Creating a Creativity Revolution in RVA

What happens when you put 250+ creative, innovative folks in one space for eight hours and give them the task to change the way something has been done for centuries?

Things change, that's what!  People leave fired up, turned out, ready to rock and roll.

Consider some of the people presenting their own passions yesterday at i.e.:

Ed Trask, a world-famous artist and former punk rocker, spoke about his art and about seeing the world in a different way, through a creative lens.

Matt and Mike from the Martin Agency, a world-renowned advertising agency, talked about their corporate culture and how they manage to do things so darn well.

Samantha Marquez, a 15-year-old rising sophomore at Maggie Walker Governor's School, blew us all away with her stories about the research she's been involved with for the last 2-3 years and the patents she's already gotten. Unbelievable!

Jeff and Joey Anderson are 21 and 23-years-old and have already started a company, BioTaxi. They get used grease from restaurants and turn it into fuel for their taxis. Not only are they working to help the environment, they are also helping people get from A to Z with incredible customer service.

Valley Haggard and I spoke about our collaboration for Artists and Writers at Randolph Macon College last February and how we're finding joy in vulnerability, authenticity, and nakedness as we pursue our separate passions.

And that was just the tip of the very deep iceberg which is Richmond Creative. 

In break out sessions during the day, we were tasked with deciding what we as a community, a group, and as individuals can do to shift the cultural paradigm in Richmond, VA.  Richmond has historically been seen as the seat of the Confederacy, the place where slave trading took place, a city where the Confederacy is still honored.  In other words, there's a lot to be ashamed of.  The organizers of i.e. asked us to consider a different possibility - that Richmond has a lot more to offer than that, that, in fact, it is a hotbed of creativity, passion, innovation, and inspiration, and could be the Center of Creativity of the US if we just become more aware of all we have to offer.

In looking for a paradigm-shifter, I was inspired by one of the organizers of the event, Stephanie Kirksey.  Everytime I spoke with her about an idea I had for the event, or asked if she could do something for me, she said, "Yes."  Without a moment's hesitation.  She made it happen.  Her attitude emboldened me to be more creative, to take more risks, to assume something could and would happen.  What would happen if we all lived with "YES" as the voice in the background instead of "Well, maybe, if such-and-such doesn't happen..."? 

Another opportunity would be to stop speaking about Richmond's past (yes, we need to honor it and make sure it won't happen again - I don't mean to lessen the suffering of the people who were enslaved), and to instead converse about the dynamic present and the exciting future.  Point to the innovations going on here and now.

The city is bursting at the seams with great ideas.  For example, Andy Thornton,co-owner of LaDiff, the furniture store cum i.e. event site, wants to make the area around his store a Design Region with a Design Museum that would highlight all the cool stuff being created and designed in and around Richmond.  THAT would draw people to downtown!  What a great idea!

I can't wait to see what comes out of this meeting and out of i.e.'s three year initiative.  I sense great change is afoot.

If you're interested in seeing a (fairly poor) recording of the entire event, here is the link. If you're interested in Valley's and my presentation, it's at minute 41 or so and lasts 13 minutes on the 5 hour video.

What part do you play in Richmond's Creativity Revolution?  I'd love to learn how you engage in creativity in your life.

Artists and Writers and Valley Haggard

Yesterday was the culmination of over a year's worth of work collaborating with Valley Haggard to create an exhibit for Randolph Macon College's Flippo Gallery.

From 3-5 yesterday Valley and I, along with the other pairs of collaborators (Amie Oliver and Harry Kollatz, and Joshua Poteet and Roberto Ventura, and Dash Shaw (who wasn't able to be there)) exhibited our work to the public who were kind enough to make the trek to Ashland for the afternoon.  One of the highlights of the afternoon was the reading by the various writers involved in the project.

Joshua Poteet did a wonderful job reading his poem which he and Roberto Ventura had illustrated.  Hearing it read brought it close to my heart and helped me understand it more.  Their artwork was an aesthetically beautiful response to Randolph Macon's setting next to the railroad tracks, to the poem Joshua had written about the space between the tracks and the rest of the world, and to the tragic murder of a homeless person which happened in that space. Beautifully finished plywood with the poem and article etched into it, Joshua's light boxes serving as punctuation, and lines on the wall delineating the progression made an overall beautiful impression of order and disorder blending together, as does that space between the tracks.

Harry gave a very dramatic reading of snippets from his journal over the course of several years which Amie had illustrated with gorgeous black and white drawings of herself and Harry, coffee cups, flowers, and Harry's hat. Overlaid on her drawings were scrawls of Harry's handwriting from his journals.  The drawings were displayed beautifully on rails on the wall, their B&W tones exquisite against the neutral gray of the gallery walls.

