Lessons on Art and Life from Dog Obedience Class

This is Hue.  He's 4 months old now.  He looks like such an angel here.  We've been to two obedience classes. On Day One, the trainer gave us a few doggie obedience tips. Seems to me these could also be applied to art and to life.

Don't take it personally:  I ask him to sit and he does for a second.  Then I gently pull his leash up and push his bum down to sit again.  And I do this again.  And I do it again and again.
He puts his front two feet onto the table by the back door.  I push him off.  He does it again and again and again as he waits for me to put on my coat to go outside.  And again.  As I put on my coat, he tries to bite the bottom edge of the jacket.  I take my outdoor shoes out of the closet, put them on the floor and he quickly grabs one and runs away with it.  I call him back.  He comes.  I take the shoes away and put them on one at a time. I bend over to put his leash on.  He bites my scarf and gets his teeth caught in the fabric.  Oh I sound like such a patient saint, when the truth is much different and by the time we get out the door, I'm yelling and hollering and completely fried.  Meanwhile he's so happy to be outdoors.

How many times have I submitted work to juried shows, to galleries, or for grants, where I've been turned down.  At the beginning, I was hurt, frustrated and greatly discouraged by the rejections.  Not that I have a thick skin now, but the discouragement doesn't last.  I'm committed to making art, no matter if anyone likes it.  One of the biggest lessons is: don't take it personally.

Be Patient: Make him sit again and again.  When he does finally sit for longer than 1 second,  I say "Good Dog", through gritted teeth by the 50th go round.

Most often, I'm more patient with my work.   I've certainly put in my 10,000 hours.

Don't get frustrated or angry, the dog won't respect you: Well, I have to laugh at this one.  I have a long way to go here.

I have had to learn this in my work too. This has been a difficult lesson for me.  A number of years ago I created a body of work that was very experimental for a show I was having in Toronto.  The work was very poorly received, poorly attended, and nothing sold.  I had had quite a lot of success with my work until then. And that response completely overwhelmed and discouraged me.   In anger, I decided to quit painting for a year.  Very mature response.  My galleries thought it was a good idea that I was going to take a year off.  What?  I thought they would miss me or advise me not to do this.  Nope.

I did end up taking 7 months off.  It turned out to be a good break, but a financial disaster.  It took me years to recover financially from that time off.   At this point, that even though I still get frustrated and angry occasionally, I know I won't quit again.  Whatever happens.

The dog lives in the moment:  I tend to daydream on  walks.  Not Hue.  He is forever alert. He must be a Buddhist. He is interested in every single thing around him, running from one side of the path to another. And I have to be just as alert when I'm training him, partly so I won't trip on the leash when he whips around me or spins me!  He's keeping me in the moment too.

Synge's Chair  24x24" oil/cold wax medium on panel
©Janice Mason Steeves

I also know that when he finally falls asleep in my studio, when I'm working, that I had better make good use of those few hours.  I'd better focus. No leaving the studio to put in another load of laundry or to quickly check emails. Focus.  Normally I wouldn't bother to get my paints set up if I only have an hour or two to work.  Now I jump in there and use every moment, hoping that I won't step back in a moment of reverie, into a puddle of pee.

Today is dog obedience class #3.

Enough Time

Newgrange  48x42" oil/cold wax on panel ©2011 Janice Mason Steeves

“It is not enough if you are busy.
The question is, ‘what are you busy about?’”
~Henry David Thoreau


How can one person do it all?  I have taken classes on getting organized.  I set schedules and goals.  I have no TV.  But I feel that I'm constantly playing catch-up in my life: finding enough studio time, trying to catch-up on my art inventory, organizing my art classes, writing grant proposals, meeting art exhibition deadlines, donating to art auctions, writing blog posts, aiming to keep up on facebook, as well as walking my puppy, exercising, housecleaning and family life.  And occasionally meditating.


 I was brought abruptly to my senses last night though when a dear old friend called to chat. We talk now and again but not regularly.  We've known each other since our now grown children were in Grade One. In the spring, she told me she was having very serious worries about one of her children who had recently confessed to having a drug addiction.  We talked for a long time.  


