Friday, July 12, 2013
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Selected Bibliography
My Affliction
I developed a deadly allergy to most woods a few years ago - the kaarma of over-exposure. I am now limited to basswood - not very exciting, but as my husband gently (and very kindly!) reminded me, "you wrap and torch them, anyway, so what's the difference?" Well, when you have reached a meditative state during the process of the hard physical labor of carving a heavy piece of wood that's as tall as you are, you know there really is a difference. But my husband loves me and he knows how much I miss "my girls."
The Hemingway Disease
It is strange to be writing about something that I think I’ve always tried to hide and compartmentalize. I suspect that it's related to why I’m more suited to essay writing than playwriting - I hope that I have been upfront in this blog in that I consider myself a failed playwright? If not, there you have it now.My last post (http://doyouwanttobuymybrain.blogspot.com/2011/05/in-realms-of-unreal-work-of-artist.html) complained about the label, "outsider art" because "How can it possibly be 'outsider' when it comes from so deep inside? ... inside [where] most of us don't have the good fortune to go to." I have known for a long time that my weakness as a playwright is due to compartmentalizing - the very coping mechanism that helps me negotiate with my affect. Google search 'negotiate with yourself': About 15,100,000 results (0.13 seconds).Hemingway: "Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it - don't cheat with it." I used to be a sculptor and began studying writing after I'd already begun to mature as a woodcarver. I developed one of those deadly allergies from which the only going back you're going to do is in a Hazmat suit - it was my own, personal environmental disaster, as woodcarving was my best friend and I became quite bereaved. Woodcarving was not just about expressing myself, asserting myself as an artist - it was my anchor, it was the way that I learned to reach a meditative state, and it was my backup when I started to look my affect in the eye. That staredown will never end, but everything being a sculptor taught me will always be with me.I finally gave up writing plays and retired from theatre a few years ago. I had realized that I could not maintain a schedule and the habits that help me negotiate my affect because I do compartmentalize quite a lot, and I had always left my schedule and habits in my studio, and my studio has ever been in the living room and in the kitchen.Ted Gerhart: "A carving is an artifact that embodies the imagination, but it is also physical evidence of the artists experience during the process of work. ... A finished carving is a record of experience as surely as the wood’s grain records the life of the tree from which it came." (http://gerhartstudios.com/sculpture/)A funny thing happened on the way to this post: six years ago, when I realized that I was running out of things to write, I started buying tape recorders, cameras and finally, camcorders, and carried them in my purse to gather 'material from real life.' I have since been told that it is my acting and writing training that gave me somewhat of a head start at video editing, even though I didn't even know what white balance was when I bought my first camera. I have told my friends and family that I used video to self-medicate my grief at not being able to carve anymore. That is a lie - I have been self-medicating with video ever since I realized that I would only ever suck as a playwright in 2006.There you have it, again.But that is a digression from telling you the funny thing that happened on the way to this post. I guess you can never really leave storytelling, which is what all art forms are, when you get right down to it - especially when you take the origins of art forms into consideration. Ancient fertility rites + Venus of Wallendorf = theatre + sculpture? Equals video, for me, which is turning into making movies based on improvisational storytelling; and, improvisational acting is what? "[The] practice of acting, singing, talking and reacting, of making and creating, in the moment and in response to the stimulus of one's immediate environment and inner feelings. ... [Which] occurs most effectively when the practitioner has a thorough intuitive and technical understanding of the necessary skills and concerns within the improvised domain." Sculpture = writing = video = filmmaking = sculpture.Hemingway: "I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it."Google search 'compartmentalizing': About 203,000 results (0.16 seconds).
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