While I awaited the time for my appointment with Dr. Shoja, I cleaned up the house. I’d been neglecting my domestic duties because of the pull to be outside every day (and the pull to do nothing). It felt good to get the place looking spiffy clean again. I was happy to know that once my meeting with Dr. S. was over, I could go for a nice long walk in the sunshine with Her Highness and then spend the rest of the day working in the yard. Plus, I was looking forward to an afternoon spa in the sunshine.
It appears certain that I will get the fuel and auto insurance disability rebate. I’m grateful for this financial break because the cost of living has increased so very much of late. Getting 25% off my fuel and auto insurance is a godsend. I may even be getting a 25% refund on the auto insurance I paid for the past six years.
The yurt arrived. A large truck with a monster crane brought and unloaded enormous bundles of building materials, all wrapped in white plastic. Dave bought a yurt kit that will enable him and Andrew to build it fairly quickly. Dave said it would only take them two days to put up the exterior walls. I love watching all the work, seeing changes every day.
I yard work in the afternoon. Slowly, slowly, Pinecone Park is coming into its best self. Whereas once my gardens looked more barren than planted, they are looking mighty fine now. It takes a long time for gardens to mature, unless you’re rich and buy a bazillion plants. I’ve still a few holes to fill, but they the gardens are looking pretty good.
•
I once did a public project so that I could use the exercise. It was a huge project on my part, but fun for the students who did the interviews. I used the results of the project to make an impression on all my students while I was at Emily Carr U.
The hard part, my part, was making the artwork for a mini exhibition within a group show. I had to make the artwork, but I can’t paint and my drawings are not exhibition worthy. Where I can excel, however, is with pencil crayon, but creating fairly large works by pencil takes forever! Still, I made a dozen drawings. But to make things simple, I made each drawing of a part of the Sistine Chapel. The Chapel images provided the design, and I changed the colours of the original. I drew in a painterly style, each panel of a single colour—as in the clothing, and even the faces—appeared to be a single solid colour when seen from a distance, but up close, you could see that in fact the entire surface was made up of strokes of many colours.
The point of the exercise, however, was not my artistry with pencil crayons. I drew the drawings because I chose to leave two or more bare patches of paper, each one ½” square and in a quite prominent place on the drawing. I called my little exhibition, Scolo Nascosto. It means hidden meanings in Italian. I chose the name because the purpose of the show was on the squares.
Students from the school newspaper did the rest of the work. The school was a university of art and design. My purpose captured the interest of the student journalists. They spent hours with the show. When people stopped to look at my work, the students would let them linger, and then they’d approach the visitors. They asked for a few minutes of the visitors’ time, and then the asked each viewer questions. All the questions were designed to provoke the visitor to mention the blank, unfinished squares.
NB: These weren’t really squares. They were blank spaces with rough edges of the surrounding colours. They looked like blotches. I tried to make them look like the drawing was not finished. I remember that the last question was really a strong hint to help the visitor say: “There were empty spaces, like it was unfinished.” Or something like that.
As soon as a visitor mentioned the squares, the interview with them was over. Every visitor who did not mention the empty spaces were walked back to the show and shown the spaces. I dreamed this whole thing up to see what percentage of the people walked back to the drawings would say, when shown the squares: “I didn’t even see them.”
A statistician would make mincemeat of my process. Regardless, 62% of the visitors walked back said it. That amazed my students and thrilled me. I did not do it to shame the viewers. I did it because the first question was to ask if they liked the artwork, and if they said no, we passed in an interview. My lesson for my students was to dramatically show them that people can like your work, but that doesn’t mean they see all that they might want their viewers to see. This is how I got their attention at the beginning of the first term, and all my lessons about things like artist statements, marketing text, bio text, grant applications, etcetera, built on that statistic of 62%.
When I was making my dresses—a favourite project of my life—friends would visit over the course of the two years it took to make them, and everyone struck me as sincerely impressed and dawn into the stories of the dresses as well as the dresses themselves. (The stories were fiction, except for one.) At one point during the process, I realized that I was constantly apologizing for the unfinished portion and things I had to correct. They were seeing nothing but wonder in my work, and I was always focused on things not there. I stopped doing that.
•
Last night I did a walkabout in the backyard. Every year it looks better, but this year it looks much, much better than last year. Bronwyn put compost on everything; perhaps this is the reason for the burst in growth. My walkabout was uplifting for two reasons: I love what I see, and I love adding more.
Imagine, critical me, proud of my garden—done, like everything I do, from the heart. No brain is involved. I had no plan, no advisor, I just followed my instincts.
There was nothing here except a few ferns and one rhododendron. Most of the ½ acre lot was rock, a very dry area under the 30 or so trees on the lot, and lots of junk. There were rotten wood piles and a 300 meter-square space that was machine parts. I had to clear crap out, and then I brought in truckloads of soil to lay the lawns and the gardens. There are no more lawns, but there is an attractive layer of native plants giving me the green carpet I like. I started planting in 2018, with the trees: 5 Japanese maples, 3 apple trees, and I’ve been adding ever since. Now it shows!
 |
| Condor. |
No comments:
Post a Comment