Blog
Posted on 10/22/2021 1:09:17 PM
By Donald Fox
Comment on this
Full Moon through Cracked Glass
As an artist, a writer, a teacher, and a lifelong student, I am aware that the accumulation of knowledge, along with the expression of creativity, is a frequently messy process. I have notes, studies, doodles, and bits of information, sometimes neatly organized but often scattered here and there. For example, I’m writing this on a lined notepad with previous pages still attached. These pages contain notes from webinars, notes for ideas to be included in lectures, notes from in-service continuing education meetings, notes from thoughts on art or art and social interaction some of which were expanded into blogs, notes on current policies and procedures a work, and, of course, this current writing. Sometimes I find notes on bits of paper without context of time, place, or circumstance, and these notes may seem foreign and make little sense when I don’t remember their origin. The main point, though, is that all these notes along with many others in different forms become the detritus of activity over days, weeks, months, and years. In a way, these stacks, or piles – some get filed, some incorporated into other works, some discarded, some transformed into something else – are symbols and evidence of creative activity and are like an evolving art piece in themselves.
Many artists have used fragments of materials from their lives to create collages that include these biographical bits as a kind of subtext. In his collages, Robert Motherwell frequently used Gauloises cigarette wrappers along with other paper fragments lying about his studio, and these can be seen as thematic in many of the works even when employed primarily for color or texture. This is not too different from a landscape painter using the experience of being in a particular landscape as the subject – he or she paints the perception of that time and place by organizing multiple observations (visual notes) into one coherent composition. However seamless a finished work may appear, the artist knows the many changes made through various stages of development, one stroke piled into or onto another, so to speak. In the process, the artist has edited and refined, but the many alterations and adjustments will remain in memory, for a time at least, much like little notes piled onto a desk.
