Balancing Writing and Art
August 22, 2009
My family was anxious about labels. (“What’s your major?”)
To my ancestors—who according to the Zunis are dancing for eternity, though it’s hard to envision those inveterate Presbyterians dancing at all—I say: What I am is me. I am the one who writes, paints, works, sings…and dances.
How to do it all—time allocation—is another question. Honest, guys, I don’t know how. I dither and fiddle and get cranky. I put in a good work day, but sometimes that means lying in the grass staring at clouds, or walking around an Asian store trying to guess what the hell some dried object is.
I try to distinguish my family’s slightly hysterical work-ethic voice from the deep, driving voice of what actually wants to get done. Sometimes one is louder, sometimes the other. But as I accept my own mortality I have less patience for the hysterical voice. More and more I cleave to the voice of time, nature, peace: the voice of earth, where we are one of the gang: very unimportant, very much a part of the world.
Being Both
August 15, 2009
Who am I? A writer or an illustrator? Which? Both?
Yikes.
For years I drove myself insane with that question. Sometimes quite theatrically. “Is there a name for somebody who isn’t just an artist and isn’t just a writer but is something that doesn’t really have a name? How do I tell people what I ‘do’? What am I?“
Many a 2 a.m. distress session there. Until a friend clarified things.
He said, “Your nouns are fighting each other: artist vs. writer. If you used verbs instead—I’m painting or I’m writing—then it’s just a question of time allocation.”
Duh!
Mysteries of Educational Illustration
August 2, 2009
One would think that if “Show a child deciding it is unwise to stick a pickle fork in a light socket” is considered a spot illustration, then more cash and elbow room might be offered for “Show thirteen multi-ethnic children, two of them in wheel chairs, with their multi-species pets, deciding by concensus not to stage Chinese New Year (with dragon) on a transformer.”
Interestingly, this is not always the case.
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For more on educational illustration and its antidote, click here.
