Facing Death

I faced death yesterday.

Seriously.

It wasn’t what I was anticipating as I headed down the driveway to get the day’s mail right after getting home from work.

But I faced death as a 4 ton Chevy Avalanche came down the road, veered off the road, and slammed into the maple tree at the end of my driveway just 10 feet away from where I stood waiting – waiting for that very vehicle to pass so that I could get the mail. The tree stood steadfast between me and the truck that barely veered a couple of feet off the road. I instinctively began to back pedal just before impact. A loud BANG! and then flying bumper, headlight, and plastic shrapnel. The momentum of the truck rotated it a little around the tree so that it sat diagonally across the narrow road. Then the creaking and snapping of wood as branches rained down and a large dead branch fell just feet away from me. I pulled out my phone and began trying to dial 911, my brain trying to process the collision, the terror, and what I should do to help. The simple act of pressing three numbers became a monumental task as I tried to get a grip on the reality of the situation. Everyone in the truck was ultimately all right. Some cuts and some bruises – but no frantic ambulances rushing to the hospital – no life flight. Thirty minutes after the accident the truck, police, and people were gone. The injured presumably taken to the hospital by a relative or friend, and the truck towed.

Ten feet… This has stayed in my mind since yesterday. Ten feet away from where the right front side of the Avalanche crumpled into the maple. That tree may have been the only thing between me and the grill of the truck. If the tree had not been there, I could have been severely hurt… or worse. But that tree – that now has a two-foot section of bark missing – that was shaken but not toppled – stood solidly, and I was unharmed. But I can’t help thinking that I faced death. It was so close and could have happened so quickly. And it has my pondering.

If that tree had not of been there, and I had an up-close, personal meeting with death, what would I think of my life? What regrets would I have? What would I wish that I could have done differently? I wouldn’t regret much. I have achieved a lot. I have a wonderful wife and amazing friends. And it is a remarkable thing to think that I have touched thousands of lives with my art, my book, and my teaching. But I would regret not doing all that I feel that I am meant to do. My life is full, but I know there is so much more out there for me – so many more avenues of life to explore and so many more people to meet. I want to make the most out of my life no matter how long or short – to have an impact on the world. There’s so much more joy and life outside my front door.

I pondered this today as I walked down the hall, and I saw one of my students skipping down the hall. A freshman, 14 or 15 years old, and she was alone in the hall and probably did expect anyone to see her. But I turned the corner and she stopped skipping as soon as she saw me. As I said hello to her and passed by, I told her that I believed the world needs more skipping.


So I faced death and realized that the world needs more skipping.

Eric's Rules

Inspired by Patti Digh's rant (which she includes in her book Creativity is a Verb), I began thinking about what gets in the way of my making art. So, I wrote the rules below for myself adopting and adapting some of Patti's and inserting my own. I was very blunt and honest with myself because that's what I need. I expanded it a bit thinking that there are others out there who need such bluntness. So, here are my "rules" for making art and being creative.

1. Show Up
Make a space and show up every day. Get in the studio. Sit down at the dining room table. Clear off the coffee table. Pull out the journal or a small piece of drawing paper when you have five minutes, when you’re watching TV, and when there’s nothing else to do. Show up at the page, the canvas, the hunk of clay, or the pile of fabric. You must be present to win, so show up.

2. Sit the Hell Down and Make
Turn off the TV. Stop checking email, reading blogs, and surfing the web for inspiration. Get off of peopleofwalmart.com, fmylife.com, and shitmydadsays.com. Forget about the pile of laundry that all of a sudden got rather appealing, and forget about the dishes in the sink. Turn off the cell phone, stop texting, Facebooking, and instant messaging. Sit your butt down or go stand at the easel and start making. Start playing. Distractions are only a way of procrastinating.

3. Work
It’s all about working and putting in the hours. It’s about the process not the product. So work in the journal, doodle, and experiment. Start a larger work with no idea where it will lead. Work will lead to work, and the more you work, the easier it is to get to work the next time. Inertia applies to art. A body in motion tends to stay in motion. A body at rest tends to stay at rest. So get moving and working, and you’ll continue moving and working. Don’t wait for inspiration to hit. Forget about what it looks like. Forget about if it’s good or bad. Suspend judgment. The more you work the sooner you’ll get onto something. There’s an estimated 20,000 pieces of Picasso’s art in the world. You might say that’s because he’s a great artist. NO! He’s great because he made 20,000 pieces of art. He worked constantly experimenting and pushing his art. Dan Eldon filled 17 hardbound journals in his short 22 years. He made his life into art. Put in the hours and you will do great things.

