Creative Bucket List

It is much easier to take a leap when you know there is someone to catch you.  Painting with Julianna is much like that act of faith.  For me, at least, painting is a test of courage, and I have more courage because she is there guiding me.  She encourages me but also only lets me go so far before she pulls me back and insists that I stop and put the canvas on the wall and analyze what I have done thus far.  She points out the strengths, asks me about the painting’s weaknesses, insists once again that I not retouch certain areas and helps me plan my next steps.  Only then, does she take the painting off the wall and put it back on the table and I begin to paint again.  And when I paint can be freer because I know there is little chance that I will mess up or overwork it  (my biggest failing) because Julianna is there is stop me.  So I paint some more, trying to focus on making bolder more expressive marks.  I breathe deeply, quieting myself and looking for some feeling or memory or image that has moved me, I try and let my brush carry that spark.  And then she stops me again and we begin to analyze the painting again.  It is a dance between my left brain and my right, between free expression and the careful controlled dissection of the intellect.  And it is also a dance between Julianna and I.  She is both endlessly encouraging and genuinely excited about the process of what emerges on the canvas.  And that excitement is contagious and inevitably leads to bolder expression on my part.  It was become a mantra for living for me in many ways.  Move boldly forward then stop and reassess and then more boldly forward again.  I have painted for a few years now and this is my third group of lessons from Julianna in the last two years.  The richness of what I get from her, the confidence she instills is exquisite.  I am not nearly so brave or methodical on my own, as yet, but I hope to get there.  Until then though I feel with her , as with my metalwork teacher Gilbert , that I have found some secret code to my creativity.  It is as if I have discovered the piece I have been missing to unlock my artistic expression.  Perhaps the road to one/s creative soul it is initially just too lonely and frightening when it is undertaken alone.  Perhaps we need others, who have come before to show us the way and recognize the kindred artist in us and say, “Yes, you are one of us. Let me show you the way.”

Several hundred miles and a few days of visiting with family later,  I am finally, blessedly, alone.  It took days to get myself settled into the casita I rented in Santa Fe but I have felt wonderfully at peace being here in this place… as if I have both started my life over and at the same time returned to my roots.  Santa Fe and I go a long way back. I spent summers here as a teenager, actually from about age ten on, because my grandparents lived here and are now buried here. My Mother always wanted to live in Santa Fe  but was frightened off by the lousy reputation of the hospital here .  So she tried to content herself with living in Albuquerque instead, and visited here often.  I, in turn, visited her often for as long as she lived in Albuquerque.  When I met my husband I brought him here, just a few months after we had met.  When our daughter went to summer camp we found a camp for here, which worked out very well for all of us.  And when my mother died, I brought here ashes here, because I knew this is where she would want to be.  Everywhere I look in Santa Fe I have great memories and I see myself, my grandmother, my aunt and my mother sitting together laughing, or my husband and I in our early years, or our daughter discovering this same magical place that has always been home to me (though I have never actually lived here).  It is a place of the best of my memories and roots as well of the place of my greatest artistic inspiration.

Art also runs deep in my life and my background.  My grandmother owned a small gallery in New York before she and my grandfather retired to Santa Fe.  My mother was art editor of Time, Life and Fortune magazine for so several years and was also an artist in her own right.  As a child I often stayed with the painter Stella Pearlmutter in Saint Louis.  I loved watching her paint, cigerette dangling fro her mouth, while at the same time she counseled a steady stream of friends as well as cooking a meal for a dinner party.  She was a one-woman ringmaster.  I had an art minor in college but oddly, given my mothers background,  my parents wanted met to find a degree in something “more practical” (as in leading to a job) and so I majored in psychology instead.  I married an artist, who manages to make very good living designing for the entertainment industry.  And though I very much enjoyed my years as a psychotherapist it is not at all surprising to me that my hunger for producing my own art (as opposed to just thinking about my own art) has become profound.  Every visit here over the years I have wished I could actually MAKE art…not just view art.  I would get so excited by what I saw, keep loads of notes, and then reluctantly go home only to instantly get so caught up in my everyday life that by the time I got to my art the inspiration of my trip seemed like a dimmed memory.  Last year, when we brought my mother’s ashes here, my daughter pointed out a sign for me on Canyon Rd., where an artist was offering painting lessons. After speaking with the artist, Judy Poldi, who was offering the lessons, I decided to stay on in Santa Fe and extra week on my own and do several days of painting with her.  It was a perfect counterpoint to the sadness of my mom’s passing and something she would have loved to have done herself.

Now, some eighteen moths later, I am here for a bit more than a month, finally giving to myself that which I have craved so long.  It has been hard to give this to myself, to justify the money, the time and the (omg) leaving my husband on his own for five whole weeks.  Thinking back now I can see this creative crises or breaking point, this “do or die” moment coming at me like a locomotive headlong for years.  But also nothing short of the premonition of the head-on crash would have to overcome my guilt and fears and moved me to make this happen.

