I had a lot of fun this year and learned a lot about metallic-on-black drawing. See ’em HERE.
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Inktober 2018
art
For the Love of Place (Dispatch from the Steinbeck Center)
Last month Chris humored me for a trip to the National Steinbeck Center, a quirky exhibit in the heart of Salinas, California. It’s densely packed, verbosely curated, and delightful. Museums are places of discovery and reflection for me, and I set upon this one with a question.
John Steinbeck is up there among my very favorite authors, and is certainly my favorite among the non-genre literary writers. My question was: why? What is it about Steinbeck that I love just so much?
I love nearly all his books, but East of Eden has the distinction of being my second favorite novel (after Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed of course). Unlike Liza Hamilton’s bible, the eye tracks in my copy of East of Eden are uneven. I’ve been toting around the same dog eared and pencil annotated Classics Edition since high school. The first few dozen pages are especially worn. When I was traveling most intensely for work, about five years ago, I would carry it with me as a cure for homesickness. Steinbeck’s ode to those dry hills, and the wet years when people forget the dry years, remains my perfect reminder of California. Continue reading
My Inktober 2016
I’ve never done Inktober before. I haven’t really done ink drawings since high school, when I briefly launched myself into pen-and-ink pointillism. And then stopped because imitating an ink jet printer is not fun.
But this was a really fun experience. I had one friend, one family member, and one colleague playing along. That helped. Here’s my favorite:
I’ve set the whole collection to public in this FB album. I enjoyed playing by the rules, starting and (with two exceptions due to travel) finishing each drawing on its assigned day. While early on my husband was critical of the idea (“real writers and artists practice every day, not one month a year”) he was quickly converted to the wisdom of giving working stiffs like me an opportunity to rediscover talents I had let lapse.
For me, Inktober revealed surprisingly large pockets of my day that were available to creativity. I had lost them to TV, video games, staring at the ceiling, and occasionally exercise. I’ve only finished four ink drawings in the month since then, but that’s still 4/month more that previously. I’m not waiting until next year to make art that I enjoy making.
It prompted me to explore nature photography, to look at abstract concepts more concretely, and to see what is actually there. In other words, it helped me “see with ever more perfect eyes in a world in which there is always more to perceive.”