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September 11, 2010

Passport and Palette: Another edition of the Wisdom of Artists

My dad’s newest pastime is plein air painting. He wakes up every Saturday morning and takes his palette out to Kensington Metro Park to paint the natural landscapes. He reads about painting and talks about it with my mother, who has been painting and making art most of her life. One of the contemporary master plein air painters my dad studies is Kevin Macpherson. I sat with my dad one Sunday morning while he was watching a recorded episode of the PBS series Passport and Palette featuring Kevin Macpherson painting a scene landscape in Italy. There were many nuggets of wisdom for painters, but I couldn’t help seeing how they also applied to writing. I’m learning so much about writing from listening to painters. Here are some of the nuggets presented in the show:

1. When inspiration stops the artist (writer) in his or her tracks, it means hours of intense concentration, translating his or her vision onto canvas (paper).

2. Capture the big relationships; the lights and shadows to be blocked in properly before attending to details. (This little bit of advice reminds me of the importance of early drafts and how we are trying to get the nuggets of the story out before we fill in the details that refine it.)

3. Nature is a departure point. Paint the essence of the scene. (I think this is particularly important for fiction writers who draw from their own life experiences or on a real-life historical character to tell a story. The real story or model story is a departure point. The essence of the scene to me is the imagination and how that works to bring the story together.)

4. Art must have one important ingredient: the artist’s soul. (no explanation necessary)

5. Success for an artist may just be the act of painting. (I think sometimes I forget this when the ego creeps in and says, “But, I must be published.” These nuggets of wisdom from artists are great reminders of how to get back to the writing process and just write mindlessly.)

6. It is not the artist’s job to copy word-for-word what we see. Artist’s have a license to edit, to rearrange to emphasize the elements within their painting, to make the painting a personal statement. (Great advice for fiction writers using a true-to-life subject. Maybe not so great advice for creative nonfiction writers.)

7. Sketching will develop the eye and mind to remember the experience on a higher level, much more than taking a quick snapshot. (I like this piece of advice for when we writers are out and about and have the opportunity to look closely at the world around us. We should be sketching it in little paragraphs of description, painting the picture in the mind’s eye. What a great exercise that is. Maybe, we should start plein air writing groups.)

So, let’s get out there and write…or paint.

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July 31, 2010

Light and humility

I’m learning about light and humility as I sit here on Saturday morning talking to my mom. She’s just showed me how to see light by pointing at my Weeping Buddha my friend Q gave me a long time ago, when I was going through cancer treatment. It feels good to say that was a long time ago. My mom is showing me how the light on the wall behind Buddha is a hair brighter than the light that falls in front of it and that’s how you’d paint a background. I wasn’t painting my Buddha. I as painting strawberries, but the lesson was one of seeing rather than specificity.

We are two artists on the same plain working in different media. She’s a realist painter. My writing is about realism as well. I’ve picked up the paint brush as a way to get through this postpartum lull of having sent out a completed novel as well as a poetry chapbook. It’s summer and I need a break from words. I need to fill the well again.

I see why my mother loves painting. The focus and attention on a piece brings you fully into the moment. There is no thinking about what the piece was or what the piece will be. There is only the discovery of where light hits the subject.

I suppose I search for the same kind of illumination in my writing. I’m looking for where the light hits brightest against the background and on the subject itself.

My mother was reading an interview by her favorite painter, Daniel Sprick. She kept giving me nuggets of the interview that show his humility, that show that he just paints really because he’s fascinated by the process and his subject matter, not because there is a greater message. Ironically, people do find his work to hold a much deeper meaner. In one response to writer/interviewer Rose Fredrick, he says:

“I don’t really dig that deep for symbolic meaning. The uninteresting fact of the way I work is that I mostly paint things because I just like the way they look, simple esthetic enjoyment…”

When my mother began reading me bits and pieces of this interview it brought to mind another interview with Edward P. Jones at After the MFA. I think I’ve mentioned it in my blog before. But, his interview resonated with the same kind of “I just do it because I do it” kind of thinking that Daniel Sprick has, the kind of thinking that resonates with both my mother and I.

