Category Archives: Art

About Coloring

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It used to be that around Easter, every grocery store would sponsor something called a Coloring Contest. A parent could pick up a photocopied coloring page of an Easter bunny or a decorated egg or – jackpot! – both (see above) and take it home for their child so they could enter the realm of arbitrary competition by coloring the picture and then dropping off the completed masterpiece back at the grocery store. Odds of winning substantially increased if your parent dropped it off at the same store. You could check for yourself if you went before the specified holiday and found yours among the multitude of identical holiday icons, taped into place like another brick in the wall.

The week after Easter you would find out who won the contest when you read the Vermilion Standard where we went for all the latest tweets before the advent of smart phones. I never knew how first prize (a bike), second prize (a ham) and third prize (an Eastalta Co-op-logo-emblazed t-shirt that would never be worn, ever, except maybe to paint the barn) were awarded. I assumed, at the tender age when coloring pictures was a passion, that it was because of serious coloring skills. Alas, I realize now that after Easter, someone probably crunched every last page into a ball, threw them into a bingo barrel and picked out three AT RANDOM.

Or maybe (more likely) someone from the store chose their three favorites, perhaps because The Winning Color-er used a particularly lovely shade of yellow for the Easter chick. Or because they painted their bunny rabbit the sanctioned brown or white, the usual bunny colors. (But not purple or blue or black. You probably couldn’t win with a black Easter bunny. Not when I was a kid.)

I harbour particularly bad feelings about a particular substitute teacher when I was in grade five surrounding a memory about coloring pictures of Easter bunnies. I probably thought it was pretty lame that IN GRADE FIVE we were given pictures to color for “art class”, but I this was also back when I was in Obedient Student mode. If you gave me an school assignment, I was on it. (Well, except for maybe gym class.) So, I colored my Easter bunny some very lovely shades of violet and mauve, thinking I could at least go the avant garde route.

I probably still hadn’t recovered from The Yellow Submarine Fiasco of Grade One when I discovered my picture pinned up on the back bulletin board with a mark (a mark!!) of 55% on it – for everyone to see and to compare. Oh, and I compared! My coloring was impeccable! I had added tufts of grass around the bunny’s feet! I used gold-leaf to embellish the Easter egg! This was a travesty! Meanwhile, my academic rival, who happened to be this teacher’s neighbor and favorite, colored his rabbit plain old Laurentian number 10 brown and got 95%.

The angst is not unlike that of this comedian – skip ahead to time 2:47 when his father derides him for coloring a monkey purple. (Purple is obviously the choice of us “artistic people”.)

I suppose that it’s these kind of childhood events that “build character”. For sure, they build grudges memories. But even more, I like to think that this was when I started to call out the status quo, to contest the idea that “teacher knows best” if only in my mind. What’s wrong with a purple cartoon bunny anyway? Where’s the creativity in everyone’s picture looking exactly the same?

I’m a big fan of creativity. And sometimes that looks like standing out and looking different from everyone else. And it’s definitely not something that should be marked and compared. Just sayin.

About Plagiarism

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Me: circa 1973.

I am a plagiarist from way back.

When I was in grade one, my teacher (Mrs. W.) gave our class a writing project – an exciting culmination to the whole “learning to read” thing. She showed us how to fold a few regular papers in half and staple them at the folded edge to create a booklet, upon which we could immortalize our words and illustrations.

Unfortunately, I don’t have it anymore. So much for immortality.

But it is my first remembered effort at publication. And I do recall – rather clearly – both the text and my drawings, probably because of the traumatic circumstances that surrounded my budding authorship. Namely, when my minimus opus had made the round-trip journey from my desk to the teacher’s and back again, I discovered that it had been marred with the frightening letter “C”. It was my first rejection letter as a writer.

Why, you ask, did my teacher NOT LIKE my story? (Imagine me as a miniature person, with short crooked bangs and spindly arms, feigning a thrust of a dagger to the heart. Actually, see the picture above, taken sometime before Mrs. W. crushed me.)

What had I written, you ask? Let’s see, it went something like this: We all live in a yellow submarine… Yeah, that was the start of it anyways, with accompanying pictures of stick people looking out of the portholes of a yellow spaceship-y thing. It went on like this for a riveting eight to ten pages.

Okaaaaay, so technically I stole the idea from the Beatles. At least I can’t be blamed for my taste, even though I did gravitate at that age to the Ringo songs. Maybe I wasn’t reaching as high as I could have. It doesn’t really matter because I was just borrowing a tried-and-true line so that I could learn how to write a story. Also, I must have missed that day in grade one that we learned about copyright law.