And then days began to pass.   My busy, often chaotic life took all my attention.  I wasn't sure how to follow up with my friend, and I soon got so far into my own world, that I simply forgot to call her.  I didn't call to see how she and her family were coping with this life-threatening problem. Last night she called to chat and the conversation turned to her hurt at my not calling to check on her.  She had gone through months of hell because she was so worried.  I'm embarrassed to confess this.  It wasn't intentional.  It just happened. And I feel simply awful.


I don't have all the good answers that I see on other blogs and newsletters, where point by point, you can see the way to being a better person.  I'm sick of them actually.  Life isn't point by point.


Sometimes we make mistakes and we're brought face to face with our weaknesses.  


Sometimes we need to step back, take the time to reflect and turn off the noise.  I came across Pico Iyer's article "The Joy of Quiet"  recently in the NY Times.

"The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen."  

[Some] friends try to go on long walks every Sunday, or to “forget” their cellphones at home. A series of tests in recent years has shown..... that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.” More than that, empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are “inherently slow.” The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for."

Slowing down is the key, not working harder, longer and faster.  Walks in the woods with my puppy and grandkids.  Visits with friends. 

Serendipity

Influence of Hue 40 x 40" oil/cold wax on panel ©2011 Janice Mason Steeves

Each time I begin a painting, I wonder where it will go.  I begin intuitively,  holding a thought in my mind of what I'd like to express. My paintings are abstract investigations of landscape, symbols, memory and process.  I know artists who are fully confident that even if they can't see what the finished painting will look like, trust that the process will resolve itself and become a painting.  I can't say that I am so confident.  When I step into the studio each day, I feel to some extent that I'm stepping into the abyss. This is the excitement of abstract painting.  I have no idea where the work will go or how I will get there or if it will resolve itself.   And yet they do, they always eventually do.

I love that razor's edge though, between safety and the abyss.  I think it keeps the work honest.  There is some sense of terror there!

Yesterday,  I reread a quote of Joseph Campbell's from the book, The Art of Pilgrimage by Phil Cousineau.  Campbell had just made a speech in Chicago about the nature of the goddess and the role of the artist in society.  Afterwards, a woman came up to him to tell him that she was going to Greece to 'find the spirit of the goddess'.  She showed Campbell her detailed itinerary, which included precise calculations of the best times to visit every major cultural attraction.  "Do you think this is sufficient?", she asked Campbell.  He took her free hand in his and with great kindness said, "Dear lady, I sincerely hope that all does not go as planned."   When Cousineau later asked him about this response, Campbell replied, "How will the gods ever find her when she has done everything in her power to make sure they never will? Unless you leave room for serendipity, how can the divine enter in?"

Red-Mark Rothko and Hotel Art

Thoughts of Stones #5   ©Janice Mason Steeves 2011   

Yesterday I went with my friend Jane Lind to see the award-winning play, Red, at the Bluma Appel Theatre in Toronto.  What an experience!

Director Kim Collier describes Red, as 'a play about faith versus doubt-in the artistic process, in ourselves, in our work, and in our place in the world.  I think we all are confronted with the sturggles that faced Mark Rothko: what does my life's work add up to?  How will I be remembered?  Have I been true to myself? These are all questions that eventually demand an answer from us."


 Red is set in Rothko's studio in 1958 in New York City where he was working on his mural commission for the Four Season's Hotel.  The play documents a fictionalized account of Rothko's conversations with his assistant, Ken.  We get a look into Rothko's intense artistic vision- to create art that expressed archetypal human emotions and communicated with the viewer at the deepest level. His assistant, Ken, challenged Rothko's thinking and accused him of not being in touch with the world, of living in an ivory tower, of becoming a has-been, while the world moved on to Andy Warhol and Pop Art.  Rothko held to his beliefs that art can change the world but felt he was betraying himself and his own ideals by 'selling out' to the Four Season's with this lucrative commission.  Finally, he went for dinner there.  Horrified to see only very wealthy patrons, overcome by the clinking of glasses and forks, the inane conversation and artificiality, Rothko impulsively withdrew from the mural commission, believing he was protecting his paintings and his own ideals.  In the end, Ken was fired from Rothko's studio, soon after he declared, "It's only a painting.", betraying Rothko's deep-seated belief that these were much more than paintings.  They were like living beings.
 
I am reminded of Sean Scully's comment, that in his work, he is trying to show, "Everything, all at once".

