Painting My Way Into Possibility

August 3, 2009 · by Joanna Paterson · in

I sat down one weekend to create 12 postcards from Scotland as part of an art project.

It was the first time since I had left school that I’d tried to create anything that remotely resembled ‘art’.  I’d  normally run 100 miles in the opposite direction from something like this, protesting as loudly as I could to anyone that would listen that “I’m not visual!”

But this project was different.  It was being run by someone I knew, liked, respected, admired.  Someone who was helping me learn about what happens to writing, art, creativity… possibility… when we allow ourselves to play around at the edges.

Plus she’d given me an idea.  As a writer, I could play around with words.  Expand them, doodle them, paint them, make art from my words.

And she was right.  I was starting to enjoy being more playful with words again.  It was  helping me to connect with the meaning of the words, to slow down my mind, to enjoy feeling more creative again.  So I had a plan for the postcard weekend: to write something, a poem maybe, then cut and splice the words, doodle and paint them, so each postcard had a little something of my writing.

The words would be the art, with a little painted ‘something’ on the background for relief.  All I had to do was find the words…

The postcard weekend drew closer, and still I hadn’t written anything. I’d played around with some notions of reinterpreting Scottish postcards, playing with stereotyped images, recreating a picture of Scotland that was more honest and true to life, but in all honesty the idea seemed too clever. Too contrived. It left me cold. Wasn’t really what I wanted to do, or create, or send.

I tried to let myself wait, be patient, be still. Let the words find me.

I drove home on the Friday night before the day-of-the-postcards and waited for the ferry to take me home.

As I waited, words of a poem started to bubble in the background of my mind.  But on the boat, once I was on the water… the feeling changed.  It wasn’t a poem, it was a prose poem.  It wasn’t something constructed and literary I wanted to write, then slice, it was a feeling.  A mood.  Something that had shifted inside of me, and something I wanted to convey.

I found the words. Or rather, the words found me.  At 3am, notebook in hand, bleary eyed and half-asleep, my muse dictated the words she wanted to share.

(You can read them here: Look To Your Source)

So the next day I was ready.  Ready to create, ready to make postcards, ready to paint.

I live near a small town.  Art shops are in short supply so I gathered materials that children might use from a toy shop, and the supermarket.  It took the pressure off me. It stopped me feeling I needed to know what I was doing (I didn’t, I don’t).  It allowed me just to play, and paint.

I started off thinking about the river.  How beautiful it was, how stunning the colours had been the night before, how much I wanted to express and convey the feeling of the river to those who lived so many miles away.  In Spain, in Canada, across the U.S, people who might never get to Scotland, who might never cross the still waters of the Clyde on a balmy June evening.  I wanted to let them feel it.

So I just allowed myself to paint the river.  And then the hills, and then the sky.

It felt good.  It felt like the place that I knew, and loved.  It felt like what I wanted to say.

I was nearly ready, ready to add my words to the piece, on top of the ‘something’ I’d painted as backdrop.

Except.

Except now I was looking at my hand painted postcards and thinking… but I love them.  But they’re good.  But they paint a picture, of this river that I love.  But I don’t want to write on them, to spoil them, to get in the way of the work I’ve just done.

So I changed plans.  Dreamed up a modern idea… I’d include an extract from my writing on the back, and a link to a hidden page that held the complete text.  Very modern.  Very multi-media.  But really just very simply a way to keep the words off my ‘paintings’ and show off my first piece of art :-)

And here’s one for you to look at:

Who’d have thought it?

Not me.  Not in a million years.  Not that I’d be sending off postcards with my artwork to people I look up to and respect in places all over the world.  Not that I’d be sharing something visual I’d created with all of you.

But something about doing this project woke me up.  To my inner artist, maybe :-) To what happens when we play at the edges, at the boundaries between one medium and the other.  To the energy that flows when we look to our source.

To what creativity is all about, and how the act of creation leads to such a powerful sense of possibility.

~~~

This is a contribution to the Mission (Im)possible group writing project, part of the theme of possibility.

The mail art project is being run by artist Janice Cartier.

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