#SOL16: Making

Birches (M.A. Reilly, 2016)

On Sunday mornings I paint. That is my new routine--one I began a week ago.

It has been so long since I have made any kind of art and I want to begin again and decided last week to keep an hour or so on Sunday mornings as a time for art experimentation. This morning, the birch trees in front of my home were the inspiration and I decided to use gouache paint after I found a piece of watercolor paper and a few tubes of paint and some terrible brushes. I like constraints when I paint as they are oddly freeing although the brushes were truly terrible. Cheap brushes aren't worth the effort. Nonetheless, it felt good to see a scene emerge on the page.

A friend told me the way I would work through Rob's death was by making things. Most painting is more about what is not there than what gets produced. John Berger in The Shape of a Pocket wrote,  "What any true painting touches is an absence -- an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware." I thought about absence a lot after I finished painting and set the work aside.  This is the first spring without Rob.  Even the birches have budded, leafed and Rob is not here to see this. The pulse of life goes on even though he does not.

All around me this sad truth is proclaimed.  

#SOL16: let her paint

let her paint (M.A. Reilly, 2016)

...sometimes this is the only thing that makes sense,

 the only thing...

Staying Creative

Christmas in Harlem (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

I found this video referenced on Red Bubble's blog. I  especially like 29.

The image that tops this post is one that I made in December 2011 after spending an afternoon looking at some of Romare Bearden's collages.  I had taken a break from my daily work (Suggestion #7 in video below) and met a friend, Jane, in Harlem.  On my way to the NY public library (Schomburg Center @135th Street) where Bearden's work was being displayed, I captured the image of the the woman in the foreground of the collage I would later make.  Her coat color and jaunty hat caught my eye.

Staying creative is largely a matter of habit, breaking habit, and remaining open to possibility.

Teaching Writing: A Few Resources

Happiness Is The Longing for Repetition. (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

I. Repetition

I cannot imagine teaching writing without writing daily . Janna Malamud Smith writes:

I posit that life is better when you possess a sustaining practice that holds your desire, demands your attention, and requires effort; a plot of ground that gratifies the wish to labor and create—and, by so doing, to rule over an imagined world of your own. (Kindle Locations 66-67). 

How often do young leaners have the time and agency "to rule over an imagined world of your own"?

Steven Pressfield opens The War of Art by describing the rituals of his writing. He writes:

I get up, take a shower, have breakfast. I read the paper, brush my teeth. If I have phone calls to make, I make them. I've got my coffee now. I put on my lucky work boots and stitch up the lucky laces that my niece Meredith gave me. I head back to my office, crank up the computer. My lucky hooded sweatshirt is draped over the chair, with the lucky charm I got from a gypsy in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer for only eight bucks in francs, and my lucky LARGO name tag that came from a dream I once had. I put it on. On my thesaurus is my lucky cannon that my friend Bob Versandi gave me from Morro Castle, Cuba. I point it toward my chair, so it can fire inspiration into me. I say my prayer, which is the Invocation of the Muse from Homer's Odyssey, translation by T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, which my dear mate Paul Rink gave me and which sits near my shelf with the cuff links that belonged to my father and my lucky acorn from the battlefield at Thermopylae . It's about ten-thirty now. I sit down and plunge in. When I start making typos, I know I'm getting tired. That's four hours or so. I've hit the point of diminishing returns. I wrap for the day. Copy whatever I've done to disk and stash the disk in the glove compartment of my truck in case there's a fire and I have to run for it. I power down. It's three, three-thirty. The office is closed. How many pages have I produced ? I don't care. Are they any good? I don't even think about it. All that matters is I've put in my time and hit it with all I've got. All that counts is that, for this day, for this session, I have overcome Resistance. (Kindle Locations 70-81)

WHAT I KNOW There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't, and the secret is this: It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance. (Kindle Locations 82-84). 

What rituals do learners make inside of classrooms?  How might these rituals inform/become content we need to learn?

II.  Loss

An odd truth, perhaps, but writing like fine teaching, requires something to have been lost--something beyond our naming and what we think we know at the beginning.  It is in this losing that the work we craft is the work we become. This is not something I think you can learn easily from reading a book about writing.  Rather, it is work that requires more of you and the you you are becoming alongside others.

So before venturing on to the list below, if you are not already writing daily, I hope you will make time to do so.  Perhaps 10 minutes a day to start...

