Gratitude

On Being a Door-Holder, Not a Gatekeeper

For Wendy, for encouraging a writer to make visual art

Have you ever known something as a writer, but not been able to apply your knowledge where it could help you elsewhere in your life? Wendy Lee Lynds is a visual artist and teacher who reinforced for me the value of making art for myself and enjoying the process of creating without worrying about judgement of the product.

In an art class held in a former school bus garage, Wendy showed me that the final product need only matter to me, not to anyone else or to measure up to some standard of Good Art. If I didn’t like what I’d made, I could paint or glue something different over it — or I could put it aside and make something totally new.

Doing art projects with Wendy helped me apply ideas I’ve known for years about the writing process to experience the creative process in more wide-ranging ways. As a writer who makes her living as a writing teacher, letting myself make visual art deepened my understanding of my students for whom writing doesn’t always come easily.

Teacher, Teach Thyself

A longtime English teacher at a community college, I know that self-judgement and the perceived and/or expressed opinions of other people can make or break the way that someone feels about themselves as a writer. I’ve had countless students tell me that they’ve been carrying negative ideas about their writing since childhood.

I had similarly negative feelings about myself and visual art. I didn’t see it as something I could do well, so I told myself I wasn’t an artist, and I mostly didn’t try making art.

Wendy helped me realize that while I was encouraging students to experience the pleasure and personal development that can come from the practice of writing (and reading), I’d defined myself as Not Enough when it came to visual art and was missing opportunities to learn and grow — and to feel better by expressing myself creatively in ways I didn’t know I could.

Fun Work

From my earliest school years, I received positive feedback about my writing. Meanwhile, I gradually came to feel that I wasn’t good at visual art. As a child, I liked looking at art and learning how to do art projects. I liked the way brushes felt and how many different paint colors you could choose from and how you could mix your own.

I loved drawing cartoons and coloring with crayons and markers. When I was ten or so, my mom signed me up for an after-school cartooning class at the local recreation center, and instead of homework, the teacher gave us “fun work” to draw different people, animals, or objects without receiving grades or feedback other than “Cool!”

When it came to doing artwork at school, I wasn’t skilled at drawing a straight line or painting a tree that looked like a real tree. By the time I was in high school, I chose not to take an art class for an elective because I felt it would be difficult and embarrassing for me. I never took art classes in college, either.

After the cartooning class, I didn’t take another art class until I was in my 30s and saw Wendy on the local TV channel run by the college where I teach. She was demonstrating techniques from her collage class offered through the community extension program. Wendy looked like she was having so much fun that I called and signed up for her class.

Paper + Glue + Me

Over the next few weeks, I learned that you could make a collage through a process as simple and straightforward as gluing two pieces of paper onto an index card. You could do all kinds of things, like thin down a $1 bottle of craft paint with water and drip it onto a canvas to make an abstract background.

I learned some basics about composition and color theory, but mostly I learned to use the materials around my house to make art. Did you know you can use a credit card to smooth the glue bubbles out from under a piece of magazine paper? Did you know that a torn edge sometimes looks better than a cut edge, so it’s OK if you misplace your scissors under your collage materials?

Art finally became the relaxing, even meditative activity that I’d secretly hoped it could be for all those years I’d been scared to try it, other than rubber-stamping a greeting card here and there.

It turns out that nobody was locking a gate to keep me out of the art supply store except myself. I just had to come in and look around, maybe ask a few questions and be willing to try something new.

Thank You, Wendy

I want to say thank you to Wendy for being my teacher and —starting about ten minutes after we met — my friend.

I’ve always talked a good game about aligning my practice as a writer with my work as a teacher, but I needed her enthusiastic guidance to experience the creative process as a student again. I needed to remember the leap it takes to express your individual ideas despite feeling scared, shy, new, and maybe even frustrated — well, any number of things I’d learned to manage years ago as a writer.

I’m grateful for her help in refreshing my perspective on the fact that sometimes you have to pick up a new sheet of paper and start again — or maybe you can go back and peel away the layers of the collage you just made so that it looks cool and distressed, which reveals a hidden part underneath that you really want to bring out.…

Who knows? It’s all a process to explore.