Finally, I drove out of town with my lovely daughter who was up for a road trip and no stranger to the need to escape the clutches of home.  She is now twenty-one and living on her own  (doing an amazing job at it at that) Luckily she was willing to drive with me one very long day, get me tucked into my new digs and then fly home. We headed off to the place that had always been the creative source for me, Santa Fe.   And as we drove through the burning hot expanse that lays between Dallas and Santa Fe,  I contemplated my escape, my final and utter capitulation to my creative need. And I suddenly had this feeling of standing outside myself and looking at myself and recognizing the strong woman I once was a very long ago and had returned to.  And I thought…”I remember you”.  And this time I heard my own laughter.
I had more in mind than running away from home though,  I had an agenda.  I wanted to devote some concentrated time for my art, my writing, finding my creative voice (I am not sure what that devil means but I my creative self has only emitted tiny little squeaks for way too many years to count).  I wish I could tell you exactly what that it or why I have such a need to do this but I can’t.  I can say that, like all searches, there are few obvious answers.  About all one can do it poke under rocks until one finds whatever IT is.  No amount of staring at the same walls or bitching or complaining or beating oneself up or analyzing is going to do it, and trust me I have bored myself silly with all the aforementioned obsessions. Eventually, and perhaps this also comes with age, it all sounds like gutless excuses.   If it were easy one would have already found the holy grail and a giant heavenly voila!  would have boomed down from the creative heavens, an  angelic choir would have started singing and a stone tablet would have been presented to you outlining the steps to your creatively fulfilled self.  But it doesn’t work like that.  Big redirections and explorations in life are a messy chaotic affair.  You have to get dirty.  You have to give up all pride and be willing to look stupid and aimless and lost in order to find whatever you are looking for, even if you don’t know what you are looking for. ( I tell myself over and over, I will know IT when I see IT.)  This means fits and starts and losing face to those around you that smile indulgently as you try to explain to them just what the hell you are doing with your life.  You have to wander about suffer through self doubt, endlessly experiment like an mad scientist and remind yourself that you have no other sane choice in the matter.  And most of all you need to nurture those tiny embers of interest and curiosity.

For me all that means looking for teachers in a variety of back burner but simmering interests and see where that learning might take me.  These were the classes and workshops I have lusted after for years but never took and could never find in a convenient time or convenient location.  “Convenient” being the important word here, because often times pursuing  ones creative interest is far from convenient.  It it bothersome at best and mostly it is very very demanding like some colicky baby who won’t shut the hell up and just when you think you cannot stand it another minute, that damned baby smiles and coos and you forget all your frustration in a moment and swear you will protect it and nurture it forever.  Much of the purpose of this blog is to explore how the process of searching for your creative voice and bringing one’s creative voice into being…making room for it, nurturing it and most of all making TIME for it, is just not convenient at all.  But it is life changing and powerful and yes, exciting.  And I believe it is more so later in life because there is this wonderful sense of  arriving when one FINALLY pursues ones passion.  There is no better elixir of youth.

Santa Fe is truly a mecca for anyone who want to learn anything creative. In fact the Santa Fe tourism website has a whole sections on “Creative Tourism”.  Pick a creative pursuit and you can probably find someone teaching a workshop on it or will to do a workshop of one just for you.  And with my thin patience and loudly ticking clock in my head I hardly had time to wait for someone else’s schedule.  So I contacted a few people teaching various workshops when I first determined that escape was my only answer.  I asked them by email if they taught individuals and I devised my own personal program.  I arranged private classes with a metal working as I have obsessed  about lighting and metal sculpture for a few decades and have been strangely attracted to welders, acetylene torches and the idea making things while letting the sparks fly.  These things also scarred me to death as well so I figured I needed some individual hand holding.  I arranged for some abstract painting lessons with a painter I knew and had worked with briefly previously. on vacation.  And yes, I also arranged a personal blogging class.  And when I mentioned my plans to a friend she decided to fly in and joint me for that one.  Another escapee following that faint smell of creative smoke.

It is from that class, in my temporary tiny casita in Santa Fe that this blog has emerged. I wanted to document this process, this search for my own creative voice, this surrender to creative urgency wherever it takes me, whatever the cost.   I also want to  examine how the awareness of the precious and finite time we have on this earth becomes more acute with age and urges us towards unfulfilled dreams.  Some dream of places unseen, or long years of leisure.  I have friends who just nothing more than to shop or hang out with the grandchildren.  But there is also another sort of animal, that lives to create and must satisfy that hunger or perish unfulfilled.  And I am one of those souls.  Always have been, no matter whatever more practical and predictable ways I have attempted to mold myself into.

Now that I am here in Santa Fe, with it’s ancient adobe building and big dramatic skies,  I look around the streets, galleries and restaurants and I think I see many many other women like me.  They may be here briefly or have  trekked here to make a new life for themselves year ago.  The town is full of creative female refugees some with a friend and a surprising number on their own. They are all ages, all economic statuses; young, middle aged, older and elderly, poor and wealthy.  They all looking for something, perhaps even they are not sure what, but hoping they won’t have to leave until they find it.