4. Ignore Everybody
Ignore what other people may think. Ignore what other people may say. A lot of people can’t except their own creativity and so will not except yours. They may not appreciate your work. They may be jealous of your activity. They may even say that you are wonderful and great. Ignore them. Criticism and praise can stall your work. Who cares if anyone else likes it? Stop comparing yourself to others saying how easy they have it, how naturally it comes to them, how great they are. Ignore them. It’s not a competition. They are not you, and besides they struggle just as you do. They have the same doubts and fears. Make for yourself. You are expressing yourself as honestly and truthfully as you can. And sometimes you have to ignore your honey, your kids, and your pets and lock yourself in the studio. They will understand if they know that this is what you need. Ignore them, but don’t neglect them.

5. Shut the Hell Up
Shut up about ideal conditions and what ifs and maybe whens. Shut up about not having the time and the energy. If it’s a priority, you do it. Plain and simple. Stop giving lip service to how much making art is a priority. Actions speak louder. Stop complaining, whining, and being jealous of others. Stop whining about having no creativity or no talent. You are creative and you are talented, so go make art. Stop telling yourself that you are a fraud and no one will like you or your art. Just shut up and make art.

6. Find Your Tribe
You can do this alone, but then you are alone. It’s hard to grow and evolve without others. Surround yourself with creative collaborators that can encourage and inspire you. Don’t compare yourself to them. Learn from them. Lean on them. Let them lift you up, and do the same for them. Artistic accomplices keep you on track. They challenge you. They support you. They point out areas to work on and ways to grow. A creative journey is best when shared. So, find a teacher, a mentor, a colleague, or a friend and start a creative tribe.

7. Look at Art
Find artists and artwork you admire – past and present, and be inspired by their lives and their art. Find artists that do similar things as you and artists that do things that are totally different. You will learn from both. Look at the choices they have made regarding materials, imagery, and composition. Learn from and be inspired from them. Just don’t use this as an excuse to not make art. See #2.

8. Nothing is a Mistake
Everything that you do is a learning experience, so see everything as an experiment. Have fun and play. Stop judging yourself and your art. Stop comparing yourself to other artists. The inner critic is only the voice of someone who criticized you and your work long ago, and it echoes to this day in your head. Ignore it, and create with reckless abandon. Spill your guts. Don’t tear up your work, tear pages out of your journal, or ball up the clay. Don’t throw away your art. Remember that it is about the process. Remember Picasso’s 20,000 works – they’re not all masterpieces. Keep everything as a record of your growth. Learn to let go of perfectionism. As Ken Robinson says, “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.”

9. Get Over Yourself
Stop putting yourself down. Stop saying how you and your art suck. Stop reducing and minimizing yourself. You’re not terrible. Get over it. Stop pitying yourself. If you want to create, stop getting in your own way. And don’t listen to the hype. Others may say how great, how talented, how wonderful, how amazing you are. Maybe you are, but don’t let your ego inflate. Stay humble, and always look to grow and evolve. You have a unique story to tell, so just spill it.

10. Do With What You Have
Stop going on and on about ideal conditions. Conditions will never be ideal. You seem to believe that only when you have the time, the beautiful 1000 square foot studio, the expensive set of Maimeri Blu Watercolors, the new laptop with the ultra fast processor, or the exquisite fountain pen, you’ll be able to make art, write, or create. Even if you had all that, you still need to do the work. It’s not the materials. It’s not the space or the time. It’s about making. Grab what’s at hand and make. Picasso did amazing sculptures using cardboard and paintings on newspaper. Don’t have the exquisite hand-bound, Italian journal with the leather cover, so what. Write or draw on the back of envelopes. Make do with what you have. Make and do. That’s what’s important.

Shine

I've been reading a lot lately about creativity, namely Ken Robinson's The Element and Patti Digh's Creative is a Verb. I have also been thinking about the role creativity has in my classroom and what my role is as the teacher to bring that creativity out in my students. And finally, I have been having many conversations with friends and colleagues on the subject as well. I am always amazed how a confluence of events can swirl around an important issue in one's life. A friend of mine would call it synchronicity.

