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.

 

My garden has run amuck

I am exhausted today after staying up late last night writing something that was perhaps overly emotional and embarrassing, but, hey, there it is, I did it, let it stand. I can't undo what I've done.

So I am moving on. Being in a wildly dreamy, exhausted state of mind, I have been catching up with lots of reading, especially some of the blogs I follow. I have enjoyed beautiful pics, friendly cooking advice, interesting facts and tidbits about the state of the food industry. (I especially like the link to "endangered foods" that I found at Civil Eats.) (Most of the blogs I follow are in the blog roll; I definitely recommend checking them out.)

As I was reading them, one reason I like them so much came to me. The photos--beautiful, composed, and professional though they may be--don't feel like catalog photos. They don't make you long for things you don't have. Or, to be more precise, they don't make you long for things to buy. They often make me long for things I can create, but that's an altogether different kind of longing. And I like that.

Another thing I like is that they show glimpses of real lives, of real pockets of beauty nestled within the everyday. In an everyday I can find if I only try and look for it.

In the spirit of finding my own pockets of beauty, I took my camera out back to the garden I have woefully neglected for the last month. Sadly I let lots of tomatoes die on the vine, but there's still a little beauty left back there. At least I think so.

Here is the lemon I thought a rascal of a squirrel had stolen when I couldn't find it the other day. But here it is, still attached to my little lemon tree.

Signs of new life on the lemon tree. I am thankful. Especially because it lost most of its leaves over the winter.

False indigo floating in a puddle left after Irene.

Winslow, my fat grumpy cat. He thinks he's a tiger. I hate to break it to him...

The basil still looks good. Soon, I will harvest it and make a batch of pesto to freeze for later.

An out-of-control stalk of grass, almost ready to reseed itself.

A cluster of cherry tomatoes left from a wilderness of vines that reached more than seven feet high at one point, which are now a brown and ugly mess. I'll leave these in the hope that I can make something of them.

A sprig of ivy, taking over the fence.

The bird feeder Mike's uncle Melvin made for us, chewed by squirrels.

A lovely fern, growing by the compost box.

Some of our harvest bounty--still not sure what to do with it all...

I also decided to start some plum jam. I bought a whole mess of plums at the farmer's market on Saturday morning, before the rain from Irene began to roll in. Most of them are prune plums, but I am afraid I can't remember what the bigger ones are. I like the red etchings on some of them. Looks like a galaxy of stars trapped within a thin skin.

I love the contrast of the purple skin with blue bloom against the strange green of the flesh. I wonder what color the jam will be? Of course, I won't know until tomorrow, because I ran out of sugar. No matter, I will let the plums macerate with the sugar I have and then we will see. It may be beautiful. It may be weird. That's part of the fun.