Participating in a creative exchange: The push of a SPARK

So this won't be the usual post about food, as you may have guessed from the image. This is my latest painting, which I have titled "In the Garden." I made it as part of my participation in a creativity exchange called SPARK. SPARK is a way for visual artists, writers, and musicians to inspire other artists and to get a creative spark in return. During each 10-day round, pairs of artists and writers exchange a piece of writing, music, or artwork and use it as creative inspiration to create something new. In other words, it's a creative kick in the butt--something I have sorely needed considering it's been a year since I painted anything new. And I really do love(/hate) to paint.

So when the call for more artists came from SPARK, I signed up. I'll admit, I was nervous: What if I didn't like the inspiration piece? What if I made something horrible? What if I couldn't finish? Eek, ack, gah! Then, the 10-day round of SPARK started. I received these song lyrics from my SPARK partner, Sharon Deegan, as my inspiration:

Are you ready to face the feast my soul companion?
Pull off the boots made for silent marching through the night?
Well you’ve been appeasing corpses, shunning angels,
And me, I’ve been turning the compost every couple of days and my garden grows
Over the bones, and my garden grows.


Do you think you can stop your digging, drop your shovel?
Wash the dirt from your calloused hands?
Life is a well from which we’re all drinking,
How shall we meet our thirst’s demands?


Well you’ve been
Invited to your own wedding,
Invited to your own birth.
Love lies waiting for You-
(spending all your time just trying to bury your true heart
In a plot of dark and lonely and cold unyielding earth )


Will you ever be ready to 
Face the feast  my soul companion?
Pull off the boots made for silent marching through the night.  

When I read it, I was relieved to enjoy the piece. I read the lyrics a few times, allowing specific words and images to hook into me, assuming an idea for a painting would emerge. And it did.

One of the most enjoyable things to do when reading a poem, or in this case lyrics, is to consider individual words. What thoughts do they engender? What alternative meanings do they have? What associations do they have? When you have gathered together this cornucopia of thoughts and ideas, the question becomes how do you put them all together again? How do you form meaning? That explains the process both of unpacking a poem and then of developing new ideas.

Here are some of the ideas and connections I got from Sharon's lyrics: The image of working in a garden and turning over compost reminded me of a poem about compost by Walt Whitman. Whitman's poem celebrates the transformative qualities of compost (and anyone who is a gardener will know what I am talking about), this seemingly miraculous ability of worms and heat and time to transform leftovers, scraps, trash into fresh, dark, beautiful soil that nourishes the garden. The ability of the earth to take death into itself and bring forth life. The ability of the earth to turn rot into the very definition of freshness.

Sharon's lyrics suggest a similar transformation, of burying bones (a tragedy? participation in war? the loss of a loved one?) and allowing the earth to transform them from pain and rot into a feast.

One of the things I wanted to do with my painting was to create layers, to suggest decaying leaves that something fresh and green could grow from, to mimic a process of accretion. Also to suggest the process of letting time and the earth transmute pain, grief, and death into green plants, fresh life, a garden, a feast. This idea of layers reminded me of a painter I heard of many years ago, Claudia Bernardi. She builds up rich saturated images of pure pigments, layer upon layer. Her painting process suggests the work she has done with the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Unit to exhume noncombatant civilians who were murdered during the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala. In this work, she patiently uncovered layers, using the painstaking tools of archaeology, to lay bare a history of grief and thereby to transmute the darkness into new life and hope.

So these were some of the ideas that went into the painting. I hope that I captured some of the thoughts and feelings that went into writing the lyrics. The process of making the painting itself featured a lot of stress and terror. From creating the underdrawing and then covering that over with paint. Every layer of paint represents another possibility of catastrophe: of making a mistake or a bad choice that you can't recover from. Making the painting was a good reminder: Being creative is an act of courage. Making something new, something for others to like or dislike or misinterpret, is extraordinarily hard to do. Will I do it again? Absolutely.

