Hi all,
I have dabbled a little here and there with visual art – I even did and posted a drawing a day inspired by my dreams for over four years a few years back.
I don’t consider myself a visual artist, though. I have dabbled. I continue to dabble.
And what I have learned from my forays into doing visual art has taught me a great deal about what practice is and what practice is not. I have been thinking of this because of our last article on practice and looking at my work on a specific issue from many years ago in comparison to my work now on the same issue.
But looking at the dreams, it is clear how I have changed and, even though I continue to work on not being anyone’s “caddy”, the practice itself has changed drastically.
Changed because I have changed.
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I had a friend years ago who was a painter and who kept trying to get me to do visual art in some way. She had me come to her studio, she talked to me about materials and processes from paint to printmaking trying to help me find something to excite me. I remember I made some kind of print that I actually liked using a simple printing method she had taught me.
Excited, I went to her studio to show her. She said, “Wow, that is great. Now, do 100 more.”
You can imagine my horror.
Also, she was right. I had done something that moved me, and she was encouraging me to keep going. To not stop with one thing, but to really dive into what I had created. I couldn’t follow her advice then, but I did when I did my drawings.
When I did those drawings a day for those years, I learned that to do something 100 times is not just to learn what I was doing, but to change, too.
Part of this was learning technique, I think. I learned about paper, paper weight and size, pens, watercolors, acrylics before really finding the thing that worked for me – small drawings of ink on paper, finally landing on blank index cards as the best paper rather than fancy paper.
Then, I drew my way out of trying to be representative [I have no gift for drawing something as it appears in the world] into more an abstract kind of drawing. Which is what I still do.
But even after landing on the abstract kind of drawing that moves and challenges me, the practice and repetition of doing them every day really changed and expanded what I was doing.
Every drawing I did stretched me around expression as well as around technique. Every drawing I did, I did with a little more confidence in my technique and trusting of myself in what I was doing.
Practice. I practiced and the practice changed. I was doing the same thing over and over again – pen to paper in my abstract way – but it was changing. I was changing.
I still am around my drawings. Here’s one:
This so applies to the practice we are given with our dreams. Sometimes, when we have dreams that work threads we have been working for years, it feels as if we are “regressing” to an old thing we thought we were done with – but it is not true.
We work and practice and it changes everything. We work our edges and we get refined and the edges get refined. We work what comes for us to work with and it changes the thread.
Okay, let me be more specific. In the examples from my dreams, the practice from the early dreams was to really dig into how I had played “caddy” to people my whole life as a way of survival and trying to find a way to be loved. To notice where i was doing it and to give space and tenderness to the why of it. It was radical at the time for me.
That edge was sharp for a while.
My recent dreams have been working the same edge, the same thread, but I am different. The place where I am working is not around looking to someone else to follow – in the dream, I am doing it somewhat but there is no one to be the assistant to in the dream. It’s almost like an old habitual way of thinking.
So, the practice now is not like it was from those years ago. Now, it is to practice what it is to be “the star”, to own the lion. And lordy, I really do not know how to do that.
This is the sharp edge now.
The work moved from looking to my past to heal my hurt and trauma with my father – to now, which is more about looking to my present and looking forward. Giving me a place to work on something that is new and unknown to me, rather than old.
The practice is in the same arena, but it is utterly different now. Because I am utterly different now.
Which is another way the dreams change us and change our narratives.