Outsider Art--A Guest Post by She Reads Writer Ariel Allison Lawhon

My mother, Emily Allison, at work on one of her sculptures.

When I was a child I could not sleep unless there were lumps of papier-mâché drying on my windowsill. I often woke to find them standing sentry, gray shapeless things, not so unlike the goblins or dwarves or gargoyles that littered the books on my shelf. Each abstract form was part of a whole—a hand, a face, or torso—in one of my mother’s works-in-progress. Sculptures formed from the flotsam and jetsam of our lives: a teak bowl, a rusted bedspring, a bottle cap, steel wool. Random bits and pieces that, when assembled, would stop you cold with their beauty.

Back then it wasn’t uncommon to find my mother stirring a pot of beans with one hand and mashing a bucket of papier-mâché with the other. I grew up with the understanding that art was something created in the midst of real life, not a secret that could only be learned at some distant university. It was something you made. Not something you learned.

In those days my mother’s artwork was mainly found in gift stores and curio shops around northern New Mexico, small pieces that could be taken home for less than the price of a dinner at a nice restaurant. It helped pay the bills. And she would be the first to say that those early sculptures helped her learn the craft and figure out who she was as an artist. Twenty years later, her work can be found hanging on the walls of Gallery 202 along with Picasso and Warhol. Like her more famous roommates, my mother is innovative, bold, and intelligent. Unlike those cultural giants, she was never formally trained. My mother is an Outside Artist.

“The term outsider art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for art brut ("raw art" or "rough art"), a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture.” - Wikipedia

The original usage of Outsider Art specifically applied to creative works made by the mentally ill, or, in some cases, children. But for the sake of this post, we’ll stick with the more relaxed definition: those relentlessly creative souls who teach themselves and then bring their offerings to the table for others to enjoy.

My mother earned a spot at the table by force of will and immense natural talent. She knows who she is and does not let the lack of pedigree daunt her.

I think about this often when the subject of higher education comes up among writers. The MFA (all the better from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop) is to writers what a degree from Massachusetts College of Art and Design is to my mother’s colleagues. (And who wouldn’t want to study under such gifted teachers?) But the reality for many a creative soul (my mother and I included) is that those opportunities were/are/will be impossible. A plethora of circumstances and obstacles can prevent the Outside Artist from taking the traditional route. She must earn her spot at the table in another way.

She has to do the work. And she has to be good.

That's what I told a friend recently at lunch. She wants to be a novelist. But she fears that she cannot write professionally without an MFA. But my friend is already a writer. And she's good. The kind of good you can't learn in a classroom. And for her, like thousands of other self-taught artists, a degree can never replace the act of creating. Writers write. Sculptors sculpt.

It has been over two decades since I needed a lump of papier-mâché on my windowsill to usher in a good night’s rest. I sleep well these days because I know who I am. A writer in all my art brut glory. Perhaps technically untrained but not uneducated. Next month I’ll tell you about the teachers I’ve had (hint: they’re all modern-day literary giants) and how their tutelage has shaped the course of my career.



I’d love to hear from the Outsider Artists in this virtual room. What has your creative path looked like? How have you earned a spot at the table?

Consume vs. Create

This post comes to us from Ariel Allison - the wordsmith behind our sister blog, "She Reads." The message in red at the end comes from us.

On Friday Katy Popa wrote a genius post for She Reads that at first had me choking on my coffee and then left me paranoid that she’d hi-jacked my webcam and had a ring-side seat to my creative process - sans the cat, she lives outside. If you’ve not read it yet, do so immediately. I’ll wait.

Ah, welcome back.

Told you it was good. South American catnip. El Capitan. I’m still chuckling.

Here’s the thing about Katy’s post that resonated with me, and what I’d like to pull from today: creating anything, be it a novel or crème brulee or a song, is hard work.

And I suspect it’s the reason why so many of us spend the majority of our time talking about writing instead of tapping out prose during the embryonic moments of our day. So in an effort at full disclosure, I have a "really ugly truth" of my own to share:



That's me writing at 5:00 a.m. It ain't pretty, folks.

The cover charge for my participation in this mystery called Art is paid in the commodity of sleep. It costs me every day. It's hard to get up, as my husband says, at the "butt-crack of dawn." But the alternative is no easier. Not for me during this season of life:
["The Many Faces of Distraction"][/caption]
A friend recently wrote that “it is easier to consume than create.” And he's right. It's easier to soak in a well-crafted story than persist through a first, second, or twenty-third draft in effort to spin that perfect yarn. It's easier to lick crème brulee from a spoon than to stand over the ramekin with a pastry torch, browning the sugar just so. Far easier to hear a song than spend hours in the studio recording, mixing, and mastering a single. This is true of any art form. Drinking in is easier than pouring out. (I would add that it’s also far easier to critique than create, but that's another post.) It is easier to sleep in.

For Katy it meant a night of lost sleep in order to fulfill her blogging commitment. For me it means getting up far earlier than I consider healthy or decent. It means peeling myself from between the sheets when my alarm blasts out its shrill reminder: create, create, create.