Needless to say, this memory bothered me for a long time – not (necessarily) because of the “C” but because I felt I had done something really wrong. That is, until I discovered Austin Kleon, one of my favorite creative people. No one vindicates the fledgling (and also the mature) artist better than he does. I’ve written about him before. Steal Like An Artist is now ten years old and his blog is way older. Both are an homage to how artists learn by stealing.

This is, after all, where all artists begin – by copying. Picasso didn’t always paint those crazy limp-necked, weird-eyed bird people: he only did that stuff after he drew a whole bunch of (recognizable) bowls of fruit. And even the Beatles – who I first riffed off – started out as a cover band. It’s only after you imitate the giants who came before you enough times are you able to jump off their shoulders and start doing your own thing. And sometimes, just writing down someone else’s lyrics so you can memorize them or filling out a paint-by-number is good enough to satisfy the creative urge within us. That doesn’t make it any less of a creative endeavor and it always delivers that positive, constructive feeling of putting your own hand to something.

Check out Steal Like An Artist in a special 10th anniversary edition! It’s an eminently readable book – with pictures! – and plenty of encouragement for all.

About Poetry

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I’m not a poet.

Believe me, I know it.

I won’t even read it

Very much.

Exactly how did Shakespeare manage to write all those rhyming couplets? Or Emily Dickinson or Shel Silverstein or Dr. Suess? My one-minute feeble attempt at poetry is really about as good as it gets for me when it comes to busting rhymes. My admiration for those seasoned (and patient) poets goes up that much more.

Professional admiration is one thing. Reading and enjoying poetry is something completely different. Everyone knows that poetry is good for you like doing yoga or eating vegetables or wearing a toque in winter. But barely any slim volumes of poetry grace my bookshelf and none find their way to my bedside table to compete with my usual fiction picks. And yet, once in awhile, some random poetical lines will stop me short when I meet with them out in the wild like one of Mary Oliver’s geese.

During my first year university, I flipped open my Norton Anthology of English Literature and encountered the familiar “poem” Big Yellow Taxi by “author” Joni Mitchell. Ummm, hello? Mr. Norton? That’s a song. But noooo, I learned in class, actually, those are lyrics, which is a form of poetry. Adding music is what makes it a song. But the music in my head made the poem that much more palatable and understandable for me, adding that extra sensory experience. And poetry is supposed to be all about the senses, right?

I was reminded of this the other night while we were watching TV with the closed captioning on. The lyrics of an ambient song came up and I was struck at how much music plays a part in my being able to engage with the poetry. Suddenly, I felt deeply what the lyricist meant when The Faces sang, “I wish that I knew what I know now…” because I could hear it in the singer’s voice: there are some things you just can’t really understand until you’re older.

I’ve also discovered that I can enjoy entire novels in verse. When my online book club choice for the month was Elizabeth Acevedo’s YA novel The Poet X, I had my usual apprehension about reading poetry. My library solved that problem for me when only the audiobook version was available. Read by the author – without my botched Spanish pronunciations of her lovely dialectical additions – it was an immersive experience that would have lost something if told in prose.

Years ago at a writers’ conference I had a similar experience. At the closing banquet, I turned up my nose when I read that part of the entertainment would be someone performing Cowboy Poetry. How quickly I was schooled by the masterful recitation by an old gentleman cowboy telling his story by heart, in verse, with the mesmerizing lilt of an ambling horse. If I had read it for myself, I would not have done it justice.

In her book The Cloister Walk, poet-author Kathleen Norris advises against dissecting a poem in order to try and understand it, as if the parts are more important than the whole or “as if the purpose of poetry is to provide boring exercises for English class”: simile, metaphor, image. Maybe I need someone to read or sing poetry to me. My husband actually does a pretty good job of this when he gets into one of his let-me-read-you-all-the-lyrics-to-this-song-and-tell-you-exactly-what-it-means moods.

The whole act of writing is communal, after all. Unless it’s a diary (and even then sometimes), the transaction is only complete when someone reads it. It becomes that much more complex when someone reads it to you or an artist performs it, especially in person. I look forward to engaging once more in such communion of concerts and theatre, recitals and school concerts, hymns and choruses when this dang pandemic is finally over.

