One of my oldest memories smells of clay and tempera paint. This memory is tactile, full-bodied. I see the Italian Nun’s in their habits, rosaries swaying as they move around the art table. The women and children in this memory are faceless, but I remember the gray clay, the smell of it mixed with paint, and the feel of that cool glass coke bottle in my hands as I patted the clay onto it to take its shape. I think we were making a vase.
I’ve been digging back into the files of my life trying to recall where my joy for making first took root. And while I still hold a small grudge against those Italian sisters for the “stinky cheese incident”1, I credit them for encouraging my fledgling creativity, and for caring for that little bird, who, while we were at play in that room, flew hard into the windows one bright morning.
When I close my eyes, I see the limp bird cupped in tender hands, and I see that clay-covered coke bottle in my own hands. I don’t think these two things happened on the same day, but memory is slippery, and in my mind there’s an overlap that I’ll let stand for now. I like the juxtaposition of compassion, coupled with art making. I like the idea that perhaps there’s a connection between tenderness and creativity unleashed.
I am a couple of weeks into building my Artist’s Deck, and already I’m profoundly pleased to have decided to try my hand at something entirely new to me. I said that I’d be making a card a week, but I confessed to some friends the other day that I have been prepping the cards2 in batches because it’s easier to do it that way. One friend turned to me and waved her hand playfully, smiled and said, “whatever, it’s fine. You make the rules!” Her words triggered an exhale that seemed to come from my toes.
My baggage around rules is old. My early college career began at a school hell-bent on making more rules than necessary, and worse, making and enforcing them under the guise of “thus sayeth the Lord”. The school operated on a demerit system and demerit’s were handed out liberally, while the grace of Jesus was restrained with a vigor that borders on the demonic. Rules about rules served as the vehicle for behavior modification, “protection” and indoctrination. Besides the glaring lack of a theology of grace, this school also lacked imagination and creativity—and compassion. Not only in the administration, but in its student body as well. There was no room for the dangerous wiles of one’s creative landscape. Surely to let one’s mind wander was as if to commission one to sin boldly.3
I suffered much in this dark place, and left at the end of the first semester, my faith in tatters.
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