My Turn

I broke my access to this blog while upgrading various programs on my web site (php in particular), and I ended up having to uninstall and reinstall Wordpress from scratch to make it work again. I restored my old posts from a backup, but some characters seem to have been misread in the restoration process. I have started cleaning up old posts, but it will take some time to edit them all, so if you encounter odd characters (other than me!), please read past them.

Actually, this may not be an issue: I seem to be having a problem accessing the archives, so you may not even be able to read older posts. I’ll work on this next.

Sigh.

The following rumination was sparked by a remark by someone I don’t know at a meeting sponsored by the Tucson Pima Arts Council to brainstorm strategies for incorporating the arts into planning for the economic recovery of Tucson.

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Imagine a world without art.

It wouldn’t be a world without beauty, because—face it—we’re surrounded by more beauty in nature than we mortals could ever create.

And it wouldn’t be a world without creativity, because humans survive by solving problems, and solving problems requires creativity.

And we would still express ourselves, still communicate with one another, because that’s what humans do; it’s who we are.

So what would be missing?

Artists. The impulse to make art. The impulse to express . . . what?

Art is expression. Art is a particular and peculiar kind of communication. Through it, we express feelings and ideas, pose questions, articulate meaning. So how is art distinct from language?

Before language, before expression, art is a response. Art is a particular way of responding to the world, different from thought but partaking of thought, different from feeling but partaking of feeling. Art is a way to process and understand information coming to us from outside and inside of us, a means to connect perception and thought and feeling, to discern relationships hidden in the clutter of the mundane.

Art is how we interpret the world.

And art making begins the moment we clutch our first crayon.

Would we even know beauty without art? Imagine color as a mere signifier of information: this yellow fruit is ripe; those green berries will make you sick; snakes with red stripes kill. Imagine form determined solely by function or ease of production. Imagine being unmoved by color, impartial to shape.

Imagine indifference to proportion, balance, symmetry, line. Imagine rhythm doesn’t matter and melody as simply sound. Imagine your life without narrative. Try to understand anything without metaphor. Imagine yourself unadorned, your home undecorated. Imagine nothing inspiring you to song.

Imagining is an act of art.

Responding to beauty, to symmetry, to rhythm is in our DNA, and making art is a primal response to beauty. We collectively make art because we must. We don’t all agree on what art is, but we all are drawn to whatever we define it to be. I believe we all enter life with the impulse—and the capacity—to make art. If we are able to follow that impulse, we make art for ourselves; if that impulse is thwarted, we find art nonetheless. Artists or nonartists, we gather it and surround ourselves with it.

Art is so much a part of our daily scenery that we sometimes forget how much we value it.

We value it because it gives us pleasure. We value it because it brings beauty to our personal spaces—indeed, it makes personal the spaces we inhabit.

But beauty isn’t the only reason we make art. Art is how we make sense of ugliness, how we find meaning in loss, how we understand pain. Art is how we make sense of life.

And so we also value art because it enables us to see the world and ourselves differently. We value it because it lifts us out of our everyday struggle for survival. We value it because it seems to speak directly to us, reminding us of truths we otherwise tend to forget. We value it because it connects us, and reconnects us, to ourselves and to each other and to the world and to something bigger than the world.

Art is how we talk back to life.

For some of us, art is how we speak with the divine.

Art is the language of the soul. Art is the voice—no, the breath—of spirit.

Spirit is what we express through art.

And spirit is what we need more than ever in these dim, uncertain days.

So take a moment today to experience the art around you, in all its forms—painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, writing, music, dance, drama, film, video, architecture, furniture, craft, fashion, food, graphics, tattoos—however you define it for yourself. Take it in; receive its gifts; know its wealth.

Imagine a world without it.

Artist Steven Derks just introduced me to a new blog, Tu Scene, dedicated to the visual art scene in Tucson. The woman writing the blog, who I understand is a newcomer to Tucson, is doing an amazing job of pulling together a detailed calendar and info about what is happening locally artwise. Check it out. I have added it to the blogroll list to the right for future convenience.

I have just joined Facebook, so if you are already a member, please find me and invite me to be your friend and become a fan of my page. I am new to this whole social networking thing, so please be patient with me while I learn the ropes. I joined because I’ve been hearing from many sources that social networking is the new wave of art marketing, but as a bonus, it looks like I may get to reconnect with some old friends as well. I very much look forward to that.

I also realized that I have been blogging more than I knew—just not in this blog. Instead, I have been posting updates to my home page, when I could have been doing it here instead. Realizing that will make me come here more. In addition, I will be figuring out how to integrate this blog into my Facebook activities, so there is added incentive to write more often.

I have neglected my art business this year, as I have focused on fixing up our new (to us) house. As I near the end of the major tasks, though, I find myself turning back with renewed drive. I am determined to be more disciplined on the business side of my art this year, beginning with my online presence. I am also bursting with ideas to try out on and off the lathe.