Dash Shaw's graphic novels greet the visitor upon entering the gallery.  A computer monitor was set up to allow people to watch his short film.  Original pages from his novels were displayed in a grid on the wall, and the actually books themselves were also available for visitors to peruse.

Valley's and my work is on the far wall as one enters the space, bold and red paintings along with stark black and white words against the neutral gray walls.  Three oil paintings of Valley, a pastel drawing, and three series of three photos are the visual offerings.  2-3 line poems along with Valley's article from Belle are the written ones.

 This is the painting from our first session.   It's called Valley in the Chair. 

This drawing was also from the first session.  It's called Valley's Folds.  It's an almost abstract exploration of her scar and the folds of her torso.

  

From our second session together, after Valley had had some amazing revelations about her relationship with her body.  Valley Coming out of the Chair.

The final painting in the series, a portrait of her in her flashy red bathing suit.

Standing in front of Valley's Folds, her personal favorite of the paintings, Valley gave a reading about her experience of our collaboration.  It was so beautiful, so powerful, so completely intimate, there was utter silence as she read, a reverential hush when she finished, lingering applause as she returned to the crowd and hugged her best friend with relief.  Here is what she read:

Last January I was invited to a vision board making party at the apartment of a good friend. I had just spent the morning having a past life regression in Mechanicsville. But after entering a state of deep relaxation instead of visiting a past life, I had visited an archetype. I was Guinevere in King Arthur’s Court and I was sobbing in front of a mirror. Beauty is dangerous, beauty is betrayal, beauty is a crime, Guinevere/Me moaned through her sobs. The words, and the thoughts behind them, were so powerful that I spoke them out loud.

This a belief worth examining, my past-life regression practitioner observed. And so I did. As a young woman in my early twenties traveling across America by bus, train and ship, my mother had felt compelled to write me a letter. “Valley, your body is not a thank you note,” she had said, because I was still in the habit of offering it as a substitute for everything else I felt I intrinsically lacked.

In my mind, being beautiful was the equivalent of being a slut. I wanted to be beautiful, but beauty was, I believed, a weapon women used against other people, particularly themselves. This belief left me confused, divided and shut down about my own body and physical nature for many years.

At the vision board party, while flipping through old magazines I thought about what it was I truly wanted for the year ahead. Yes, money, fame and fortune. But as I cut out a stunning photograph of a nude statue and then pasted the words “WE LOVE YOU” over her breasts, I looked up at Susan Singer. I remembered the first time I’d seen her paintings and the electric current they’d sent through me. She had managed to render the rolls and folds of the female body in a bold, exquisite way that was completely unapologetic. Her paintings had woken something in me that now sat up at attention.

Across the coffee table scattered with glue sticks and magazines, I asked Susan if she would be willing to collaborate with me for the Artists and Writers show at the Flippo Gallery the following year. In other words, I asked if she would allow me to be her model, first photographing and then painting me naked. This was a scary prospect for me, but one that I instinctively knew I needed to try. She, it turns out, had just pasted the words/images “Gallery Show” on her vision board. She said yes.

We have spent the last year making this happen.

The experience of being naked is not unlike the first time you show someone a raw and vulnerable first draft of a novel. As a writer I have a tendency to edit myself down until there is almost nothing left. I whittle and cut and delete and fret over my words like a woman first making up her face and then changing 18 times before leaving the house. I worry that what comes out on its own- without being heavily clothed, made-up or edited, is unacceptable. The plastic surgery I have committed on my own writing has left some of it more mangled than those sad brides competing for the opportunity to be disfigured on the reality TV show, Bridalplasty.

However, being painted naked has made whittling myself down to nothing more difficult. My body carries the blue print of the life I have lived. In the last decade I have had six surgeries between my neck and my thighs. I have had six miscarriages and one beautiful child. I have probably lost and gained 300 pounds. Six months after getting married, I developed Cushings Disease, an adrenal disorder which gave me moon face and a buffalo hump. My body is short a uterus, a gall bladder, one rib and an adrenal gland. I have been sliced open and stitched back together, but some of my deepest scars are invisible. Allowing myself to be seen, to be studied, to be photographed and painted by Susan has been the catalyst for healing many of them.

Obviously this exhibition was heavily edited. There are not 389 nude pictures of me on the wall. But it does represent a year long process within which I’ve struggled to uncover both my body and my writing, finding what lies beneath the surface of not only my clothes, but the words I use to represent myself in the world. In the beginning I felt fragile, exposed and like I might die. But when I didn’t die, and in fact felt accepted, celebrated and nourished in Susan’s presence, something powerful happened.