On the drive home, Jane and I found ourselves wanting to discuss all of the topics that came up for us in the play, besides the gorgeous set and production.  The actor who played Rothko, Jim Mezon was fabulous in his intensity, and looked amazingly like Rothko.  Ken (David Coomber) was the perfect foil for that intensity.

We wanted to discuss that intensity of Rothko's and what the situation is in art now, is there any of that sort of passion left in painting?  Do artist's want to communicate emotions, or the absence of emotions?  What's the future of painting? What makes a good abstract painting?  Jane will be writing a blog post on her experience of the play and our conversation that would be interesting to check out.

And then as conversation does, ours shifted and flowed along to other related things. I remembered this week, an artist friend, who was at a workshop a few years ago, where the insensitive instructor told her that her painting was 'Hotel Art'. My friend said her feelings were hurt, her ego was bruised and she just wanted to hide.

I can understand that there are artists who paint Hotel Art, but those are not the ones who usually take classes or have their work critiqued.  On that same thought, another friend, who is not an artist, suggested I look up the work of an artist she likes.  I did so and was simply horrified.  This was an example of Hotel Art.  It's painted for decoration. Very slick.  She has a formula: texture the background with moulding paste, then add drippy washes of transparent colours with a dab of dark here and there. Passionless, poorly painted.  It sells well.

Rothko knew his paintings weren't Hotel Art. These paintings, originally intended for the Four Seasons, eventually went to the Tate Gallery.


“Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.”-Mark Rothko


“Pictures must be miraculous.”-Mark Rothko 

Thoughts on Inspiration

©Janice Mason Steeves 2011

A couple of weeks ago, Helen Hagemann, an Australian poet who was in residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at the same time I was, emailed to tell me that she had written a poem  inspired by one of my paintings she saw there.  A section of that painting took her eye.  I am honoured by this. I was also delighted at how my work was interpreted so differently than my intention as I created it.  I include her blog post here with her poem:  Her Blue Dress and encourage you to check out her website to read more of her poems and see the books she has written.

Helen's writing this poem,  makes me consider sources of inspiration:  what inspires us, keeps us creating?  Maybe it's different for everyone.

I have just finished reading "The Aran Islands", written in 1907 by J.M. Synge, the famous Irish playwright.  He spent time on each of the three Aran Islands, mainly, Inish Mann where I visited in early October. Synge was clearly inspired by the islanders, especially by the folktales, songs and stories of fairies, told him by these simple, rugged people. But he was also inspired by the remoteness of the place, the difficulty of making passage there.  The sea, a very powerful living being, played a pivotal role in the lives of the islanders, dependent as they were on it.  Their only boats (the same kind used today for fishing), were small canvas-covered currachs, each rowed by four men. Today though, ferries ply the channels to move passengers and cargo.  Synge's experiences there and the folktales he collected were to form the basis for many of his plays.

I am also inspired very much by place: In my last series of paintings that I exhibited at Agnes Bugera Gallery, in Edmonton, my thoughts were about the prairies where I grew up.

In Ireland, at my artist residency, it was interesting to find that the colours of my paintings became so much more muted than at home.  Often when I travel, I don't paint.  I only photograph and absorb and write my thoughts.  When I get home, and after some weeks, or months, I find that my paintings begin to take on the feel (at least to me) of the place I visited.  And what surprised me in Ireland, was how quickly those changes were made while I was still there, like this painting that Helen was inspired by.

So thanks very much to Helen, and with her permission, I am printing her poem.

Her Blue Dress

                      for Janice

You will want to know

the season

how a gown can slip itself over nose and cheek

and be visible from art

how Emily Dickinson stood by a window

pressing her pink hips

through a passage of time

lifting a blue taffeta dress

over her shoulders

to reach

cool, upturned toes

where poems lay like stepping stones

on the hardwood floor.

The long blue dress

was too big for this slip

of a girl

but she proceeded down the hall

where a mirror

motioned her to look

at the poet she would become.

