p e n c h a n t

one: to repel flies while working in the garden, tie lemon balm in your hair or rub it into your skin. I do this frequently, because I don’t like commercial sprays, and the buzzing and biting of flies is annoying

two: when creating a work of art, capture the essence of the idea or the subject, then stop—in this case, the greenery in the hair. to continue on to complete the face would have been fine, but it also would have changed the focus. once the art becomes more developed, it’s easy to forget the original inspiration. if I had gone on to create a full painting, I would have put the lower portion of the face in shadow

this is a visual journal sketch, drawn quickly because the garden was calling
ballpoint pen & acrylic on paper

empty pencil sharpener

scrape palette

stretch canvas

adjust skylight-

unlock trunk

catch dreams—

feed dragon

The moon grinning at me like a Cheshire cat on a limb. Private joke, I guess.

(See enlargement for a better view.)

There seem to be many myths about art and creativity. One of them is that the process of creativity is done under the sway of some nebulous creative mood, which comes seldom and vanishes at its own mysterious will. You must wait for it the way you wait for the sun to come out.

“So,” I’m asked occasionally, “you work when you’re in the mood, when those creative juices flow?”

Mood, shmood. If you want to use the word mood, mood runs in our veins, along with all those creative juices. That’s what our gray matter consists of. That’s who we are.

“If I waited for The Mood,” I usually say, stressing the The, “I’d be flat broke.” (Not that I’m rich, mind you, not even close—that’s another myth.)

If there’s any mood to be had, we create it.

We go to work, not unlike a man with a shovel across his shoulder, with a purpose to perform. We may not know what the exact result will be—usually we don’t—but we are engaged the entire way through, from the first glimmer of concept to the final polished result. If we’re an illustrator we have story to start from, and we respond according to its needs. If we’re a writer we have something to say, and we endeavor to say it in the most succinct, unique way we can.

In the process, we are pulling something out of nothing.

That’s work, believe me. It may not be brow-beading (though sometimes it is), but it’s certainly brow-beating, soul-sweating, mind-wearying.

Also in the process, we are pulling something out of a vast reservoir—the accumulation of all those somethings, whether they’re from years of formal education, practice, life’s experiences, or intensive research. That, too, takes hard work. Lots of it.

Am I in the mood? Give me pen and paper. Just possibly, if I try hard enough, I can put you—not in The Mood, but in a mood. A mood that enhances the subject. That may have an affect on how you see, or think, or feel or laugh or cry, in that moment. Or even longer.

We’re mood makers, not mood twiddle-our-thumbs anticipators.

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Written moodily.

and a crimson of cardinals burdens the birdfeeder, five crows—one with a hiccup
that follows its every caw—come harassing, the cat who wanted out wants in again,
both wood stoves, upstairs and down, are coughing and choking, and the ink in my
pen’s gone cold.

artwork is charcoal—the real stuff, right from the hearth—on charcoal paper

I wrote this years ago as a creative writing exercise. It’s a little quaint, but I think there’s something here worth saying.

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It wasn’t from anger or frustration, but from passion and pressure and overuse.

Picture a cutaway view of a room, like a medieval painting of a monk’s cubicle, womblike. The light is dreamy. On the tarnished floor sits a black swivel chair—sometimes it is a throne, sometimes a hard stool.

At present  it is a stool, and on it sits a body, bent and laboring. It is a man: he is an artist. Above him hovers a cloud, and in the cloud swirl myriad colors and shapes, images, vagaries and histories, questions and definitions and elusive unknowns. He takes a swipe at the cloud now and then, and like a wide-eyed child after a firefly, brings the brush down to draw it across the empty surface before him. He does this defiantly at times, at times with uncertainty, but always with quiet anticipation.

And there it appears: a thing once invisible, to see. Proof of intellect, of desire, of pain perhaps, of love.

It is the most brilliant spot in the room.

But look! See the spot spread, watch it grow; it washes over the astonished artist, spills across the room; it appears greater than even the cloud.

The cloud grows bright too. Sometimes it swells. But sometimes it rains gloomy and dark; sometimes it shrinks, almost vanishing completely.

Yet the artist works on and on and on.

One day his weary hand breaks—his work-weary, gnarled hand. He bandages it up.

But how the cloud grows, grows to an enormous height, towering over him! So he straps the brush to his bandaged hand, and once again plunges and plunges and plunges into an ocean of turbulent hues, storm-wracked, severe under northern light.

One day the brush breaks. It snaps on a rugged landscape of a face: a commanding, crowded brow filled with concept, and stained-glass mysteries of eyes.

The artist is left with his broken brush, splintered at the heart and hanging by an impossible shred. This brush that conjured magical fog, ran across glorious hills, sharpened life into focus, stirred a vast sea of spirits.

He wraps up the brush—wraps it and wraps it as with a shroud. But underneath the wraps, the brush remains broken.

The light is fading in the cutaway scene; the room becomes lone and silent. The cloud blackens; it rains and rains and rains and rains. It rains until there is no more rain. The cloud is gone.

But the brilliant spot is propped up in eternity for all the world to see.

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I’ll be taking a break from blogging for a few weeks in order to meet some deadlines.

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In a time when class distinctions and attitudes prevailed, John Ruskin believed there were two classes of people: the working and the idle. Both types could be found among the rich and poor, hence the idle rich and idle poor become one class, and the working rich and working poor another. He was encouraging understanding, acceptance, and respect among workers within all economic conditions, a focus on character and productivity, rather than status and education.

Work is a curse and a blessing. We labor under its burden, we are lifted by its benefits. Its burden may be physical or psychological or both. So may its benefits. They may be small or great, deep or trivial, transient or eternal.

Last winter I spent two weeks in California’s Central Valley, working alongside a contractor friend, David, who was building two additional complexes for a boys’ home. As we were hanging a set of doors, David remarked, “This is work!” I looked at him and said, “To me, it’s not.” True, my arms ached, my back was in a sweat, the splinter in my palm was burrowing in, lunch was too far off and always too soon to go.

However.

I was not staring at blankness, grasping for inspiration. There were no contortions of ideations throbbing in my head. I was not on deadline. It was not the eleventh hour; this was not a painting I had labored over for days, or even weeks, that was going awry, that thousands of viewers would judge by their reactions or absence of, that the author would stake some of his or her hopes on, that I would actually be paid for, succeed or fail ….

This was not a year-long—or two years or three—literary work.

This was a house. It would be a home. A home to some troubled young men who perhaps had no home, or who’d had no welcome offered from anywhere or anyone else.

However frequent the frosty mornings chilled my bones, the distant Sierras warmed my senses. However often my trigger-itchy finger, firing multiple nails when only one would do, sent David scurrying for cover, his laughter eased my chagrin. However occasional the back-burdening hauling of lumber dulled my zeal, the thought of home sustained me.

This was not work, this was respite.

As I sit drawing at an open window this evening, listening to the stillness, the crickets, and intermittent falling leaves, I think how blessed I am to be here. To be at home, working.

Illustration from an early 20th-century poster, artist unknown