About Odd Things

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I finished off the Parmesan cheese the other day, the Kraft kind with the red double flip top that lets you choose what kind of adventure in cheesiness you would like. I washed the container out and put it in the recycle bin but when I went to toss in the lid as well, my hand wouldn’t let go. I took a closer look at it, then put it in the place where I keep “The Odd Things I Cannot Throw Away”.

Sometimes, such “found” items are just…un-throw-away-able. The box that my husband’s Maui Jim’s sunglasses came in with the cardboard top that looks like real wicker? A good holder for my Post-it notepads. The miniature bottle of Tabasco that accompanied a room-service meal in New York? Now a tiny memory that sits on my bookshelf. The stopper from my Starbuck’s coffee? Strangely interesting and even more impressive in quantity (not unlike the collection of bread bag clips I alluded to in last week’s post.)

After my Mom passed away and we were going through her house, I found an old cookie tin on a shelf in the basement rumpus room that held a magpie’s assortment of saved objects: old board games pieces, some wooden beads and some tiny plastic gewgaws that she had saved. This last category held things that could have easily been thrown away, or recycled, like (wait for it) bread bag clips or the lid from an interesting perfume bottle. My own magpie instincts were modeled to me a long time ago.

What did she see in these tiny bits of ephemera? For her, saving these things was a bit like an eccentric savings account, not unlike my father-in-law’s shop where, with a little bit of thought, he is able to forage out the exact size bolt or screw for an odd job. Odd jobs, after all, require odds things. But the odd things are also sometimes gateways to the weird and wonderful, art projects that are so utterly unique by virtue of the the odds that spawned them.

When I was still in single digits, my Mom created for me a Barbie doll house. Now, this wasn’t a typical doll house that could be carted around and it didn’t live in my bedroom. Instead my Mom commandeered three shelves of the closet in my oldest brother’s basement bedroom – and created a Barbie condo. The bathtub? Carved from a blue fabric softener bottle. The clock on the wall? An old broken wristwatch divorced of its straps. The bed-side lamps? Two plastic pop-tops from cheap champagne. (Take a look next time. You won’t be able to see anything else.)

That Barbie doll house has inhabited my psyche for forty years now. I have so many questions: Did I ask for a Barbie doll house or did Mom get the idea on her own? Was it due to the critical mass of tchotchkes that she had saved up that needed to go somewhere? (Not unlike the patchwork lap blankets she cobbled together for all of us from old polyester sweaters and Fortrel pants.) How did my brother feel about having a Barbie doll house – and his elementary school sister playing – in his bedroom? Did I even like Barbie dolls?

I don’t really remember playing with dolls that much, but I do remember that house. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t throw away that Parmesan cheese top the other day. It would make the perfect Barbie ottoman, with storage for Barbie knitting needles and Barbie yarn, a hobby she’s probably taken up during Covid. Barbie is getting older, after all, just like me. But her condo – in my mind – is still a classic.

About Shel Silverstein and His Unexpected Art

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Shel Silverstein, barefoot, grinning and playing rhythm guitar
Shel Silverstein: Poet, Songwriter, Author, Illustrator

A few years ago, Rick and I took a trip to Nashville. We did all the important stuff: we went to the Grand Ole Opry for some truly toe-tapping entertainment, toured Sun Studio and stood on the Singer’s Sweet Spot, and walked Broadway and listened to live music pour out of every single bar and restaurant. And, of course, we went to the Country Music Hall of Fame, a gargantuan 3-storey repository of all things that twang and yodel.

On the top floor, we lucked out: one of the rotating exhibits then featured Johnny Cash’s creative and friendly relationship that he had with Bob Dylan. The display educated us about Johnny’s prowess in the musical world, his love for all genres and his openness to collaboration with oh, so many other artists. All the pictures, stories, music, movies and artifacts led us to a new appreciation of how country, folk and rock ‘n’ roll music were in each other’s back pockets all the time.

Of course, the usual suspects were there: Waylon and Willie and the boys. And then I rounded the corner and found Shel Silverstein.

Shel Silverstein? Of Where the Sidewalk Ends and Falling Up fame? The creator of children’s books Runny Babbit and The Giving Tree? Yup. It was the one and same. This was one of those times when my awareness of an author’s gifts barely scratched the surface of the sum total of his artistic contributions.

Silverstein didn’t look like your typical country music lyricist. Indeed, his roots were Jewish and he hailed from Chicago, far north of the Mason-Dixon line. But his words read whimsical and wise, not completely unlike a Jewish rabbi’s. They were also often quirky and dark.