As we were getting ready to go thrift store shopping for possible still life subjects, we talked about how Edward P. Jones and Daniel Sprick both look at the creative process in such a no frills kind of way. They don’t over think it. They aren’t trying too hard to get to some meaning. Ironically, what comes of this ends up being deeply profound.

That was our little aha morning.

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July 11, 2010

The Wisdom of Artists

I sit here on Sunday morning in my Egyptian kaftan. It’s early and quiet and I should be working on my novel, but I guess I’m just sort of clearing the cobwebs. This weekend has been calming and fun all the same with the boys gone up north. We girls have a no television policy and have been playing with making art and having great adventures and conversation. We took Kiki, my youngest child, to the Crossroads Festival Friday night and listened to some great live music at the open air concert series in downtown Ypsilanti. I was captivated by the characters that milled about the concert and danced to the band’s mix of blues and rock. We stopped in a little shop beforehand and found amazing trinkets for as cheap as cheap can be. My mom has been looking for a bottle to complete her latest still life and this place had just the right piece at just the right price.

I found some old photos that I’m hoping to use in some creative way at some point, either as fodder for a story or a poem or some of the altered book stuff I’m doing. I don’t know. This one I’m particularly fond of. It read “Me and my snake” on the back of it, but I’m not sure that was original to the photo.

This was another of my favorites. The kid looks oh so happy to be dressed up and mom is particularly stylish and happy that son is wearing a tie.

This final one is classic, too. I love the guy on the end with the pipe.

I don’t know why I bought a bunch of old photos of nobody I know, but old photos have always fascinated me. They always get me thinking about the people in them, and they stimulate my creativity a bit, which brings me back to the point of this.

I’ve been spending a bit of time with my artist mom lately and recently I interviewed another artist Mary Rochelle Burnham. In chatting with both these women who have devoted their lives to the arts, I’ve realized that the process by which artists work, whether in words or paint or clay, is not so different. I knew it, sort of, but I guess I’d never really talked about it with another artist all that much.

I’ve always understood that creative people are not just creative in one area. Even in my own writing, I find it hard to stay with one single genre, though all the “marketing people” say that’s not the wisest thing for a writing career. Still, I chose the Spalding University MFA program largely because there was that philosophy that allowed you to explore beyond the walls of your designated genre and because it fostered the interrelatedness of the arts.

Still, there were things that Mary Rochelle said in our interview that resonated in me, though I don’t pick up a paint brush all that much. She talked about practice and how people say they’d like to paint, but fear it and thus never do it. She said it’s all about practice and just doing it. She was speaking from the perspective of painting, and I found myself jumping in and saying, “Well, that’s the same thing people do with writing.”

With my mom and our conversation yesterday morning, she was talking about how she wanted to focus on three hyper realist painters and examine the way they work and then she started talking about how she felt like there is this fear that artists have that if they study an artist too much, their work will mimic that artist. She said she felt that was a bit short sighted. I told her how much that sounded like a lot of what’s discussed in writing. It sounds like a lot of what I learned in school. There is something to be learned from others who went before. I think, even if we play with the style of another writer, we bring our own individuality to that style. We bring our own experiences.

It’s not like I haven’t heard a lot of this already, but I enjoy conversations with artists and it’s just another way to come at my creativity from a different direction. Just recently, I even briefly picked up a paint brush, just to do something different. No, I won’t be a Picasso or a Maria Trapani or Mary Rochelle Burnham anytime soon, but freeing myself to just do the work opened something up for writing, too.

Well, it’s time to get back to the novel.

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May 1, 2010

Collage, the appearance of the Japanese maple and letting go of the abstract carrot

Lake Reflection Collage

Painted Collage

Today is a bit about play. I see the Japanese maple outside my window again. It’s wide awake with its new leaves unfolding and opened like small hands. Droplets of rain cling to them from the storm that rolled in early this morning.
The sight of the tree coming back to life inspired me to play with a collage I did a while ago. I scanned it and played a bit with filters and came up with the above images.