III. A Few Lists...Largely Arbitrary

A Few Books That Inspire Me to Look Closely (Really this list is arbitrary.  Perhaps substitute with those texts you cannot help but put down/pick up/put down/pick up/Turn towards and away... and so on)

Bateson, Mary Catherine. 2010. Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom. New York: Knopf.
Berger, John & Jean Mohr. 2011. Another Way of Telling. New York: Vintage.
Berry, Wendell. 1996. The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture. Sierra Club Books.
Danticat, Edwidge. 2011. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. New York: Vintage.
Diaz, Junot. 2012. This is How You Lose Her. New York: Riverhead.
Dillard, Annie. 2013. Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters, Revised Edition. New York: Perennial.
Gaiman Neil. 2013. The Ocean at the End of the Lane: Audio CD. New York: William Morrow. (I could listen to hime= read for weeks and weeks.)
Heaney, Seamus. 1997. The Spirit Level: Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 
Heaney, Seamus. 2011. Human Chain: Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 
hooks, bell. 1997. Bone Black: Memoirs of a Girlhood. New York: Holt.
Morrison, Toni. 2008. What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction. University Press of Mississippi.
Solnit, Rebecca. 2010. A Field Guide To Getting Lost. New York: Penguin.

A Few Books To Strengthen Your Own Art as Writer

King, Stephen. 2000. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. New York: Scribner.
Lamott, Anne. 2007. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Pressfield, Steven. 2011. The War of Art. New York: Black Irish Entertainment LLC.

A Few Books To Complicate Your Teaching Practices

Dyson, Anne Haas. 1993. Social Worlds of Children Learning to Write in Urban Primary Schools.New York: Teachers College Press.
Dyson, Anne Haas. 1997. Writing Superheroes: Contemporary Childhood, Popular Culture, and Classroom Literacy.New York: Teachers College Press.
****Dyson, Anne Haas.2013. ReWRITING the Basics: literacy Learning in Children's Cultures. New York: Teachers College Press.
Graves, Donald. 2003. Writing: Teachers and Children at Work –Twentieth Anniversary Edition. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Heard, Georgia and McDonough. 2009. A Place of Wonder. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

****Reading now.

Cited
Smith, Janna Malamud. 2012. An Absorbing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery. Berkeley, CA Counterpoint.

Maps and What Not

Looking (Tuscany, 2009)

I. the set up

Anna Smith (@writerswriting) told me about the Making Cycle series (#clmooc) and thought I might be interested in it as I like to make stuff. So I followed the link she provided and thought it the perfect reason to return to my neglected blog with a post in response. 

The focus for this week is on exploring the tenets of connected learning as expressed in these three key questions:

• How is what you create driven by your interests?

• How is your learning and making supported by peers?

• How is your learning and making connected to larger systems?

The suggestion beyond these questions is to make a map that represents your making.  (Imagine my surprise that an earlier post I wrote about learning walks is referenced.)  A perfect day for that too.  Overcast with the hint of fog--every photographer's best day at that. There are all ways of walking.  Some happen largely on the feet.  Some happen mostly in the mind.  At best these differences may be hard to differentiate--not worth the bother.

II. an interlude

What is Written (Sant'Anna at Campana, 2009)

Last Thursday I learned that I won a trip to Italy. The last time I was in Italy I went alone and spent two weeks there, most of it at a monastery in Tuscany where I made art and practiced zen. The light in Tuscany is everything everyone says it is: too pure, it almost pains. It seems to set into focus specific parts of the landscape, like Hopper captured in Maine. To know I will be returning sometime this year fills me with confidence that I will return to making images--something that in this too busy year I have made less and less of.

Spun Gold (Tuscany, 2009)

This time I will travel with my husband and son and we will spend time in Tuscany and the south of England--where I recall the light as being bolder, working off the ocean with a sense of urgency.  I will bring my camera, a small box of paints, some paper, a brush, and a pencil or two. And the work I make there and later will be temporary maps, lighting possible ways.  This time I want to also work with sound. 

(Plymouth, England, 2012)

III. middle spaces

Like most walks, learning and not, the first physical steps happen while on your feet.  They begin with some intention--even if the intention is less clear, such as to wander, to be lost.  When you practice zen walking the focus is on putting one foot in front of the other, deliberately, nothing more or less.  At the monastery, we did such walking, a method that seems to clear the mind.  Now make images, says Doug. Make them at noon when the sun is directly above. Break the rules you think you know. Make portraits (see top image). 

And the walking, then and now, strips away the clutter, leaves  making photographs simple, doable, like this morning my husband taught me how to make coffee.  This is what it means to be in the middle: way leading on to way, loosing the need to know and the pretense of expertise.

Later today I will be meeting a friend in Morristown. Nearly two years to the day from the learning walk I documented. Who knows what might happen... Connected learning is less about the connections made with others, and more about the connections that happen when open to possibility. 

It's largely a way of living.