I believe that what Susan Singer is doing with her art is a gift not just to the women she paints, but to the world. I feel like her work is revolutionary- not because she is inventing something new but because she is showing us in a new way what is already there.

And beauty, I’m learning, isn’t about having flawless skin, thighs that don’t touch, perfectly aligned features or the right person next to you in bed.

For me, it’s about allowing my imperfections, insecurities and battle scars to co-exist with the parts of myself that I already liked in a way that is vulnerable, authentic and open.

And now in a completely different way, my body is a thank you note. One that I am giving to myself.

To close, I would like to thank Katie Shaw for having the vision to bring all of this together, and my husband for his unflagging patience the last ten years as I’ve struggled to learn the things he has always known intuitively.

 

A portrait - from embarrassing to not too bad

I went up to DC yesterday to work with Rob Vander Zee.  He's a very good teacher.  He has a school two days a week in which he gives demos and individual instruction.  I feel like I learn a lot from him each time I work with him.

Yesterday I took a piece I'd started on a while back and had given up on because it was so awful.  I had decided to work on an old canvas so I painted over the old painting with a mixture of palette mud and pumice, thinking I might draw with pastels rather than paint.  Then I changed my mind and decided to paint, but my goodness!  The canvas was horrific.  It was like trying to drag a brush through dry sand.  I couldn't get it to work on teh canvas. It was terrible.  Despite that, I was pretty determined so I perservered, but I just couldn't get the painting to work.  It is a gorgous portrait of Valley, the model I've been collaborating with for the upcoming show Artists and Writers at Randolph Macon (opening Feb 20), and I love the image, so I was excited to do the painting.  I started using the method Rob had taught me, loosely, lightly, using Galkyd for glaze.  That stuff REALLY didn't like the surface I'd created!  Also, in choosing to work lightly and loosely, I went at the face with an approximation of how it should look, not being persnickety and exacting, figuring I would go back into it and refine it later.  That is NOT a good way to do a face!

The first part was fine - the bathing suit turned out nicely.  Her hair looks good.  I grided in her face so I would have guidelines to work with.

And now at the risk of embarrassing myself completely, I'll post the first rendition of her face.  It was horrible!  Poor thing, she looks like one of those dessicated faces made out of dried apples.  Sorry, Valley!

Quite discouraged, I painted over her face and put the canvas aside for a couple of months.  My son and husband kept coming out to the studio though and commenting on the piece and saying they really liked her hair and her bathing suit and that I should work on it some more.  NO.  Too discouraged.

Until Monday night when I was trying to figure out what to take to DC the next day.  My printer is totally wrecked so I can't print out any photos right now, so I had to work on something I already had a photo for.  I decided to be bold and brave and to try working on this picture again. 

When I got up there I gridded the face again so I could do it with a lot of accuracy.  Then I began painting.  It was helpful to have Rob there to point out when I was headed off in the wrong direction.  I did all the features with great detail until he suggested I soften all the lines, and blur the ones between her teeth.  That was very helpful.

I managed to make some very good progress on her face and came home feeling like perhaps it wasn't a completely lost cause.

This afternoon I worked on a few things on her face then re-painted her arm and bathing suit so the colors were in harmony with her face which was no longer lavender.  Now it's feeling close to finished, and I'm not so embarrassed to show the darn thing in public!  I think I need to work on her eyes a bit more but otherwise it may be close to done.  I know it doesn't look 100% like Valley, but I think most people who know her would know that's what I had in mind.  I hope so at least!  Portraits are not easy to paint.  It's significantly easier just to paint a body with no hands or feet or face!!

The progression of Valley coming out of the red chair.

I got to work on the painting of Valley Haggard today, yet another piece for our collaboration at Randolph Macon's Flippo Gallery this February.  I think it's starting to look pretty good.  There's lots left to do, but I got a good start on her face and on the body.  I need to match up the colors in each!

I've pasted in pictures of it at various stages because I think it's fun to see how a painting develops.  At this point I need to refine the color and the form on her body.  I need to darken the shadow behind the chair.  I need to paint her ear and her necklace.  I need to match the colors in her face and body.

I don't think I'll be able to paint today because I have a lot of tutoring students coming.  This week isn't going to be about painting.  It'll be about finishing up my work as a tutor with integrity and joy.  This is my last week of tutoring after 23 years of it.  I feel some sadness about leaving behind what I've known for so long, but mostly I feel exhilaration about where I'm going.

Each and every day I am finding new opportunities to teach about women's body image.  Tomorrow if I have time, I'll post a list of the various classes, workshops and lectures I'll be offering in the new year.  It is growing daily.  Plus I get to paint!  Life is incredibly full of promise right now.