Here I Am

From Ellen's directions:  "Subject matter, media, scale is your choice. Handing the work in, is not."  From Ana, one of the librarians where I teach, when asked what she learned on a leave of absence:  "It doesn't matter."  She wasn't saying that what she learned doesn't matter, but that she learned It doesn't matter.  It's stuck with me and, when I'm lucky, it surfaces when I'm weighing a decision that has no real significance.  It doesn't matter whether I do this or do that, it only matters that I do.  It's not a way of life for me, but a strategy I can use to keep it moving.  It's been my mantra this weekend in the studio.


Like the good student I am, yesterday I began drawing from observation using a pencil, the only divergent path being my choice of vellum over Stonehenge.  I wanted an unfamiliar surface.  Everything about it felt stupid and awful.  So my first rerealization (I know this, have known it forever, just periodically have to unearth it all over again) was that I'm not interested in drawing what I see.  I'm interested in drawing what I can't see but what I feel and know and need to actualize.  I'm rereading Daybook with my students, and Anne Truitt describes it for herself as "attempts to catch the threshold of consciousness, the point at which the abstract nature of events becomes perceptible."


I took another sheet and started making tiny circle-like marks in an intuitive pattern, then flipped the vellum over and used a pink Prismacolor pencil to give the marks a ground.  The marks suggested holes and so I turned to needle and thread for the next drawing, and the next, and the next.  And each time I felt myself overdeliberating I thought, It doesn't matter.  I kept it moving and made quite a few.  They suggest an architecture/establish a place, with a carefully placed occupant or witness in collage or colored pencil.  More from Truitt:  "Sculptors, relying as they do on subtle kinaesthetic cues for the apprehension of weight and form, may be more dependent than other people on placement."

I can only be the artist I am.  To compare myself to those who make grander, public gestures on similar themes isn't fair; it's an act of judgment that makes me invisible to myself.