The Giving Tree (also illustrated by Silverstein – yes, more talent) tells of the relationship between a young boy and a favorite tree – a tree that throughout the boy’s life keeps giving and giving and meeting all the boy’s needs until it makes the ultimate sacrifice. And then it still has more to give. (Read the book!) Its message is so poignant it can make you cry. It can also quite possibly make you mad – the book has been banned because it was interpreted as sexist: the tree exhibited some overexploited female qualities to some Colorado librarians in 1988. Read more about The Giving Tree here.

(Incidentally, you can find most classic children’s picture books on YouTube and have some gramma or grampa turn the virtual pages and read them out loud to you and spare you the embarrassment of checking out piles of picture books for yourself from the library. Like I do.)

Knowing Silverstein’s style, it all came together for me that day in Nashville as I read the huge placard that talked about his contributions to Country Music. And his connection to Cash? He wrote A Boy Named Sue. Well, duh.

As if there wasn’t enough for me to take in that day at the CMHOF, I whipped out my trusty portable encyclopedia – er, iPhone to you rookies – and found out even more lyrics he was famous for:

  • Loretta Lynn’s One’s on the Way – a cheeky tribute to exhausted motherhood
  • Sylvia’s Mother released in the same year by country singer Bobby Bare and, in the version I knew, by Dr. Hook and the Travelling Medicine Show
  • Put Another Log on the Fire, subtitled the Male Chauvinist National Anthem

The great thing about Silverstein’s songs? Like another Dr. Hook tune The Cover of the Rolling Stone? They were just so darn singable.

On the surface, Shel Silverstein’s lyrics and picture may have looked rudimentary and maybe even unsophisticated, but if you dig in you can see that “(they) sing about beauty and (they) sing about truth”. And it’s all told in a way to make you smile.

And really? What more could you ask?

About the Arnolfini Wedding

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After two failed attempts of post-secondary education in pre-med and then in nursing, I took a year’s break to find my fortune (a.k.a. work three part-time jobs) by scooping ice cream, peddling auto accessories, and being a very cheerful bank teller – until the end of my shift when I failed to balance my cash more often than not. Thus buoyed with such success, I returned to the University of Alberta, this time in the Faculty of Arts.

Sometimes I think that if I had been a better student, maybe I would remember more. After all, saying you have a History Degree demands some sort of off-the-cuff knowledge of dates and wars and plagues. (I will NOT, however, forget 2020 and COVID-19.) But the things I do remember are scant and sorted – dumbfounding, really, considering the price tag of my university education and the number of hours I stood behind the cash register in West Edmonton Mall selling radar detectors to pay for said education. (Oh, and for coffee at Java Jive.)

Although I disposed of many of my course textbooks after packing and moving them one too many times, there are a couple of survivors, one of them being my Janson Art History textbook. Paging through, it reads fluorescently: I highlighted 95% of the words. But little of it is familiar and I cannot remember what my final grade was.

Albeit, there are snapshots in my brain: my tiny, elder art history professor, whose passion for art was not dulled to me though I chose to sit near the back of the 400-person Tory Lecture Theatre. I do remember how she chose very specific paintings to represent whole swathes of time. One of those was the famous Arnolfini Wedding.

Maybe you’ve seen this painting before: a very pregnant bride, dressed in verdant green, holds her gentleman’s hand as they pose for a wedding portrait. Her coveted fertility has been obviously secured and she, in turn, has locked in her future as a merchant’s mistress. She is coyly looking down; the husband is confidently facing the artist. And directly in the background, the clever artist has painted a mirror and thus inserted a teeny-tiny self-portrait.

Art can capture not only the subject itself but context, humor, secrets. A photograph of your childhood remembers that favorite cream pitcher shaped like a milk cow but you also remember how you dropped it and it smashed on the floor, splattering droplets of cream everywhere. A portrait like the Mona Lisa begs many questions: Who is she? What’s with the weird landscape in the background? What the heck is she smiling about? And modern fashion or architecture can be baffling to the untrained eye.

If you’re not already versed in a subject and know what to look for, only someone “in the know” can really tell you what the photograph or painting or Cake-Boss cake or is really about. Even better is when they can tell you the additional info that lay within like layers of paint on the canvas.

All seems well in Arnolfini Wedding portrait. The room reflects wealth and happily, the couple are expecting an heir. At a time before iPhones or even cameras, one had to be wealthy to even commission such a portrait, to immortalize yourself among the faceless masses. It seems oddly brazen to advertise the maiden’s state as she is entering the marriage contract but the dog is there to symbolize the fidelity that belongs to the marriage bond.