This week my daughter turned twelve. She had friends stay the night. I laughed as their giggling and silliness reminded me of my own youth and long, lazy afternoons of giggling and fun with my girlfriends.

I baked a cake from scratch again. This time it came out a little more moist. It just takes practice, I guess. My daughter insisted the cake be from scratch, because she liked her brother’s cake. I got lost in the process and enjoyed being in the moment as I beat eggs and folded them into the mixture of flour, eggs, sugar, butter, baking powder and other stuff. I feel a pull back to something closer to earth when I take on projects like baking a cake from scratch. I feel closer to something simpler than all of this crazy-fast task oriented stuff aimed at some elusive abstract dangling carrot. I’ve realized as of late that that’s exactly what all this running around has been, all this doing a million things, being crazy busy even through cancer treatment, was my attempt at chasing an abstract carrot. That’s what the dangling carrot always is, elusive and abstract…and pointless.

As I awaken, I still, from time to time, feel the hypnotic nature of the abstract carrot. Just this week I was asked where I saw my self in five years. I gave some unconscious answer. I don’t regret that. I just did it in that moment when I was caught up in the abstract tomorrow. My true answer is that I no longer have an image of myself in five years. I can’t. I focus on what I’m doing now, what my hands or my heart are doing now, and know that five years from now will figure itself out in its own way. I truly have no way of knowing where that will take me.

Right now, I have pancakes to make. I pray for the Gulf Coast marine life, and I meditate on my Japanese maple.

Peace.

3 comments

March 6, 2010

Day 41 – Artist Poem

This was inspired by looking at my mom’s paintings, sort of. If you want to look, you can see them at Maria Trapani Fine Arts.

Painting

I woke up an artist,
my hands moving and dabbing
at the sky, pushing at the clouds
trying to make them look
soft and fluffy.
In the end, their edges
were too crisp. I thought
the clouds would certainly
shatter
into a million pieces.
I set the brush down
and walked away.

5 comments

October 17, 2009

An evening in the red room

I’m sitting here in my red room, working amid the clutter of Pokemon cards and the sound of Pokemon streaming over the Internet. So, it’s not the ideal writing space, but I think of Stephen King and how he wrote in his book On Writing: A Memoir of Craft of writing with his son playing near him. That’s how I write. That’s how I get things done, and I love my red room. I love the energy and color and the fact that there are books stacked all around this room.

I taught my third class today and feel like I’ve finally gotten in the groove. What made me happiest was the fact that I used Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s poem “Daddy, We Called You” in class and streamed her Youtube reading of this poem into the classroom. My students loved it!! Mind you, these are students who are mostly majoring in health and business fields, but I could tell they were moved by her poem and by hearing her read it. I used her poem along side Mary Oliver’s poem “A Visitor” to get my students to think about comparing and contrasting in an analysis essay. It worked so well because both poems are so accessible and both are poems about fathers, which is a subject that’s likely to resonate with most people. I really felt this was the most engaging discussions we’ve had so far.

On the writing front, I’ve been reading Tillie Olsen’s Silences, which makes me more determined to move forward with my writing projects, no matter where I find myself doing it; at a doctor’s office, in a red room with Pokemon episodes playing endlessly on a computer, or in the few minutes I have between work and meetings.

Not too long ago I went to a writing lecture given during the Kerrytown Book Festival. The panel was made up of two writer couples. Their discussion focused on the writing life when both parties in a couple are writers. That’s not my situation, but I just wanted to hear writers talk about the writing life. I always find inspiration in it. At one point, there was the discussion on who gets ownership of certain life situations that might make good fictional or poetic subjects or situations. That got me thinking a bit later on how we make our stories different. It got me thinking that the same situation can be used in many different ways, but it’s the unique characters and situations around it that make it different. I think about this as I deal with cancer in my novel. Cancer is a common story in novels, but what makes mine unique is the characters that surround the story. They have unique experiences and approach that common circumstance in a very unique way. I guess what I’m getting at is that those stories need to be written because we all experience the same things in uniquely different ways and that’s where the unique story arises.

