What Limitation & Differences Make Possible
Evolution, Fertilization, Gaps and Leaps, Insight
Limitation #1: Time
I got the idea to continue from yesterday, because of my limitation and because I am doing this with Becky. My limitation is that I have to finish it within about 22 minutes. Either I could declare it done. Which I did with the others. Or I could go back and make what was done yesterday, into something else today.
You can expand time.
I got this idea from Becky who sent me pictures of work that she was in the process of making, the latest thing she’d done.
But, to change you have to be wiling to let go of what’s good.
What if I were to do that with my wonky heart, yesterday’s doodle. This would require I change it in a way that I couldn’t erase, possibly making it worse, not better than what currently existed.
To change what I’d completed yesterday I had to be willing to take it apart. That is hard for me because I struggle so with completion.
I am afraid to ruin something I’ve done that’s okay, because I am afraid that is as good as it can get. I don’t believe, that doing something different, and likely ruining it — undoing what I did before, or redoing it differently — will produce something better.
Good or evolving?
You can be an artist either way — choosing to do what you know to be good — or you can choose to keep experimenting, trying new things, and see where you end up. To be this kind of an artist, you have to believe that your pursuit isn’t for good, for being good, for being perceived to be good, but to answer a question you are asking yourself. Art is your medium, you way to travel. Though you make things that take you to the next stop. There is no end, only an endless dance.
Limitation #2: Refrain from commenting or offering an opinion, even a “positive” one
In our daily exchanges of doodles where she requested I don’t say anything negative or positive — and I understand very well why — we, I crave approval and if I get it, I will start focusing on doing it for the adrenal hit of having something I do liked, feeling that sense of accomplishment I am so very hungry for when someone is enthusiastic.
It’s easy to get waylaid by opinions, yours as well as other peoples.
Becky said, and I agree, the point of doing is to get into the practice of the daily showing up regardless of whether it will be liked that is what makes you an artist. You are not doing it to earn your keep, You are doing it because the doing itself changes you, transport you to a place where everything is larger and infinitely lovely. She may not have said it in those words but that’s what I took her to mean. The doing is everything. I have felt uplifted and returned to myself since I’ve started, 8 days ago. It’s not about any one doodle, it’s about what happens through the making of them.
Art is an investigation
And I learned, or remembered something else, was reminded of it in a very vivid way.
Art, the making of something, a creation in the becoming teaches you so much about the things you really want to know, that some part of you is asking. The art gives you a way to ask and a way to answer. It is like a weaving made up of strands, in and out.
Inspiration from not me: The Woven Book
Earlier in the week, she showed me a woven book she made. I could not ask her the. million questions I would have asked had I been allowed to express the enthusiasm I felt. How is it possible to make a woven book? That is a level of skill and cleverness and ability to hold a clear vision that I do not possess. I cannot fathom how it was done, nor would I ever be able to do something — not really. someone might try to show me how but it really was like being a sculpture and being able to take away and add so that only what was essential — in gesture, in character, in lingering affect remained, like a makes made of smoke dissipating.
Let’s just say, the difference — that she had done something I would never ever have thought to do — and had the artistry to pull off. That was stunning. I wasn’t sure what to do with that but it was inspiring.
Difference is electric and magnetic.
What I remembered, was the woven book, today when I was thinking about the background of the heart — something I didn’t have time to do yesterday and to day would make it a different drawing. It occurred to me that the lines behind the heart were woven in and out of each other. Not in an orderly way — a more haphazard way. If there was an orderliness to the pattern it was not apparent, except that a weave of strands in and out of one another, was perceptible, and in this iteration of the doodle, what I in fact did.
What Becky did inspired me in a way I didn’t expect — I found myself making a new move, trying something that would not have occurred to me before to try.
I made a leap in my drawing — the way an electrical spark leaps from one wire to the next, or the way that differences are somethings irresistibly attracted to what they are not.
We fertilize each other. Or we can.
Creative people need this kind of fertilization that comes from being inspired by something other. This is where sparks fly, where it is possible to skip from one neuron to another, it is the leap in that gap that makes you able to reach the other side. Without the delicious gap between people, between me and not me, between and everything around me, is what makes the leap, a real leap, a state change, a more expansive reality possible. We grow not just in age but in possibility. All growth contains a state change — a change of consciousness, a way of being and feeling.
Doing things other companions — those willing to accompany you — neither lead,, nor follow but walk by your side, is a tremendous gift. Like the weaving or the idea I could continue the doodle the next day — came from inspiration from the art and also from the doing of the art.
Inspiration from not me: Mexican Hearts
As I was going around the heart, making the outline of it thicker, I thought of those painted tin hearts from Mexico — a real human shaped heart, framed and often inflamed in fire. It struck me that different cultures use different symbols. Hearts, actual human hearts was part of Mexico iconography — what people might call folk art, which is really the ancient wisdom passed down encapsulated in an image.
In Arabic cultures it is the hand with the eye the center. The Hand of Fatima, I believe.
Of course there’s the cross in Christianity.
The buddha and the lotus.
The chakras.
The Rose.
On and on.
The dollar symbol…
The central symbol in these cultures says a lot about what is central to that culture.
Other cultures had hearts that were upside down spades. not beating hearts with veins and ventricles. I began thinking about the embodied nature of human experience, the the tender fallibility and unbelievable strength of our hearts.
Thinking about those Mexican hearts — I have one from Oaxaca next to my dining room table I decided I could add flames, and make it more like those Mexican hearts.
Not me and Me: A mezcla
I tried to make fa the lines were spiky, more like cactus needles than flames which I realize often curl voluptuously. At least in the way the flames behind the hearts were drawn, full of curves. I thought about how passion and love that was often obsessive or tragic or violent in its outcome, seemed to run not just through the hearts but also the music — the Rancheras and Boleros and the heartbreaking and heart opening music of Lhasa de Sela.
But the heart i drew looked more like it was a rather badly drawn cactus of some misshapen variety. It wasn’t a Mexican heart because if it was, it would have been rendered with far more skill than I have ever been able to muster. So it was a Mezcla — a mix of something Mexican, something taken from seeing Becky’s art, the fact that my white ink in my pen doesn’t make voluptuous swirls.
I’ve seen Mexican art with cacti as well. Perhaps this painting was showing me the prickly nature of my own heart. Perhaps there is some way I hold myself apart, like a cactus, shielding myself from a full embrace.
And that’s when I remembered, that when you play, you allow what you play with to teach you, to lead you, to take you on adventures. The work begins to be much more than object or a project completed. It begins to be more like your imaginary friend, your passionate dance partner breathing her hot breath into your ear.
I remembered, from when I played with Hilma — when you allow yourself to play, you make yourself available to wonder — and when you do so, revelations flow — you find yourself suddenly ecstatically in the flow, the dancer and the danced.
