I have recently changed my blog’s name.  The reason becomes quite obvious when you look at my old name, ha.  The lower case printing of thetaoofart was giving several of the readers a laugh.  So…..the new name is www.thetaoinart.wordpress.com.  I hope that you will visit my new site for further blog posts.

Cheers

Carolynn

Working on Sunflowers in My Room

There is an inherent force held  within these words.  To a child it can be particularly threatening, to an adult it most often is but a fleeting memory that still holds some trepidation.

When I was a child I actually enjoyed being sent to my room.  I sometimes wonder if I maybe did a few ‘naughty bits’  just to encourage that outcome.    My family was moderately large, living in a rather small house and not one of us escaped sharing a room.  However, when you were sent to your room, you were sent alone.  It was therefore a quiet, peaceful place, filled with every treasure a child could collect and admire.  It was the one chance for a child to slow down, ponder, imagine, create.   Who wouldn’t want to go to their room?

I just finished a book titled the War of Art by Steven Pressfield.  Wow, what a find that was for myself and my family.  The premise of the book is that there is a war, within each and every person,  that is responsible for holding us back from following our dreams and developing fully as a human being.  Actually, Steven points out several conflicts responsible for our demise but the one I am particularly interested in is that of merely ‘showing up’…or not.

Shortly before reading the War of Art I read the Outliers – The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell where he pointed out the infamous 10,000 hour rule which in its most basic form would have us believe that anyone, yes anyone, can become darn good at something…anything…if they are willing to  put in their 10,000 hours of effort  towards their goal.  After reading this book I was convinced, that as an artist, I needed to get busy building on those 10,000 hours.

When I first started painting Fridays were my days.  Those were the only days  I thought I had to do my work or ‘go to my room’.  I slowly began to realize that this was not enough.  If I were to get any better I would have to make more of a commitment to the process.  The funny thing was the more I went to my room, the more drawn I became to it.  It became the space where ideas flowed, where I could expose myself without criticism and reveal myself to myself (I also paint there, ha).  Now, there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t work in that marvelous space.  I started out painting in my kitchen and now have a beautiful studio space to work in.  I have learned however, that the space does not make the artist, the effort does.

This is true for every passion in life whether it is a mediation practise, a yoga practise, cooking, playing an instrument, writing…  we need to spend undisturbed, quality time with ourselves, in our element, to find out more about ourselves and what we can become.

It sounds as though I am giving everyone homework.  While I am.

Brown-eyed Girls - Monet's Garden, Giverny

I know that the title I gave for my next blog was “In Defence of the Jigsaw Puzzle”  but I decided to change it to “In Praise of the Jigsaw Puzzle”  because I feel that the word ‘praise’ is better suited for the subject of today.

At first glance you may feel that this posting is not for you but ‘read on MacDuff’.  For the painter this post might speak for itself  but hopefully it will speak to the rest of you creative souls out there as well.

It was about five years ago or so that I had the great good fortune of taking a ten week drawing class from one of our local teachers,  Rick McDiarmid.

This class drove home for me the rule of drawing:  forget the subject of what it is you are drawing and instead focus on drawing the shapes within and around the subject.  This class taught me that when drawing, shapes matter and I have since come to realize that this is also true when painting.

Around the same time that I took this drawing class, I had the opportunity to travel to France to paint.  While visiting Paris I was able to see, first hand, the use of coloured ‘shapes’ that the impressionists employed.  Cezanne stands out in my mind as one who ‘built’ his paintings by placing different coloured and valued shapes next to one another in a deliberate way.  It was sometime later that I realized that  this method of  ‘laying down paint’  was oddly familiar to building a jigsaw puzzle.

It just so happens that I love making  jigsaw puzzles, so this little realization intrigued me.  I began to use this method of  laying down paint  to ‘build’  my paintings, shape by shape, while looking carefully at my subject.  It didn’t matter whether it was a still life or a painting from a photograph, I could see marvelous shapes of colour, lights, darks, cool, warm, thin and thick.  The building blocks of a painting.

The following year we were in Giverny painting and low and behold in the gift shop there was a jigsaw puzzle of Monet’s La Pie.  I bought it.  Well, that puzzle was without a doubt the most difficult puzzle I have ever built.  My family even abandoned me and left me to finish it on my own.  As I puzzled away I realized that Monet, too, used this method of placing colour to create his scene, mood and all.  I learned so much from that experience that I now teach painting based in part on what I have observed from the building of the lowly jigsaw puzzle.

Something else comes to mind when I think of the piece by piece building of an image.  It applies to pretty much every creative pursuit.  Think of a quilt, a mosaic, a sweater, a novel, a lyric, a tune….a life!

A life is a series of pieces or events, interlocking to make a whole.  Not one piece should be disregarded, brushed under the rug, corners clipped,  for every piece is integral to the whole.

Just as a painter looks for contrast, strong compositional elements, value changes, strong evidence of  repetition and fabulous colour, so too, should we be looking for this in our lives.

Next time you have a chance to experience someones painting, look closely, check-out how it was ‘built’ and see if there is something personal you might take from what you see.

Writing is a new experience for me…I paint, I don’t often get the chance to write.  I have decided however, that painters have things to say.   This blog will hopefully allow me to have my say.  I hope that anyone who wishes to respond will feel free to do so and that this dialogue will help to solidify our collective, creative urges within.  I do need to stress that  I am a painter, not a writer, and would appreciate that any spelling, grammar or structural errors that you might find within  the writings be ignored.

Probably the first point of order is a quick explanation to my choice in naming the blog.

The Tao of Art…   Tao loosely translated means the ‘way’, ‘path’, or ‘route’.  I once read that the Tao is often used as a philosophy to signify the fundamental or true nature of the world.  It is believed that the Tao precedes and encompasses the universe,  that the named (all observable objects) reside within the nameless.  The Tao can never be adequately expressed in words but it can be known and its principles can be followed.  There is no controlling or understanding the Tao.  I am a newbie when it comes to this philosophy and its principles but I can see , even within this loose translation, the significance of this ‘way’ with respect to the creative process.

As a painter, I have experienced glimmers of this ‘way’ within small strokes of my brush, while painting in my garden, a forest or by the sea.  I have seen it within artists I have met and teachers I have had.  It is quite exciting to think that the profession I have chosen enables me to experience these glimmers and to in turn, pass them on to my own students.  Painting is a process, as is life and  I hope in the upcoming postings to explore these processes from my prospective as an artist and an investigative, curious, human being.

Look for my next blog titled “In Defence of the Jigsaw Puzzle”

ps  I tried to figure out how to attach the title of the image in this posting to no avail.  The title of the piece is “The Spirit of the Rainforest”.