That’s it for now. The picture below has nothing to do with anything. I took it at this year’s Clinton Fall Festival, which I covered for the newspaper. It’s sort of my silly little tradition to go to the animal exhibit and photograph animals up close. Last year, I photographed a camel.

July 12, 2009

Fun with Photoshop

These are my little peeps. I’ve been having fun with Photoshop lately, giving myself a brief respite from writing. Actually, there really has been no respite from writing. I did a good chunk of work on my novel this morning and plan on doing more. I just wanted to do something else creative. I think this will be this year’s Christmas photo.

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June 21, 2009

Oh Father

It’s Father’s Day, and I’ve taken a brief pause from my novel revision to reflect on fathers. Ironically, I’m working on a chapter in my book where my protagonist is hanging out with her dad. My book, on some level, deals with the father-daughter relationship since my protagonist, Rosa, only has one sibling–a sister named Frankie. The two are as close to their dad as any sons might be. They grew up fishing with their dad, they grew up shoveling snow with him and even played catch with him.

While this dad character I’ve created is not modeled after my own dad, the relationship certainly is. The closeness these girls feel for their father comes from the closeness I feel with my dad.

If my mother taught me the art of seeing, my father taught me the art of living. I’ve realized, as I’ve grown older, that my youth would not have been as rich were it not for my father’s insistence that we experience so much as a family and so much in general. He encouraged us to try all kinds of things and he worked hard to make it possible for us to do so.

Because of my dad, I’ve traveled all over Canada, hung out in the CN Tower in Toronto, watched the Carnaval festivities in Quebec, hung out in Montreal. I’ve traveled all over Europe and learned more about World War II history than I ever could have in a classroom. I learned to ice skate, I learned to ski, competitively, and skied mountains where world class skiers trained, and I learned to fly fish. I was able to learn to play the flute and achieve a level of competency that allowed me to attend Interlochen Arts Camp. There is likely not enough space in the blog-o-sphere to list everything he encouraged me to do and all that he gave me and my siblings. It’s been a rich life to be sure. Throughout my life, he’s been there to support me in so many ways, including being there during the two most important moments of my life–the birth of my son and the birth of my daughter.

We’ve had our share of challenges lately, but nothing can take any of that away.

Thanks Dad. Happy Father’s Day!

This photo of my dad was taken by my brother Paul Trapani, who is a professional photographer.

April 5, 2009

Magico Finestra

Here is a poem I wrote rather quickly that was inspired by the sculpture in Tecumseh called Magico Finestra. I judged a contest in Tecumseh of poems that were inspired by any of the sculptures currently up around Tecumseh. The sculptures are changing soon, but I was captivated by the way the window looked to be melting and the idea that glass is actually a liquid.

Magico Finestra

What is seen through

a melting window?

The red orange of brick spilling

slowly into new grass, colors

meeting, pushing against each other,

distinct for a moment before they

merge, becoming something new,

soft waves perhaps on a mucky-

bottomed lake churned from a summer

storm. The liquid sky holds a flock

of geese. A car horn calls

from the boulevard. I see

now that the window is set

in stone, as are the sky, the wall

and the grass.

