Tapping into your life

In the early 1980s, while living in Chicago and making my living as a medical writer, I found myself looking for a different way to spend my vacation time. A coworker told me about Oxbow, a summer art colony run by the Art Institute of Chicago.

I had my doubts.

I’d traced comics as a child to make decorations for our windows, but that was the extent of my “artistic” experience. But I decided to take the plunge, despite the wave of second-guessing that swamped me as I stepped onto a yellow school bus with a group of teenagers to make the trek to Oxbow.

That week changed my life. Suddenly, I saw everything around me with new eyes.

During the years since, I have taken a workshop of one sort or another (the book and paper arts, printmaking, and jewelry making, just to name a few) just about every summer, at Oxbow and then at the Penland School of Crafts.

What I’ve learned from all this are two things:
1. Focus on the process, rather than the results. Pick a subject for the workshop so that you can focus on learning the medium, rather than agonizing over the content. Otherwise, I would be paralyzed by the inner voice of the editor, telling me that nothing I do would be any good.
2. Tap into your life history to make your work immeasurably more engaging. The breakthrough came the summer at Penland when I drew on my feelings of damage (I was facing knee surgery), and loss (my older sister’s sudden death) to create a sculpture that was not “pretty” but pretty powerful.

I had escaped the strictures of making beautiful things to making meaningful things.