To borrow the words of the writer of the Psalm 51, the psalm for Ash Wednesday, it creates a clean heart within us.Īsh Wednesday beckons us to cross over the threshold into a season that’s all about working through the chaos to discover what is essential. Allowing ourselves to be present to the messiness provides an amazing way to sort through what is essential and to clear a path through the chaos. Yet what may seem like inadequacy-as I felt in my early attempts with charcoal-becomes fantastic fodder for the creative process, and for life. It compels us to see where we are not adept, where we lack skill, where we possess little gracefulness. Launching into the unknown and untried confronts us with what is undeveloped within us.
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Taking up a new medium, entering a different way of working, diving or tiptoeing into a new approach: all this can be complex, unsettling, disorienting, discombobulating. If I stay too attached to a favorite medium or familiar technique, I risk shutting myself off to possibilities that can take me to whole new places in my work and in my own soul.
![artful ashes artful ashes](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_bjRkMjF5ysQ/TR9hIVUO19I/AAAAAAAAMS8/gbhSSpJuK5w/w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu/RickRossAshesToAshes.jpg)
ARTFUL ASHES HOW TO
In the process of cultivating a unique vision, with all the consuming focus that involves, we have to learn, at the same time, how to keep an eye open for the creative surprises and invitations that can lead us to new pathways or deepen existing ones. What remains on the page-the dark, ashen lines-is spare, stark, sufficient.įor every artist, one of the most crucial habits to develop is staying open to what shows up. It is a medium of subtraction, involving little more than a piece of blank paper, a stick of charcoal, and an eraser to smudge and then smooth away all that is extraneous. When I do a charcoal drawing, my goal is to find the fewest number of lines necessary to convey the scene. Where collage involves a process of accumulation and addition as the papers are layered together, charcoal invites me to an opposite experience. In large part, what I came to love about working in charcoal was the dramatic contrast it offered to my colorful, often intricate collage work. Not only did this help make it possible to complete the project, but it also began to open creative doors within and beyond me in ways I never would have imagined. Moving through what I had perceived as chaos, Peg showed me what she saw, and she offered suggestions on how to pursue and develop the path that had been obscure to me. In a fashion that struck me as being something like lectio divina, she followed their tangled lines until she began to perceive something that had the beginnings of coherence and form. But Peg took the smudgy, ashy papers, spread them out, and pondered them. Peg told me to bring her all the sketches I’d done: the good, the bad, and the ugly. On the verge of calling the editor to do an embarrassing backing-out dance (an awkward jig that I try hard to avoid), I instead called my artist friend Peg to ask if she could either collaborate with me or counsel me on the project. I could sense that a style was stirring, but in the beginning stages it appeared so raw and unformed that I began to despair of having anything ready in time for Peter’s book. And fell in love.īeginning to work with charcoal was like learning a new language, with the delights and challenges that come in such a process of discovery. After several other experiments, I picked up a piece of charcoal. I tried doing collages in black and white, but made little headway. Then I set about to figure out what kind of black and white medium I could manage. I so wanted to work on Peter’s book that I told the editor yes.
![artful ashes artful ashes](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/03/bf/64/03bf64502f448460a8cc7359fc5997e6.jpg)
With my having worked primarily in paper collage, black and white was not exactly my first language, artistically speaking.
![artful ashes artful ashes](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/c2/95/7a/c2957ab48fd3b2628924aef1f580b6c6--memorial-stones-ashes-cremation-products.jpg)
The catch was that the artwork had to be in black and white. His editor, who had been the editor for my first book, wasn’t aware that Peter and I were acquainted, having crossed paths on a few occasions when he was visiting the U.S.
ARTFUL ASHES SERIES
When I received the invitation to do the artwork for Peter Storey’s book Listening at Golgotha, a series of reflections on the Seven Last Words of Jesus (featured in Friday’s post), it came as a lovely bit of synchronicity.