Both Robinson and Digh make it a point to say that we are all creative no matter what we have been told by education, society, or our own inner voices. And when we tap into, accept, and embrace that natural well of creativity, we can begin to live our lives deeply and with meaning. Sir Ken shares many stories of celebrities, musicians, sports figures, and academic figures. Patti uses personal stories and her own struggle to be fully alive in her skin. I haven't read all the way through either book, but one thing keeps coming up in the reading, conversations, and my own thoughts. And that is the way that many of us reduce and diminish our own luminous creativity - how we refuse to shine.

Patti puts it this way, "We minimize ourselves in so many ways, and stop ourselves from living our most creative life -- or owning that we are creative beings just because we are alive. Often without realizing it."

The above spread was an exploration on this very idea that I did for the Illustration Friday prompt Pale nearly two years ago. Click here to see the original post. We diminish our gifts and our talents and fade into the background and refuse to shine even though we have so much to share - so much to offer the world. Yet we make up rules and excuses. We compare ourselves to others and deny that which makes us uniquely unique. We look at the negatives and negate the positives because somewhere someone told us that we weren't good enough, weren't talented enough, weren't creative enough, weren't suppose to shine. And we were young enough to believe, and for all these years we have been playing that soundtrack in our minds believing that we are never enough. "Why should we even try?" we ask ourselves. "There are those special people that it's just so easy for, and I'll never be one of those. I'll never be an artist, writer, singer, entrepreneur, or mathematician." And even when we venture to put ourselves out there, we are afraid that we will be discovered a charlatan and fraud. We can't see our own luminosity because we filter our perceptions through these stories that we have been telling ourselves for years. And the scary thing is that someone squelched that creative spark in us. Sometimes in a very direct and mean way, but often in a seemingly harmless remark. I bet if we all look back through our lives we can find examples of the remarks and actions of others have snuffed the creative flame, and we can find instances where they have fanned the flame and sparked our creativity and passion. Why do we focus on the negative?

So, when will we realize that we have so much to offer the world simply because we are human and we seek connection in order to share that which sparks us? We are not alone out there, and if we shine bright enough we might be able to see exactly how un-alone we are as our light falls on the faces and hearts of others.

Randomness

I just wanted to post a random journal spread from journal #12. This spread evolved over a long period of time from a lot of random juxtapositions. Some of the random fodder consists of small watercolor experiments, to-do lists, a delivery notice from FedEx, and a magazine image. Some of the random drawing consists of the stylized face and tracings of various stencils.

Although this spread was fashioned from disparate elements, it derives meaning from the list of questions on the right-hand page.

JFJ in Norfolk

This past week, Dave and I enjoyed giving a presentation and two hands-on workshops at the Virginia Art Education Association Fall Professional Development Conference in Norfolk, VA. After a long drive in the rain on Thursday, we enjoyed an enthusiastic group in a hands-on workshop where we shared some tips and techniques for layering in the journal. On Friday, we presented about our journey to the visual journal and the book to a packed room where people filled the chairs, lined the walls, and sat on the floor, and on Saturday, we did a repeat performance of our hands-on workshop to another group of wonderful art educators.

Over the years, we have done a lot of these presentations and workshops at various conferences and conventions, and the enthusiasm, excitement, and personal experiences of the attendees still shocks me. I'm not sure why, but I guess that the journal has been such a part of my life for so long that the power of it seems to be almost commonplace. And to see the excitement and to hear the stories is almost overwhelming and always powerful. It is for all those wonderful people who show up eager to hear what we do that keeps us doing what we doing.

The Journal Fodder Junkies will continue to spread the power of the visual journal in education and in life. Thanks again for all of the support that everyone has given us over the last five or six years. We are simply two guys speaking our truth.

The above spread consists of notes and fodder from the conference.

100 Vis Js 4 NC

Dave has the 100 Visual Journals for North Carolina blog up and running. Inspired by the 1000 Journal project, Dave launched 100 journals out into the state of North Carolina - one journal for each county in the state. He found willing volunteers to step up and be guardians for journals and to be regional coordinators. For anyone in NC who wishes to be a part of this project as a guardian of a journal as a regional coordinator, or as a contributor to this project, wander over to check out the latest information.

In other news, I found out that my artwork was accepted for Patti Digh's new book. I am very excited. See this post to see the art that I submitted.

