When all the little moments add up to something big...

The opening reception of my solo thesis show, My Soul Magnifies, was overwhelmingly joyful and celebratory. Afterward, I was moved to gratitude for all the little moments and friendships that added up to this manifestation of God's grace in my life.



Some of the most magical moments in the gallery came before the big crowd... setting it up and documenting... as well as the first looks of some close family and friends.




When the crowds and conversations started happening, I knew all the hours spent in the studio were well worth it.


When the gallery director pulled me aside to tell me it was time to close, I couldn't believe it. The couple hours went so quickly... I wish I could've spent more time with everyone. Once again, I was brimming with gratitude,
For the one within and all around, whose spirit and life could never be accurately depicted.

For my parents, who gave me the foundation of faith and family as well as freedom to be me… I hope this show is just one manifestation of my gratitude for your love and support.

For my brothers, whose artistic and musical inquiry inspired me to pursue my path along those lines.

For my painting professor and mentor, Bruce Erikson, who not only led me through the joys and struggles of mixing paint on canvas, but also taught me to live as a passionate student of life.

For my sculpture professor, Kelly Phelps, who taught me think outside of the two-dimensional rectangle and gave me confidence I did not knew I had.

For my art history and printmaking professor, Suzanne Chouteau, who led me and my classmates in art expeditions in Italy and gave me an example of what it meant to be a contemplative in action.

For my fellow artists at Xavier, especially Lily and Em and all those with whom I have shared a studio through the years… the supportive community we created will be hard to find elsewhere.

For my friends—rather, my family— at Xavier who not only put up with my many nights, mornings, and afternoons in the studio, but also became part of the creative process whether they liked it or not.

For Heather and Madeline and Emily, with whom I have been so privileged to share everything, and who saw me through every step of the way…. I couldn’t have done it without you.

For those I have met along the way, and for those who remain unnamed… we are all caught in an inescapable web of solidarity.

Story and Silence

I wrote this tonight while thinking about some short creative non-fiction that I was writing. The stories I've been telling lately feel so (pardon my French) shitty and unredeemable. The process itself seems so unredeemable too sometimes. And difficult. And exhausting. It's like trying to ride a bike up a steep mountain in the middle of nowhere. You can't just abandon it because it's your vehicle and it is the only way you will ever get there and back. But it is so impossibly heavy on that uphill...

So I was thinking about all of that--how much I'd rather just avoid writing. It would be so easy. And it would be so much easier. So I was reading over some crappy work and I wrote the following and I didn't know where else to put what I'd written but here. You know how it is sometimes when you create something--whether it is art or justification for art or just some act of self-dramatization--and you then get all frantic about it. Children do that all the time and adults in straits spanning any degree of dire are accustomed to it also, but furtively. Like whatever you've created is a secret and you have to slip it under a door or something so that it is seen on accident but examined deliberately, genuinely.

So I wrote all of this stuff about storytelling after taking a critical look at some "stuff" that I was going to "stuff" and despairing over whether I (or anyone) even knows what they're getting into all the time when they undertake such a complex venture.



Well, for what it's worth, I am slipping this under the door.

"It might come across as professorial, but before writing pieces like this, a good writer will begin (or come to some sort of realization while drafting) with some idea of the impression he/she wants to leave on the reader. Some people call this a “theme” or maybe a “thesis” or whatever Greek-derived word they like—the idea is that the writer should make what is perhaps more colloquially understood as “a point.” Whatever is at the heart of the piece must be both a statement and an assessment. Impartiality is not an option. The purpose of storytelling in any of its generic forms is to impress the audience—to present a judgment in a way that convinces the reader to care about it. Otherwise, the writer is just another crazy guy on the subway whom the reader is more than happy to ignore.

Anyway, for pieces this short, establishing a sense of immediacy in your first sentence is critical. Most people may not realize this when they read, but that first sentence—no, that first clause—determines how and (most importantly) whether he/she will read beyond that initial punctuation mark. They say that even tone deaf people will get a funny feeling when a band is out of tune. Well, that’s kind of the same thing here. Eliminate all doubt in your readers’ minds that they are reading something arbitrary. But don’t be obvious about it. Obviousness is the hallmark of bad writing and is especially prominent in bad poetry and bad essays. Obviousness is also the root cause of bad conversations, bad music, bad ideas, bad relationships, and pretty much bad everything. As a general concept, blatancy counteracts the objectives of storytelling. The goal of this form of narrative is to translate a particular “judgment” into something universal in a way that informs the reader as a human being—dimensional, complex, mysterious—only partially revealed. There is an archetypal individual who denounces imagination as frivolous, unnecessary, impractical, and even dangerous. Well, I have to agree with this character to a certain extent—imagination is all of these things. We don’t need it to survive. We could walk around, talking only in short declarative sentences and no one would die from it. But without applied imagination, we would be miserable and nasty creatures, unable to hope, incapable of understanding any perspective or experience but our own. We would remain alive but fail at everything else because applied imagination is the difference between altruism and selfishness, independence and slavishness. Don’t dehumanize your readers by delivering anything less.