 

Working my way back to inspiration

I started sliding weeks ago, before our dog got sick and we had to put her to sleep. Losing her made me let go. No, losing her made me tell myself it was OK to let go and slide some more. To sink into a wallow of not trying, not being passionate, not caring much, and just getting by--not really a pit of despair so much as a comfy couch of meh. I lose focus and energy sometimes. This is especially true when I've worked hard for a time toward making significant changes in my life and behavior, when I have consistently toughed something out for a few months, but that first, fat rush of progress slows down. When the realization sinks in that change will no longer have dramatic effects, but is now the standard. When the work (easier now, granted) remains, but the heroics of fighting up that hill aren't there anymore. I just don't seem to have the hang of just living. I am either sinking deeper and deeper into my worst habits, with attendant ill effects on mental and physical health, or I am struggling mightily to get back up again. It's a tedious, frustrating cycle. A cycle I want to break.

Knowing that inspiration doesn't strike magically and mysteriously from the universe, but must be sought for, I tried to get out of the funk and find inspiration again. I flipped through books, started looking over my long-neglected Google Reader with its array of blogs and learned about a food blogger named Jennifer Perillo who lost her husband suddenly. A community of bloggers and readers poured out care, love, and concern. I felt deep sadness for Jennifer's loss, but couldn't help but ask myself why. Why did I feel so much for someone I did not know? I hadn't even read her blog before. Then, a few days ago, I learned through Facebook that a former colleague had died. A man I had liked very much, but not known well because we had little cause to spend much time together. I felt hideously voyeuristic when I went to his Facebook page and read the loving comments from close friends and family. Once again, I felt genuine grief and loss for someone I knew so little. One of the saddest things is to like someone but not have a chance to know them better because there isn't enough time.

I feel their loss because I can imagine what it would do to my life if I lost Mike or someone else close to me. It would leave a black hole that would distort all life around it--a void that would be almost unbearable. But like most people, I would force myself to keep going, to figure out a way to live with the void, and even eventually to learn to be happy again, even though early days would see me preferring to creep under the blankets and sleep my way to oblivion.

So what is this possibly morbid mulling over death about? Well, there's just plain sadness and grieving, but there's also the recognition that to overcome any emotional pain, whether it be the loss of a loved one or loss of passion and focus takes work. It takes going through the motions of doing what some part of you knows matters to you. It takes forcing yourself to think about what you care about and why. It takes remembering what you value.

And so, I am trying to remember what matters to me and why. Why do I care about food? Why do I care about art and literature and music? They connect me to humanity and life as little else can do. These are the things I return to again and again after losing my footing. (That's at least one definite good thing about me: I don't give up. I may fail a lot, but I always try again.) Sure food is good, and restaurants can be fun, glamorous, tantalizing. I enjoy watching great chefs do masterful things with ingredients and make edible works of art. But my care for these things is more fundamental than that. It's about connecting. It's bringing family and friends around a table to share in something together. It's passing along history and culture from past generations to future ones. It's linking your body and existence in a tangible way with the earth and the people who bring food into being. After weeks of slipping up and eating too many soulless meals in chain restaurants, I have to remind myself how much justice matters to me. How much it cuts me to the core when I eat foods that are produced by slaves, that are grown by poisoning the earth and abusing animals. Good arguments may be made for producing food in sustainable ways, but for me the reasons are all emotional. I love getting my food from the people who grew it. The large, heavyset farmer who handles his peaches like fragile kittens. The father that bickers in a comfortable, loving way with his son who can't seem to add up the total correctly. The pretty woman with brown hair and freckles who says eggs are her favorite food and sells me beautiful, tender greens. The cute young guy with a nose like a chisel and dirt under his nails who sells me flats of berries. These are the individuals who worked miracles, turning dirt into food and then worked more and slept less to get it to me.

Making food is a form of creativity--like all arts, it's an expression of the individual and the cultural context of that person. Ultimately, it's a way to communicate. That's why I love food and art and music and literature, because these are ways out of the isolation within our skin and minds, ways to cross the boundaries between us.

It's now 2:30 in the morning, I am tired and foggy. But I know what I have to do tomorrow: I have to think about what matters to me. I have to start work on a new painting. And I have to make food for my family that says that I love them.