No. 82 - The alchemy of an idea
From sketchbook to exhibit
I’m working my way back to the graphic memoir I abandoned when life decided to throw some rocks under my feet while I was running. As part of my re-immersion therapy, I’ve put together this post that harkens back to the genesis of the project, and the first sketchbook pages dedicated to it. I’ve never posted these pages here before (though I’ve used some of the images here and there).
Five years ago I formulated an idea for a “visual memoir” about my experience navigating the medical system with my mother and her Lewy Body dementia. Lewy Body dementia is the second-most common type of neurodegenerative dementia, after Alzheimer’s disease. It’s what the comedian and actor Robin Williams had, and it involves harrowing hallucinations. At least, they certainly sounded harrowing to me when my mother was still able to describe them.
I wasn’t sure what this “visual memoir” might look like, but I had a vague notion of some kind of mash-up of art, photos, and memoir. My idea did eventually become a show in June 2022, which I’ve written about here before: Life’s Work: A Visual Memoir. It didn’t end up including any photos, but I did venture into the world of graphic memoir, or memoir comics. I also started to incorporate aspects of my difficult relationship with my mother.
Making my way from the initial idea to the eventual show was an odyssey that I look back on with something akin to wonder.
I imagine that to some people, such a journey is all-in-a-day’s-work: You get an idea. You develop it. You work on it. It changes along the way. It comes to fruition. No biggie.
For me it was a biggie. Yes, I’d had some art shows. I’d even done a few series of work, including a 100 Day Project where I painted a portrait a day for—you guessed it—100 days. But I’d never taken on something so large, so close to my heart and impossible to separate from who I am. Something I had no clue how to approach. Something that, when I was younger, I would’ve assumed required the mystical, esoteric artist credentials I was sure I lacked. I was very misguided about art back then.
BACK THEN
I’d done a degree in fine art, but I was clueless as to how to
Navigate the art world
Set up a creative practice
Get myself to MAKE ART AT ALL
My degree in fine art did not include one whisper about what might happen when my schooling was over. I thought—if I thought about it at all—that my life as an artist would just… happen.
Except it didn’t.
I was working a day job and raising a child, and I had every artistic block going. The internet didn’t yet exist—if you can imagine—so there weren’t endless resources at my fingertips like there are now. I didn’t know any other artists. Artists to me were the heavyweights that I learned about in art school.
I didn’t understand what kind of a brain I had, or how to care for it. The message I’d received growing up was that that making art, or at least expecting it to be anything other than a hobby, was impractical and therefore not worthy. Some part of my brain knew that I had “talent”, but a louder area maintained that I would never be great (like Picasso!), so why bother. The belief was that if I were a real artist, I’d know innately how to produce art on a regular basis, get shows, and have a career.
I was clearly not a real artist.
Ten years or so after leaving school, I read The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. It was originally called Healing the Artist Within when Cameron was still self-publishing and hawking it at a local bookstore, which better describes the purpose of the book. It takes you through a course of reading and exercises meant to foster and nourish creativity, introduces the idea of morning pages, and encourages readers to take themselves on “artist’s dates”.
This was the 1990’s. Such a book was so unheard of at that time—to me at least—that I looked upon it askance even as I read every word and did every exercise. I actually found it embarrassing—artist’s dates? Yikes. It made me uncomfortable. Why should I need this book?
But I did need it.
I had my first solo show twenty years after leaving art school. You can’t beat the luck of the late bloomer. I had finally started to take action, instead of the endless thinking I did about it. Mind you, I had to fight with myself to push past the inner dissenting voices, quite literally. It was a loud and intense fight, and I can’t really tell you how or why I was finally able to wage it. The result was that I produced enough paintings for the solo show, and I learned more than I could have from a lifetime of thinking. My friend Jill Margo taught me that clarity comes from engagement, and boy, did my first art show ever school me on that one.
It was a slow road, but eventually through the doing, I came to understand more about art in general, and in particular my artwork and myself as an artist.
TEASER! In the next edition of Feed the Monster, I’ll be interviewing Jill Margo, writer extraordinaire and a woman who makes it her business to help people establish and maintain their creative practice. Where was Jill when I needed her thirty years ago? STAY TUNED FOR THE INTERVIEW.
BACK TO THE VISUAL MEMOIR
When I was conceptualizing the memoir five years ago, I may not have known how to approach it, but this time I didn’t let that stop me.
I took an 11 x 14 inch hardcover sketchbook, wrote “BE FREE OR GO HOME” on the first page, and dove in. There were awkward moments, especially at the beginning, but I pressed on. A lot of it was throwing stuff at the wall—or, the page—to see what would stick. As time went on and I continued to explore, I started to tap into memories, feelings and imagery that had resonance for me. But I had to stumble around a bit to get there.
Admonishing myself to get-it-the-fuck-together and make art with complete abandon.
Yes, I was born. More miraculous still, I grew to the size of an eight year old child before I was even six feet from the birth canal!
No explanation necessary, I imagine. Snakes and head keys are something we all understand.
This is a bit dramatic, and also might give the impression that I was beaten. I was not.
That old “holding an anvil up with your head” feeling.
This one touches on one of the many traumatic instances that transpired while I dragged my mother to various dementia doctors, then moved her from her home of fifty years into a care home. My mother was shunted from one doctor to another at the dementia wing of the hospital—I no longer remember why. The second doctor we saw suggested that my mother wasn’t able to handle her finances anymore, and I had to agree he was probably right. What he didn’t mention was that he was going to write to her bank that very afternoon and have her authority to do her own banking removed tout de suite.
At that point, my mother still walked the two blocks to her bank to deposit her Old Age Security cheques. Unbeknownst to me, she did that the next day and was “laughed at and told that her daughter Betty-Ann now controlled her money”. I’ll never know how it was actually handled, but that’s how my mother described it. When I called her later that day about something unrelated, I received a sound blasting in my ear. My mother was practically incoherent with rage, and told me that she’d “called and told all the relatives”. She said “If you needed money Betty-Ann, why didn’t you just ask?” Nothing I could say would assuage her.
I can almost laugh about it now, ten years later. But not quite.
The sorry, malformed creature. What is it? One wonders. I can still remember the feeling of drawing it, but it remains ineffable.
Most of the imagery on this last spread did alchemize into some of the pieces in the show. The following banner painting was born of these sketchbook pages:
What I love to see is the progress from initial attempts to something much more. How simply continuing to make steps in the dark took me somewhere I couldn’t have imagined. Last year I wrote about the notebooks I kept for my Life’s Work: A Visual Memoir ideas, which were just as important, if not moreso:
I’ll show you more sketchbook pages in future posts, if it pleaseth you. Let me know.
SOME STUFF
🪞A Mr. Rogers re-mix: Garden of Your Mind. MAMA LIKE.
🪞Geworfenheit: “Merely to come into existence is to find oneself thrown into a time and place you didn’t choose, with a personality you didn’t pick, and with your time flowing away beneath you, minute by minute, whether you like it or not”. Another great newsletter from Oliver Burkeman.
🪞Norma Geddes discovered the art that she loves to make at the age of 69. She’s 82 now and going strong.
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Thanks you for sharing! I love your journal pages. They remind me of Frida Kahlo’s journals. I was cracking up at what you said about The Artist’s Way being embarrassing! I felt that way too! When I started my PhD, my friend and I learned that we’d both loved The Artist’s Way but understood that was to be our little secret—not something to share in a PhD program!
You! I am stumped for a pithy remark, just completely blown away by your honesty and willingness to share the experience of getting from there to here. Your work is full of raw power.