Unfortunately, the couple never had any children. You can’t see it in the painting, but it is part of the story.

Art, and people, are often so much more than what a first or even a second glance offers. All those myriad iPhone photos on Instagram and Facebook? There’s more than meets the eye there, too. Every picture and every person has a story and every story is worth telling and worth hearing. Not just seeing.

About the Art of a Pandemic

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The strangest things happen in a pandemic. People start busting out their dusty guitars and forgotten flutes. They step out onto balconies and perform their best Pavarotti imitation. All of a sudden, we’re noticing all these little free concerts going on everywhere in the world.

Part of the noticing is that we have the time to notice right now. Scrolling through our feeds, reading the articles that we get linked to, maybe even stepping out onto our front steps and balconies, we see people engaged in art like never before.

But is it so strange? So unusual? Maybe art is the thing that goes unnoticed during our regularly scheduled lives but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. However, I do propose that art IS happening more during these times of enforced leisure, downtime and boredom. This week I read about the connection between the Bubonic Plague and William Shakespeare. His most prolific periods? When the Plague was acting up and his acting troop had to go into quarantine.

Boredom can be a good thing if the by-product is impromptu balcony concerts. But that’s not the only thing that’s happening. Parents who are schooling at home find they are relying on those keep-em-busy-tricks they used when their kids were preschoolers: art supplies, play dough, coloring pages downloaded off the internet, dress-up clothes, blankets over tables and living rooms transformed into stages. And maybe some parents are joining in right now and finding they are able to forget themselves – and the pandemic – for a little while as the coloring page or the living room karaoke engages them.

Okay, maybe coloring pictures of superheroes and singing along to the soundtrack of Frozen 2 for the umpteeth time is not your jam. But how about that jam? There’s a lot of cooking going on right now – making homemade jam is probably one of them as freezers are being plumbed of their last summer’s stores. And the reason there’s no flour and no yeast on the shelves? It’s not just their daily bread people are making, they’re making art.

No, it’s not, you say. That’s just food. But why can’t it be food and art? Creativity begins with the head and the heart but it is executed by the hands. And even if it’s just the soothingly rhythmic chore of chopping up vegetables for soup or spicing up your mac-n-cheese with some dill and fancy mustard and putting in a pretty bowl, you are, in your own way, making your Pandemic world a more tolerable and maybe even a more beautiful place. And like comfort food, art soothes as anxiety works its way out through the hands and relief pours back into the head and heart.

The cool thing I have found about art and creativity in general, is that it begets other art. And not just in the same form. I am not musical. I play no instruments – save for drumming pencils on the backs of couches. And although I am fond of singing loudly in my car – alone – I care not to step on any balcony and sing for the public. (Think: cat concert.) But I have found that there is a funny thing that goes on when I am able to listen and watch live music being performed, especially if it is my own children playing and singing. It makes me want to write.

Huh, weird.

I first recognized this phenomenon a couple of years ago when I watched my then 5-year-old niece Penny sing a solo at her year end music concert. Although at times very shy, Penny did not shy of the microphone. She confidently sang her selection and – here’s what I really loved – tapped her toe the whole time in perfect syncopation to her accompaniment. I felt a restlessness inside of me, but not a longing to get up on stage and sing. It was the need to express my own art, even if it was just recording for posterity in my journal how watching Penny sing made me feel.

Feelings. Expressions. Outbursts. They’re probably pretty common right now as we are finding our corners in the house too cramped right now. Or we’re feeling hemmed in by our limits: no work to go to, no classes, no “fun” shopping, no playgrounds. There has to be a constructive way to express our energy, our frustrations, our personalities. Maybe: art?

I don’t want to look back at this time and think I wasted it – because time in all its iterations is a gift. But art does not have to be productive to do its work. It doesn’t even have to be permanent – think sidewalk chalk drawings or all the balcony concerts that aren’t being recorded – for it to BE ART. Art can even look unsuccessful in the eyes of the world but it can be transformative and transcending to its practitioner.

One of the origins of the word art? To be. Maybe it’s more important than we even realize. We need to do art in order to be.

Maybe it’s time to dust off the violin, the Skilsaw, the pasta machine, the 1970s macrame kit, the sewing machine, the paint, the great Canadian novel, the seed packages, the microphone, the website, the podcast idea, the Photoshop program, and because it’s almost Easter – the paska and hot cross bun recipes.

Go do art. Go be. Go!