(3rd draft)

I was instantly drawn to Janice's artwork at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, Ireland where we met and were housed in rather large cottages.  Her series included separate paintings joined as one.  I have used one panel only from her work titled Thoughts of Stones to represent a mirror and a blue dress. I saw Emily Dickinson's blue dress inside the painting (and, I guess, I was also inspired after reading Billy Collins' poem Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes


So there we were ( including Rebecca Crowell from Wisconsin- another fine artist!) each in our separate units, inspiring each other, and both encouraging me to visit the Megalithic art at Loughcrew.  I have many more poems to come!  Janice's Thoughts of Stones and her full art work can be viewed at Janice Mason Steeves

The Art Gallery of Ontario Through a Child's Eyes

On Saturday I took my granddaughter for her first visit to the Art Gallery of Ontario. First things first, we had to climb onto the inviting Henry Moore sculpture near the entrance!  My granddaughter brought her own camera and I thought it was fun to see the AGO through her eyes. Other than this first photo and the one of her in front of the Chagall sign (way down below), the rest of the photos were hers.

Designed by Frank Gehry, the building is an exciting one for children of all ages.  It took us perhaps one-half hour to get past the front lobby,  where she delightfully scampered up and down the ribbon-like wheelchair ramp.  Then on to the winding staircase that actually goes outside the building for a few twists and turns.

From up on top of this twisty staircase, when I lifted her up, she could see a panorama view of Toronto. 

The staircase, like the wheelchair ramp, was incredibly exciting and we could have spent the rest of the day right here, running up and down, if only my legs could do it!

Then onto the Galeria Italia and where you feel you're in the hold of a glass ship, with enormous trees growing out of it.  

This sculpture was created by Italian artist Giuseppe Penone and will only be in the Galeria Italia until January 2012.  We were glad to have seen it.

Now on to the Chagall exhibit:

We stayed there maybe 10 or 15 minutes, walking steadily through the exhibit, stopping only to look at the last two very large and colourful paintings.  Then on to the really important thing: lunch.

                                     

 And a stop to buy a little souvenir of the day:

Then home on the GO train where we found a ladybug crawling near our seat on the train. 

What a fun day!

The Power of Limits and the Walls of Aran

I'm aiming to hold onto the feeling of Ireland for a while yet.  Not so easy though since my re-entry into life hasn't exactly started. I've just recently returned from Edmonton, where my show, Memories of Home, opened on Saturday, Oct. 15th at the Agnes Bugera Gallery. Being in Edmonton, where I lived until I was 17, many memories of growing up under the big open sky of the Prairies came back to me.

In this suspended state between returning home from Ireland and opening my show in Edmonton, my thoughts keep returning to the stone walls on the island of Inish Mann.  Perhaps it is because I was born in the Prairies that I felt so claustrophobic there, hemmed in by legions of stone walls.  There I was, on the middle island of the Aran Islands, that is whipped by constant winds which blow up tumultuous, ever-changing clouds, and surrounded by a grey sea that is often covered by white frothy-capped waves.  A wild, open environment.  But there was not an inch of the island that was not covered with stone walls.

The physicality of such limiting walls, made me consider the idea of limits in art.

In her book," Prospect, the Journal of an Artist", Anne Truitt writes about going on a driving trip across Canada and arriving in Carberry, Manitoba.  She said that she 'understood for the first time that limitlessness might be a threat, that it might induce the reverse of claustrophobia, a desire for enclosure, for protection from the naked eye of the sky."  She muses that it would take a store of courage to live on land that so emphatically does not need a human hand, and that people may have fallen in love with the prairie, as sailors fall in love with the sea. Truitt wondered aloud to her travelling companion if they would "have been moved to art if we had been born on this prairie?"

Perhaps the reason for acres of stone walls on Inish Mann was for enclosure and protection.   Surely the walls were built to clear stones from the land, as well as for protection from the wind and to create delineated pastures for the cattle and sheep.  But because of the hundreds, perhaps thousands of walls, my sense is that something more is at play.  The walls give limits against the limitless.

Creativity comes from limits, not freedom.

Stephen Nachmanovitch, in his book, "Free Play, Improvisation in Life and Art", says, "Sometimes we damn limits, but without them art is not possible. They provide us with something to work with and against.  In practising our craft we surrender, to a great extent, to letting the materials dictate the design. Limits yield intensity.  Working within the limits of the medium forces us to change our own limits.  Improvisation is not breaking with forms and limitations just to be 'free', but using them as the very means of transcending ourselves."

The poet Wendell Berry writes:
"The impeded stream is the one that sings."