Feeling like an Artist

Nothing beats the feeling of creating when I am in that zen-like state where the painting, drawing, or sculpture is just taking form effortlessly and it just finishes so easily. It's like the work is creating itself. Of course, I have a lot of unfinished work stacked up in the studio that started out flowing like water, but quickly got dammed and came to a screeching halt waiting for completion some day. Both of these feelings - the free-flowing creativity and the blocked creativity - are part of being and feeling like an artist.

And there is such validation when someone else thinks so highly of your work that they want to own a piece. I was fortunate to sell two pieces this past weekend at the NCAEA conference. Modus Operandi 123 above was an 11x14 piece that hung around my studio for a couple of years before I finished it for an exhibit last winter, and Personal Excavation below grew out of my Excavation Series and is a small 4x6 graphite piece that I finished relatively quickly. I appreciate anyone wishing to own a piece of mine, and there is such a release when the work is sent out there to live somewhere else. That release is also part of being and feeling like an artist.

This artwork would have never existed if it were not for the visual journal. The ideas, techniques, and concepts that I have developed in the journal over the last 11 years have laid the foundation for the artwork that I am making now. The journal has been such an integral part of my personal artistic growth. And I am happy to share my art and my journey.

Thank you to all who have supported my artistic endeavors.

JFJ in NC

Dave and I just got back from the North Carolina Art Education Association's annual Fall Conference in New Bern, NC. The setting was great, the weather was beautiful, and the attendees were highly motivated. We were part of 4 presentations and workshops spreading the power and importance of the visual journal.

Our 3-hour, hands-on workshop was filled with excited teachers - many of whom keep coming back year after year and some of whom came on the advice of a friend or colleague, but all of whom dove into the variety of media and techniques we shared. Our 45-minute presentation on our journey to publishing The Journal Junkies Workshop brought out quite a few people early in the morning as we traced our path form the visual journal to the book. Many stayed for Dave's presentation on 100 Visual Journals for North Carolina (Dave's hand-drawn logo for the project can be seen above). Basically, Dave envisioned one journal going to each county in NC (there are excactly 100), getting filled by teachers, students, and the commuinity - ages 2-102 - and then making its way back to him where they will be donated to the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching as a means to raise money for the center. We thank all those who took on the role of Activist to become guardian of their county's journal. We thank Cheap Joe's in Boone for the donation of the 100 journals. Finally, we supported our good friend Sam Peck in his presentation Fight Club=Graduate School where he credited his acceptance into UNCG's MFA program in part to the visual journal and in part to the discussion he had with the interviewers about the book/film Fight Club and Postmodern Principles. Tying the book/film to Olivia Gude's "Postmodern Principles: in Search of 21st Century Art Education", Sam led a great talk about his journey to and through graduate school and back to teacher.

Thanks to all who came out to be part of a great conference, and we hope to see you all in Charlotte next year. The support, enthusiasm, and motivation keeps inspiring us to continue to push the visual journal further and further.

Balance

I have been finding my balance more over the last few weeks. Life can be so overwhelming at times when things are stacked up and everything is a priority. Unfortunately, many people want their priorities to become mine. So, it is nice when life balances itself out for a while. Balancing teaching, spending time with family and friends, working around the house, making art, and finding some quiet time is a difficult task at times, but that is what life is about - seeking balance.

Priorities

With school in full swing, I have been busy to the point of being almost overwhelmed. Things are finally settling down, and it isn't so much work and struggle keeping up with the day-to-day. I have actually found some time work on my art. Besides working in the journal, I have been able to start a 22"x30" piece on watercolor paper (pictured above). I tacked the paper up behind my desk at school, and over the last week, I have been slowly adding layers of watercolor and watercolor pencil with much of the work over the last two days. It has been a nice lift in the spirit to find time to work on some art.

I am a big believer that in our lives we give priority to things that we value. Unfortunately we often give priority to things like TV, cell phones, and computers, and to some degree that is what we value at the time even though we may say otherwise. If it was something we did not value, we would not dedicate the time. It is that simple. Actions speak louder than words.

Too often, I have paid lip service to the importance of my art, but I have not dedicated the energy. So, on some level, I was not valuing it at the time. I am not criticizing myself because life easily gets busy and one aspect can quickly take over our focus. I am simply stating a fact, but I am glad that at least for now, I am finding some balance in life with work, play, art, family, friends, and so on. It's not all perfectly balanced, and there will always be ebbs and flows. But I feel more in touch with myself and more centeredwhen I am making art.

Here is to finding balance and prioritizing the things that truly matter.