If you haven’t seen them already, here are some new-ish pieces that might hint at some of my new directions.

My studio is almost together, but I had to stop working on it to focus on the house itself, so that we can move in by the end of the month. It’s a satisfying but exhausting experience. Everything I do is for the long term: no throwing on paint to make a room livable; instead, it’s careful (and, yes, tedious) preparation followed by meticulous execution. Still to go is more painting and then laying floors.

Here are some photos of the initial transformation of the garage into my studio.

As you can see, the aluminum siding covered simple wooden louvers. I dismantled them and used the wood to frame the windows and air-conditioner and the siding on the outside, as well as for a frame for my dust collector, as you will see in later photos. Recycle!

Under the tutelage of my friend Art, I learned to frame a wall, install windows, put in insulation, put up drywall, and much more. In this photo, one wall opening has been framed and drywalled; the other is in process.

Since this photo, I’ve installed an air-conditioning unit and added trim around everything. I still haven’t finished caulking and prepping, and I still need to prime and paint, but I will get to it, I swear.

And inside, I’ve added a lot of new equipment—bandsaw, belt sander, drill press, dust collector—but haven’t yet moved over my lathes and tools. Except for a demonstration, I have not turned since the end of April. I miss it, but I am finding satisfaction in these other pursuits. It is exhausting, though, so I make no promises as to resuming regular updates to my blog.

My partner and I close on the purchase of our first house in less than a week. This means I will have my own studio for the first time! I’ve been having fun shopping for new equipment and planning my new space, which will be in the garage. The electricity in the garage is insufficient, so I am having an electrician install a new panel and a bunch of outlets. A friend of mine and I will frame one wall and install windows and a room air conditioner.

Besides working on my studio, I will also be laying new flooring in the house and repairing walls and painting and doing maintenance on the roof, so it may be a month or two before I actually return to turning full-time. In the meantime, I can still work in my current studio—whenever I’m not working on the house or packing and moving our stuff.

I will try to keep you up on the progress of my studio. I have been avoiding blogging because this has been the most stressful month I can remember in years! Besides, I’ve barely had time to turn. But very soon I’ll have something to blog about again.

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, last month I prepared (and gave) a talk for the docents of the Tucson Museum of Art, on woodturning as an artform. Besides giving a brief history of artistic turning, I described the basic anatomy of trees and discussed some of the characteristics of wood and the vessel form.

Thinking about the anatomy of a tree unsettled me this time around. Trees are living organisms; that wood was once alive, I feel, makes it unlike other media (except maybe basket materials). But the heartwood that woodworkers so value is dead wood. Heartwood is formed as a tree’s cells die; the life of a tree is all in those layers between the heartwood and the bark.

Heartwood, dead wood; a living organism dead at its center. The image has been stuck in my mind like a sand grain in my shoe.

Today, my perspective shifted. It occurred to me that heartwood is the tree’s past. It lives in the tree as our past—also dead, having literally passed—lives in us. Our history forms our structure, storing molecular bits of ourselves, recording cycles of abundance and privation, unseasonable frosts, long summers, lightning strikes, patterns of growth. Like trees, we become who we are as each old layer dies, as each new layer forms.

We live in the layers between our past and the (also dead) outer bark that protects us.

During my last show, I sat a lot with the piece called “Offering,” and I want to share some of how I feel about it.

The vessel was born of green wood, wet, as we are. My labor was long. The hollowing took two sessions, and to keep the wood from shrinking overnight, I swaddled it in wet cloth and stored it in plastic. After the hollowing, as the wood dried, the body took on its own shape: oval, rather than round, taller than it is wide when the long lip is down. The wood is imperfect, a little blotchy, bruised, even. But the vessel is lovely, softly lovely. When I cup it in my hands, I feel it sing itself, quietly, out to the world, offering itself—to me, to you, to the cosmos, to God, however you may conceive that energy or entity. In turn, I offer it on a platter, on a bed of its own shavings, the remains of what it was, by-products of its passage to what it has become.

I’m wondering if the universe just wants me to shut up for a while. I’m so crazy busy that I barely have time to breathe!

I leave for a show in Casa Grande in a couple of hours, then I come back to prepare a talk for the docents of the Tucson Museum of Art and prepare for the spring show at the museum. And, oh yeah, my significant other and I are trying to buy our first house at the same time! One with my own workshop, of course.

After being glued to the computer for 10 days or so, I have finally finished updating my work-for-sale pages. “Finished” is, of course, a relative term. There are about a dozen pieces I need to rephotograph before I can post them, but for now, I’m declaring I’m caught up, so today I get to go back into the studio!

I have so many pieces I want to make. Forcing myself to sit at home and work on my web site has required discipline. These tasks are not the ones you imagine when you think about being an artist. But if you don’t do them, you have to find another way to pay for your artmaking—or at least for your food and shelter.

I will blog more later. Now I’m off to make stuff!