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.

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.

Because of your generosity in all its forms, I celebrate a year of successes small and large, an abundance of love, a wealth of prospects.

I thank you and wish you a happy and prosperous new year. May you receive back tenfold all you have given me.

I like to think myself courageous in the face of any challenge, but I’ve recently had to learn a new kind of courage: the courage to be happy.

It’s a strange concept for someone who has spent her life fighting—to survive, to be, to want to live.

This strange new idea was reinforced recently by a touching scene in an episode of the TV series Pushing Daisies (“Smell of Success,” broadcast November 21, 2007). In the scene, Vivian Charles, one of a duo of retired synchronized-swimming sisters who have been grieving the apparent death of their niece, addresses her sister, Lily.

“It used to make you so happy, the water. I think it’s brave to try to be happy. You’ve gotten so comfortable being unhappy. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to wake up in the morning and choose to be happy? To let the water wash everything away?”

The episode ends with a sweet rendition by Vivian of Cat Stevens’s “Morning Has Broken” as the sun breaks through rain and the sisters return to the water.

Although I do embrace what Mary Oliver says in her poem “The Swan” (see my post for July 31) and although the act of creating beauty both delights and satisfies me, I also must recognize that I—always, and more and more—aspire to make art that not only is beautiful but also expresses meaning—by which I mean it reveals a truth.

Here is the current version of my ever-evolving definition of artmaking, at least as it pertains to me: an act of rendering (with all that word’s wonderfully resonant connotations) objects and experiences that communicate some discovered emotional truth about the nature of life (mine specifically or life in general).

I realize that this definition doesn’t mention “beauty.” On the one hand, I could accept as a premise Keats’s “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’” On the other hand, perhaps I have been conflating “beauty” and “art.” Chekhov said, “Art tells the truth” (Picasso said, “Art is the lie that tells the truth”)—and beauty is enough because beauty is a truth—but must art be beautiful? Certainly, I do not find all art beautiful—is that because I don’t get the truth their makers have tried to express? Then again, not all truth is beautiful. I can find beauty in even many painful truths but certainly not in all.

For me, for now, the bottom line is that I have not yet wanted to create art that was not also in some way beautiful. That may be my own limitation. For now, though, I leave for another time the question of whether the art I make must be beautiful.

Thinking about expressing meaning leads me to think about language, and all the vocabularies I can use to communicate.

More than a vocabulary, each art is really a language of its own, with its own grammar and system of signs—and its own way of apprehending the world. From studying several languages (English, German, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese), I know how greatly concepts and perception (the roots of culture) can differ from language to language.

I speak woodturning now, and live in a world of curves. As a writer, I also speak not just English, but the specific dialect of formal written English. This second (first, third, whatever) language greatly shapes my wood art, as does Japanese. To a lesser extent, I also speak ceramics (mostly the dialect of vessels) and music (a family of languages: melody, rhythm, dance) in my art. I’m just beginning to try a few words and phrases from fiber arts (sewing, resist dyeing, weaving, papermaking) and metalworking in a few pieces.

One of the qualities I love most about English is its robustness, vigor that I attribute largely to the ease with which it assimilates concepts and vocabulary from other languages. (I suppose English—at least American English—and American culture?— is a bit like the Borg of languages: resistance is futile.) Such robustness is a quality I aspire to as an artist.

The Swan

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air—
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music—like the rain pelting the trees—like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds—
A white cross streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

—Mary Oliver, from Why I Wake Early (2005)

And there is this quote from an interview with her: “I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us.”

Lesya came in not to dance but to carve waves for Siegfried’s collaborative wave piece. Sadly, there were misunderstandings early on in the communication process for this collaboration, and Sean and Jean-François won’t be working on it. Happily, Peter did and Lesya is and I will and Elisabeth may. And in the end, the public also will, as the piece will be installed as an interactive work, with anyone free to arrange the wave forms as they like.

Siegfried continued carving his box elder vessel. He later found that mounting it on the lathe to carve let him see and control better what he was doing.

Sean worked on new and old pieces. The black in this one is not painted but ebony.

Jean-François and I began our collaboration, based on an idea I used in a previous work, of breaking and repairing vessels visibly. Here are the vessels we started with. Jean-François turned the Chinese elm and osage orange bowls; I turned the sycamore bowl (the smallest).

Breaking the piece takes a bit of will. We broke the sycamore bowl into just three pieces.

Jean-François hit the Chinese elm bowl squarely and got a complicated break, which made gluing it—using 5-minute epoxy with a working time of maybe 2 minutes—a real challenge. Adding acrylic paint to the epoxy for color decreases (maybe even halves) the working time, so I use 30-minute epoxy at home. The 5-minute version is what we had on hand here, though. (For anyone who wants to know more about coloring epoxy, I discuss the subject in an article called “Nulling Voids: Filling Cracks and Holes in Wood” that, along with other articles, is available on my website under “Other links.”)

We used red for the sycamore and black for the Chinese elm. I mixed the red from acrylic paints; the black we achieved by mixing in charcoal from burnt wood (which Jean-François happened to have in jar).

I like the way the interior of the sycamore bowl came out; the exterior needs some touchup, though.

This technique—this trope, really—is deeply meaningful for me (you can read a note about the backstory on this here, under “About the work”), and it is one I intend to explore in a series of works after I return home. Using it in this collaboration is a little odd for me—like choosing a subject like, say, “death” or “incest” for a poetic exercise—and I find myself holding back emotionally, treating the process as more of a technical exercise than an act of artmaking. I would like to talk with Jean-François about how he feels about this process—indeed, how he feels about artmaking in general. I have wanted to from the beginning—the chance to explore the subject with other artists is one reason I applied for the residency—but before now, I have felt stymied by the language barrier—even though Siegfried and I managed a deep conversation about it driving home from D.C. This now is an opportunity to explore the subject.

For me, turning is deeply emotional, not just an application of technique, and it is an act in which meaning is both intentional and discovered. For me, the aspect of meaning—not technical sophistication—is what makes turning an art and not just a craft. I can argue with myself about this, of course—is not craft about creating beauty and is not creating beauty meaning enough? Yes, yes—but I’ll put this statement out in hopes of eliciting conversation about it. Turners who regard yourselves as artists (any artists, really), what do you say? Have your objects meaning? Is the meaning intentional? Do you start with wanting to express something, or does the expression emerge through the work? How do you create? Have you something to say? Must an artist have something to say? Is it enough to create objects in which others find their own meaning? Is beauty enough? Do any of you care, or do you care only about the making?

I really must sleep now. Let me hear from you, readers.