I tried to put the photo on here, but I’m not sure how all these new formats work. Here is the link to the Art Trail Tecumseh brochure that shows a photo of the sculpture. I did get a chance to read the poem, which came together about fifteen minutes before the event. I’d been thinking about the sculpture for a while, though. Having a deadline made me get it out of my head an on paper.

http://www.downtowntecumseh.com/PDF/Art%20Trail%2061108highuse%20this%20please.pdf

July 27, 2008

Some thoughts, some announcements and a lazy Sunday morning

I hesitated to move to get my computer because my cat, Betty, was so comfortably curled up on my lap as I sat in the recliner, Jay’s recliner, watching my favorite television show, Sunday Morning on CBS. I tried calling my mother, who is probably sleeping, to tell her to watch it because artist Jim Dine’s gigantic Pinocchio sculpture cast in bronze was featured. Features on artists and writers are the main reason I love the show so much. Each interview is a glimpse into the creative sensibility. Dine said he’s studied Pinocchio so deeply because he is a metaphor for the creation of art, for the attempt of artists to bring objects to life. I thought my mother would be interested in hearing that. Right now, she’s trying to bring a moose to life. Right now, I’m trying to bring a group of people living in my head to life.

What am I thinking about this week? I’m thinking about Randy Pausch and his family. I’m also thinking about Jayme and Shabana and Cathy and Lola and Eddie and their families. Randy Pausch’s death brings all of these lost friends to the forefront of my thoughts. They were all so young. Yes, it makes me think of my own mortality and my battle with cancer, but more than that they all make me want to live fully. Like Pausch said at the last graduation that he attended at Carnegie Mellon University before his death, “We don’t beat the reaper by living longer, we beat the reaper by living well and living fully.”

Living fully today means enjoying a quiet Sunday morning. It would be spending that time with my kids, but they are living well and fully for the next month with my parents in Arizona. That’s their favorite thing to do in the summer, go to Arizona and hang out with my parents. My son has turned my mother’s sculpture studio into a putt putt golf course and both of them swim in the pool everyday with my parents and their yellow lab, Polo. So, I’m here on a quiet Sunday with my tabby cat curled up next to me again.

I planted a garden this year. We have zucchini, tomatoes, peppers and squash coming in. I go out there and pull weeds and find girl zucchini and squash blossoms and mate them with boy flowers. My mother told me I should do that. I’m 40 years old and my mother has finally told me about the birds and the bees. Anyway, I guess there aren’t enough bees around to do the job, so she said I need to go out and do the work of the bees. It’s working. We have a quite few zucchini and squash growing. Saddly, we had to lose our lovely elm tree this spring. It became diseased and died. It was dropping bark and I worried that it would drop large branches on our house or on our neighbors garage, so we got someone in to chop it down. It was a great shade tree. It covered our whole deck. Being able to plant the garden is the one positive that has come from cutting the shade tree down. It’s been the perfect summer to start a garden with all the rain we’ve had. I can’t wait for the kids to come home and help me pull weeds. I’ve planted pumpkins, so maybe they’ll be able to pick their own pumpkins for Halloween.

On the writing front, I’ve had some great things happening. I’ve also had a few rejections, which is par for the course. I was sitting at my desk on a busy Wednesday afternoon, our stressful deadline day, working hard at getting my stories and pages finished in order to put the paper to bed when my editor and friend, Jim, stopped at my desk and said he had some good news. He said he received an email noting that my column, “Just Another Day at the Spa,” about my first chemotherapy treatment, had just earned a seconed place for serious columns in the National Newspaper Association Better Newspaper Contest. This is my second NNA award for my personal column. It was wonderful news, especially on a Wednesday.

Next Sunday I’ll travel up to Flint to be featured on my friend Cathy’s (not the Cathy mentioned above) a.k.a. Gigi Humming’s radio show “Lunch Hour Poems.” We are going to discuss breast cancer and poetry. The show is on 94.3 WKUF Public Radio through Flint Kettering University. The link is www.kettering.edu/wkuf/. I think you can hear a podcast of it. It will air at noon on Sunday, Aug. 3.

I’ve revamped my website a bit. It’s still a bit under construction, but it looks much better than it used to. You can see it at www.cristinatrapaniscott.com.

It’s time to get back to my Sunday morning with my cat and my dear partner, Jay, who is officially a chef as noted on his diploma that he received in the mail yesterday.

Cheers and good living,

Crissy

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When one line drops from the sky…

Tag: art