making art in real life

lately i have been thinking alot about making art and being a mother.  before i became pregnant i was excited to be a mama artist.  art about the female body, the bodily and emotional and spiritual connection between mother and child.  i have always loved art that illuminated aspects of life and the world that are rarely seen. 

but its not easy.

WHAT I NEED TO MAKE ART 

one, it is hard to find the time to fuck around.  i never realized before i had children how much i relied upon the pacing, fucking around, doing nothing time in order to feed my acts of creation.  my brain becomes paralyzed when i just sit down and decide to create.  it requires all this warm up time.  warm up time that can easily be sucked into playing ‘ball’, reading board books, supplying new paper to color, and basically hanging out with my kid. 

two, it is hard to find the emotional energy.  i have to care alot about what i am creating.  it has to become ‘my baby’.  i have to worry about it and wonder how she is doing in the middle of the night.  i have to care enough to read the same passage a hundred times, listen to that same song 12 times in a row, and stare at a drawing for an hour to figure out where is one more line needed.  guess, what? my kid takes alot of emotional energy too.

three, i have to care about what other people are creating, have created, where they have succeeded in their work and yes, where they have failed.  i have to pick up a magazine and see what kind of art is being made.  who is it being made for.  how do i respond to it.  this is what inspires me…other people’s creativity.  and part of my time and energy, has to go into constantly finding new people to love simply because they reached my life and opened it up a bit wider. 

four, i have to have an audience.  i cannot create if i do not know who i am creating for.  this art is a dialogue, a conversation, an orgy.  i have to be communicating something to someone.  even if that audience is imaginary.  or imaginary for now.  this art is a gift to someone.  not just a general gift to amorphous beings. 

and i have not mentioned the guilt i feel as i sit in my little office typing and mi companero is playing primary caretaker.  or the fact that if i still up late working on a piece (or just dealing with insomnia…and working on a piece) that means that i wont get up with her in the morning.  and i know she needs me.  to show her the value of art.  some of my sweetest memories of her lately are sitting together, me on the couch typing, her on the floor with pen and paper drawing out her year-and-a-half life.  and every 30 seconds she pushes the paper into the air and screeches showing me her latest 3 marks.  

and i am so proud of myself when i am able to create something worthy of existing while i am watching her do a million things…but it aint easy…and i am mostly proud of myself for remaining sane during the process…cuz what i want to do is give up on my brain or give up on her as i watch my creative brain being sucked into finding creative ways to keep her entertained so that i can go back to actually creating something but by the time i have found that creative way to entertain her i have completely forgotten what i was doing in the first place and what i really need to do is pace for the next 20 minutes to find that golden nugget again but i know that she is not going to be entertained for more than 10 minutes before she needs something again and…

COMMUNITY ART MAKERS

dreams of community art

i am having dreams of community, earth building, and stepping out of the cash economy…

in the first video, the white expert in africa was bit of-putting…but, as the video says: everyone in the whole village knows how to build their own healthy house from natural materials found locally. and that is amazing local knowledges.

african earth v2.0

innercity earth v2.0