It is so much harder to create than to merely consume. But the rewards. Oh those rewards, like cracking that thin layer of caramelized sugar, they are sweet.

Tell me friends - so I know I'm not alone - how you pick up the tab for the grueling honor of creating?

Since this is February, we authors at Novel Matters must jump in here for a teensy Valentines message for you, dear reader:

Mwah!

And because we are so glad you've all stopped by, we want to send one of you a bar of Green & Black's fair trade Chocolate. (Of course it's fair trade. We love you too much to support injustice in your name.)

Here's what you must do to win: In the comments, when you answer the question Ariel asked at the end of her post, if you phrase your answer in the form of a haiku, we will enter your name in the hat.

You know what a haiku is, right?

Three short rhymeless lines
The writer mustn't stress out
This game should be fun

And once again,

Mwah!

In Search of a Gimmick A She Reads Guest Post by Ariel Allison

On Monday Bonnie described how she knows an idea is book worthy. And on Wednesday, Debbie helped us see that breaking the rules can sometimes work to our advantage. And they got me thinking…about my mother.

Let me explain.

July 2010: my children sat on our dining room table watching my mother sort scrap metal. Mostly cut up cookie tins, random pieces of wire, nuts and bolts, that sort of thing. I was in the living room, timing how long before they got bored and wandered off in search of mayhem. (My children typically have the attention span of gnats) Three hours later they were still helping their grandmother arrange bits and pieces of discarded “junk” on a painted wooden structure. They asked questions:

“Tootsie,” (her choice of grandma name) my oldest said, holding up the innards to what I suspect was once a blender. “What about this thing-a-mah-jiggy?”

And she’d take it. Set it against the emerging picture. Stand back. Pull at her earlobe. “Maybe. But don’t you think it would frighten someone if we used that for her eyeball?”

“I think it would be fun.”

“Right you are.” As a mother of six, she has learned not to second-guess the creative instincts of children.

Back and forth like this for hours, until a woman’s face emerged from the flotsam and jetsam of discarded objects. Once satisfied with the results, she nailed the pieces in place and christened it with a name. (“Wink” in case you’re wondering)

Viola! Art on my dining room table.

I took mental pictures the entire time. My boys with their grandmother. Learning. Being creative. Playing with dangerous metal-cutting tools. Fun times.

Fast forward to October 2010: I’m working on a new novel and I’m struggling to put the pieces together. It feels like a disjointed heap of mental junk. There might be a picture in there, somewhere, but I can’t find it. So I call my mother.

“I don’t know what I’m doing.”

She laughs. “You must be on the right track. I almost never know what I’m doing. I just know what I like.”

“But how did you know you were supposed to do this. Of all the art you could have made, why tin collage?”

“I found my gimmick.”

“Gimmick?”

“People stop and look at my work because I have deviated from the expected boundaries. A Jazz Quartet made from clipped metal. A man proposes through the medium of cookie tins. Essentially, the same story told in a different way.”

Even though my mother didn’t give concrete advice on the specifics of my novel, she gifted me with something far more important: she helped me understand my gimmick. Some refer to it as a brand, but in reality the semantics don’t matter. We’re all trying to tell the same stories in a fresh way. And, thanks to her, I understand my method a little better.

What about you? Are your stories oil on canvas? Stained glass? Perhaps paper mache meets steam punk? Do tell!

Roundtable: Spirit and Muse

Someone once advised me to find a picture of my muse and put it near my desk. I actually did this. In my office there hangs a carved wooden figure that somehow seems right. When I read William P. Young's novel, The Shack, I imagined that Sarayu looked a bit like this. Later I read George MacDonald's The Back of the North Wind, and thought this being looked like the North Wind.

The thing about this figure that really struck a chord was that little bit of wavy stuff beneath her. To me it looks like water,

and water has for some time represented, in my mind, the mysterious depths of the human soul. The Bible says it was the Spirit who moved over the face of the waters. So there you have it. My "muse" is the Holy Spirit.

I love Vinita Hampton Wright's take on this, in her book on writing, The Soul Tells a Story:

The spirit will require tougher things than the Muse ever will. The spirit will not be satisfied when you merely embrace your personal darkness and write an astounding poem about it; the spirit will push you beyond that to whatever healing or understanding is necessary in your life.

This spirit will stare at you until you make your art honest... The spirit will require that you push through the despair and get to the hope, that you push past the comfort and embrace the confession.

~
A muse I have not. Or, if I do, it is a shifting thing that doesn't move with me from project to project. I don't look to or at any one thing to find inspiration. Mostly because my brain doesn't work that way. I'm a self-proclaimed "projects person". Once I have turned the last page on a project, I'm finished with it and look ahead to the next. The trappings, ideas, even the magic of the last project is gone. (Don't get me wrong, Talking to the Dead stays with me - but not as a project to be worked on. Rather it stays with me, I think, in the same way it lingers with readers, as ideas to be explored).

I've started a new novel I'm very excited about. I can't give details at this point because of some still unanswered questions. But I can share this picture of the journal I am using for my handwritten notes for this book. It feels "muse-ish" to me. It makes me smile when I reach for it and when I write in it, I feel as though I'm recording something very important - even if it does look like plain old chicken scratch- including spelling mistakes and words crossed out. It is the place that holds my ideas for this book and it is very much a place I meet with God to talk things over.

