Ojalá, Selah, Lateda

Artist’s Way: Week 2

This has been a very intense week for me. My emotions have been all over the place. Politics, weather, global issues, office issues, and family schedules all seemed to be boring down on me to keep me from focusing on the week’s reading and tasks. Friday I didn’t manage to do more than write the date in the notebook where I keep my morning pages. I was wondering if I needed to just call the whole thing off and go find a hole to stick my head in ostrich style. But then yesterday morning, Saturday, I woke up enough ahead of my family to spend half an hour in meditation on the Prayer of Saint Francis and then start on my morning pages. I thought I would write 6 pages instead of 3 to make up for the day before. Instead I wrote 14. The time spent meditating on the prayer right before the writing really helped me zero in on my strongest block in letting myself be an active artist. The prayer is a well known one but always worth reading again:

Lord make me an instrument of Thy peace;
That where there is hatred I might sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I might seek
not to be consoled, but to console,
not to be understood but to understand,
not to be loved, but to love.
For it is by giving that we receive,
by pardoning that we are pardoned,
and by dying to self that we are born into eternal life.

It was as I was repeating that last part that I realized that a big part of me still thought that making art was too much about myself, about my being understood, my being loved, about creating little images for the sake of my own pleasure in them. I couldn’t see how making visual art was going to do anything at all the further the kingdom of God. I realized that I could see how words or music could be an outreach but I was completely devaluing the power of images. But as I scribbled through page after page I came to feel the Holy Spirit’s assurance that I am being led down a path. That though I can’t see it from here that there is a way that God can use my images for something and that I was not being selfish or egocentric or un-Christian by trying to make art. I am not doing justice to the moment, I am uncomfortable when I read myself starting to sound too mystical, so let me just say I had a great spiritual/artistic breakthrough. I left my waking family and took a leisurely walk through my neighborhood to enjoy the feeling for a while before beginning our day.

And what a day we had. We had breakfast as a family before my husband went off to work and the kids and I headed to soccer practice. My daughter made a new friend and they played without incident as I sat sketched out ideas for my Illustration Friday submission. We came home and showered and dressed and then since I had taken my solitary walk in the morning we went on a 3 person artist date. My kids and I drove up to Dahlonega and had a great lunch at a neat little Italian place, listened to live bluegrass music in the square and then drove through the mountains to the Funky Chicken Art Project which I have been meaning to visit for several years now. We really enjoyed ourselves. When we came home we rested for a while and then the kids worked on painting their birdhouses while I started turning my sketches into a painting. We ate our leftovers from lunch for dinner and kept painting till bedtime. It was a lovely day.

The painting is not lovely. It is very awkward, but I posted it for Illustration Friday’s “Island” prompt anyway. The image is an honest one and painting it helped me in dealing with the political/spiritual angst I’ve been feeling. Besides I am really embracing this “it’s ok to make bad art” concept. Now I can’t wait to get started on week 3.