonstop stream of deadlines. It seemed that no matter how few deadlines she managed to whittle down to, the emotional pressure they generated in her made them feel ever present.

One of the reasons she had started the routine or series of monthly art demonstrations was that it meant deciding ahead of time what that month's lessons would be. She was in theory free of having to decide the night before class what the subject matter would be. This had been such an anxiety provoking part of holding classes - worrying about choosing something the class would respond to. Now that pressure was reduced to one day a month. It was still the same pressure. It was there every month. Now it was also a pressure to draw in new people. So how did one approach such efforts without the worry over whether a thing would go over well or not? Perhaps one had to simply make a decision, and hold to it, that one was going to offer what one chose to offer, She kept losing sight of the fact that the monthly press releases in themselves formed a body of creative work. They were in effect forming a curriculum outline of proposals. Each one was illustrated as well. She was beginning to see at least some of the value in this, to see that her efforts were not a loss.

She was pausing too long in reflection.... wondering what she was willing to write about next. How she wished she had the skill of making up stories on a whim. It did seem as if she were yearning to be able to do that, or to believe she could do it. Developing that skill, if it was a skill, was one of the things that would have to wait til more of these immediate obligations were out of the way.

She had for a long time had in mind to hold a bookmaking or storybook making group - something that would be a group, not a formal fee based instruction. Perhaps that was something she could do at the library. It could be tried just for a month. Unless she did it in additon to the Christmas card theme she liked to do in December, it could be done in January. She would think more on this idea.

She was worried about the December adult program. She was losing her confidence about having the class be drawing rather than painting. But the kids class was drawing and no one had a problem with that. Perhaps she needed to simply reduce the adult class to a drawing class. That way no one could feel they had been mislead. What was the difference between painting and drawing anyway? Pastel work was considered painting and yet it was considered drawing. She would have to look up the definitions of each. She had been disappointed and almost resentful that people were so enamored of the medium of watercolor that they rejected drawing in color. It was an attitude that was so symptomatic of so much of what bothered her about teaching.

The two elderly ladies who had been coming faithfully to the adult drawing class had said how they found themselves looking differently at the world around them since working in the class. They were starting to observe the geometric shapes one could see in the visual phenomena out there. They were enjoying that. It also meant they were discovering new things. To hear this was very gratifying.
12:23p

She was sweeping her mind waiting for something she wanted to write or think about to pop in. There had been lots of things passing through that morning. She had written nothing down, hoping instead that something would return when she sat down to write. Her mind felt blank of anything interesting enough to ponder upon. This was perhaps the result of only being willing to work with certain valued ideas. Should one be able to write about anything? Should one be able to find questions, and relationships about anything?

In front of the bay window panel to her right, the west, she had a box of old newspapers that held references to the annual event she was involved with. The box was covered with a little board, which in turn was draped with a mauve velvet cloth. The cloth had been a little girl's handmade party dress that she had found in a thrift shop years ago. She had bought it to use for whatever creative projects she might want it for. It had a lace trim around the neckline that looked like it was hand crocheted. It had pearl buttons down the front, which she assumed were faux. She did not remember whether the dress had actually been finished and she had cut off parts of the hem and sleeve cuffs, or she had bought it that way. For years she used it as part of her Christmas tree set up - to cover up the tree stand. Now it lay over this little board as a place to set up art work for quick photographing. It was a handy quick backdrop.

Who was the person the dress had been for? Had the person outgrown the dress or ended up not needing it for some reason. What was the occasion the dress was made for? How did the dress get to the thrift shop? How old was the dress if that was in fact hand crocheted lace? She had assumed it was handmade. It occurred to her that she had never looked inside the dress to see if there might be a label. There was indeed a label, a size and lot tag, and a garment workers union tag.

12:49 p 1394 words

Another impasse....
To her right where she sat almost in her sunny bay window, was a white metal folding garden chair. She had brought it out here to use for sitting at her writing, but had gone back to sitting in the old falling apart winsor chair. The garden chair was one of seven folding chairs that one of her students had given her a few years back to use for her classes. She had gotten so much use from these chairs. They were not the standard folding chairs, but a variety of types. She cherished these chairs. They had been so instrumental in being able to hold classes.

The winsor chair she sat in had been appropriated from the basement of an apartment building she'd lived in. An elderly couple had died. The apartment had been cleaned out. Certain furniture items had been put in the basement to be picked up by the junk hauler - probably the auction junk hauler. Her friend had seen a set of two chairs down there. They had run down and taken them. Another friend had traded her a found dropleaf table for one of the two chairs. These two items had been her basic 'livingroom' furniture ever since. The chair needed periodic pounding back together as some of the spindles always worked their way out of their holes. One of these days she might find a way to repair the chair.

1:12p 1635 words

She wondered how she would continue with the writing when the project was over. She knew she meant to continue writing by hand. She also knew how important it was to her to write daily on the machine, even though there was the constant push to worry about meeting the crazy quota. She figured she would continue by just writing what she wanted. Would she keep on writing in this nameless voice? That had been a big part of giving the experience its *atmosphere.*
1:25p 1723 words