~
By definition a muse is "the spirit that is thought to inspire a writer; the source of genius or inspiration." As a Christian, I simply capitalize the "S" in Spirit, and there's my Muse, backed up with my favorite Scripture regarding the call of writing in my life: "For it is the Lord who works in you both to will and to do his good pleasure" (Phil. 2:13). As the Source of inspiration, He gives the desire and the ability to accomplish the thing He's called me to do. That doesn't just apply to one thing in my life. For He's called me to do many things; writing just happens to be one of them.

~

There are times when I feel His leading in a very particular way as I write, and there's no doubt where the inspiration comes from. I love those little surprises -- serendipity or happy accidents as Jim Scott Bell shared recently: http://killzoneauthors.blogspot.com/. Other times, the inspiration is more subtle, but it's just as important.

~

I don't have a physical or mental image of my "Muse." I just know that I need His presence in my life for all that I hope to accomplish in the name of the Lord, which includes writing the stories He plants in my heart.

"By living well and observing as you live, by reading well and observing as you read...by training yourself in writing, in repetitious exercise, imitation, good example, you have made a clean, well-lighted place to keep the Muse. You have given her...room to move around. And through training, you have relaxed yourself enough not to stare discourteously when inspiration comes into the room."

This is from Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing, a book he freely admits has nothing to do with Zen but a title that has everything to do with marketing. This quote is from the chapter "How to Keep and Feed a Muse" which discusses how inspiration comes from being fully engaged in life.

As Christian writers, we know that inspiration comes from the Lord. Each one of us has a fertile history that God draws from for our unique stories. We are the only ones who can tell these stories from the perspective He gave us and He expects us to keep the soil tilled and prepared to help those new ideas to sprout.

Until I began posting on this blog, I never acknowledged to myself or anyone else how great a role dreams have in my spiritual life.

Once I had a colleague who was very discouraged and thinking of leaving his ministry. At that time, I had a very vivid dream of a vast field of mud that stretched out as far as I could see. One at a time, people began emerging from the viscous mud and struggled to get free. My friend stood at the edge and began pulling people from the mud.

Imagine my surprise when I attended the estate sale for a late neighbor/artist. There was a chalk portrait of someone leaning over a wall and reaching for the hand of another. It so precisely portrayed the spirit of the dream I had. I keep it in front me as I write.

Though the deceased artist was African-American and thus most of her portraits were those of people with dark skin, I prefer to see these two people as both covered in the mud I saw in my dream. It reminds me that anyone who thinks to help draw people from the mud of this world must remember that each of us in ministry was also once in that very mud.

(Please excuse the largeness of the image. I was afraid the details of the painting might not be visible in a smaller size. )

For the Love of It

Tic. Tic. Tic. Yep, that's the clock running out - You have until July 31 to polish that manuscript and get us your first chapter and synopsis (e-mail your entry to novelmatters@gmail.com) in order to qualify for the Audience with an Agent Contest. Want Wendy Lawton to read your work? Well chop-chop! Get your work in before the deadline!

We've had some interesting discussions on Novel Matters recently about what it means to put your name out there - to "go public". Last week we touched on the ethereal, smoke and mirror nature of fame, of how difficult a thing success is to measure.

We talked about the dilemma of the Christian writer with a personal mandate to put Jesus first in all things and yet is legitimately called upon to make a name for herself. We discovered there are no easy answers. I enjoyed the discussion and it put me in mind of David Budbill's poem:

Dilemma
David Budbill

I want to be
famous
so I can be
humble
about being
famous.

What good is my
humility
when I am
stuck
in this
obscurity?

I enjoy the irony of the poem, but I truly appreciate the honesty. How many of us creative types can relate to those secreted thoughts? How many of us, while incubating, sculpting, and crafting our art have entertained, even fleetingly, the uninvited idea that this work of art, this creation could be "the one"? The one that launches me out of the basement of anonymous toiling and into the backseat of the limo of limelight. I can see me now, waving to the crowds, a bashful aw-shucks smile on my face.

They are the thoughts we bat away with impatient hand. I'm not doing this for glory and recognition, we stoutly tell ourselves. I'm doing it for....LOVE....of....God......and......art....and...well, I'm doing it for love that's all.

It's true, of course, that we wrestle with art because of love. God created us with a longing for beauty and a capacity to create (which is a reflection of His nature in us). Most of us who write also pursue other forms of art and creativity. I know many writers who are also musicians - many also writing music - and some who paint, others who knit (Camy Tang knits on a nearly professional level - it's a sight to behold!). My first "career" was acting, and I also sing (can't play an instrument, sad to say). We pursue these avenues of art and creativity because, well, because we love them. We don't necessarily plan to become famous because of them, but we pursue them wholeheartedly anyway.

What do you pursue in the quest for beauty and creative outlet? How does it make you feel? Why doesn't it matter if no one else ever sees your work, or appreciates it the way you do? Share you talents! Share you passions!