All of this is a tall order, but well worth it for everyone involved."

Autumn in Cincinnati

It’s late Fall in Cincinnati and everyone’s favorite season is coming to an end. (“Fall in Cincinnati” being most—if not all—Cincinnatians’ favorite season.) When mid-October rolls into the Queen City, it seems that people who haven’t uttered so much as a sentence fragment to you will be gushing about how beautiful Cincinnati is in the fall. And it can get to the point where you just want to quit everything, run outside and glut yourself with it. Spread yourself out under a tree and look up at intricacies of each leaf turning gold then red then green. Stare at it until you can no longer comprehend what it is. It could be a tapestry, a body, constellations, the Sistine Chapel.

Now is the older, more severe portion of Fall upon us. The portion that has people wondering whether today is the day to start heating the house and put the storm-windows in, whether they should start making plans for Thanksgiving, whether their leaf blower is broken or if it never really worked that well in the first place and whom they can pawn it off on for Christmas.

And these are the days of autumn where people start wondering whether it hasn’t just been autumn all the time. How in the world was there ever a heat-shimmer on that road? How did we not freeze to death when we walked outside without a jacket? How did we ever get houseflies inside our homes and how did we get them out?

...but perhaps you may falter along the way

Allow me to tell you a story about my first life-casting sculpture:

Chapter 1: Girl, learning how to love
I actually had a breakdown last night... it was the first time I've cried in a while. I was dealing with lots of things, but my struggles in painting set me off. luckily, I have lots of people to surround me and lift me up when I have a bad night.

Chapter 2: Friends, putting love into action
So I have a favor... I need some people to model for my sculpture project... could you come up to the studio early Sunday morning?

Chapter 3: Hands, love takes risks
I have learned that friends will put their hands out there for you, no matter the risk involved.



Chapter 4: Cry out, the hard part of love
When the plaster hardened and was getting very warm, we started excavating their hands from the cast. It hurt. Just a little. Never before did I realize the extent of my friends' love.



Chapter 5: Smile, love breaks through
After pouring resin and autobody filler into the plaster cast, it was finally time to break the plaster... I felt kind of like a kid eagerly ripping open gifts from Santa on Christmas morning


Chapter 6: Persevere, a labor of love
There were a few cracks along the LONG way, but with perseverance, the hands turned into a wonderful reminder that, indeed, love holds us up even when all we can see is down.

You Will Not Fall Below My Open Arms

We begin the journey, though, knowing that if we fall, there will be arms to catch us... if we get lost, we are never alone.

Color-Paper.xml

Just also wanted, briefly, to add this sweet picture of a trail-blaze. (I'll probably wind up re-posting this post because I have a lot to say about trail-blazes. They are so low-tech, so simple. The concept is so basic, so Hansel-and-Gretel. And yet... We have no IDEA where they'll actually lead! And when you lose the trail because a blaze has fallen with a tree or burned up in a forest fire, it is the most gut-wrenching, unsettling feeling in the world.)

In which we embark

While we're still in "safe mode" on this blog, I wanted to set out a few points of embarkation that may (or may not) supplement the thematic basis of this blog.

We are artists--all of us. Or, if you simply cannot bear the self-importance of agent nouns, it will suffice to say that everyone, in some sense, can appreciate creation as both process and product, pain and salve. The purpose of this blog is to explore what we (the authors) believe is fundamental to the human spirit. As individuals, we each set forth on this expedition aboard a raft of perspective--our experiences lashed together--a raft that determines how we will feel and react to the rapids and eddies we traverse. With resolve, above all, to celebrate creativity in all of its protean forms, we embark. We do not know what awaits us on the journey; nor can we comprehend the location of its terminus. At times, we may feel inadequate. (We may feel like a child who wakes up frightened from a dream, feeling compelled to muster the courage to break the night's massive stillness with her tiny voice but uncertain as to what a cry for help will bring about. Will it wake and upset her parents? Will there even be a response?) Despite these risks, we press on out of necessity, for therein lies the impetus for our acts of creation. We will learn boldness along the way; we will lash its colors to our rafts.