carol j watson

Whew, what a school year it has been! Better than ever, busier than ever, with more talented students, more challenges in every way and every day. For months now we’ve been preparing for our big dance, V.A.S.E. (Visual Art Scholastic Event, see www.taea.org), on February 27th. I get to take 25 of my best, brightest, and -ahem- most academically eligible art students to this competition held again at San Marcos High School in San Marcos, Texas. This year, they’ve worked on self portraits, still life drawings, and gesture drawings, and now it is coming down to the wire. Less than two weeks away, we’re staying after school late and coming in to class early, putting the finishing touches on the work destined for judges’ hands.

The best part is by far the look of achievement on students’ faces when they hand me a finished work and we get to mat it for competition. Not normally driven by competition, this event moves me. I love the challenge my students face: conceiving a project idea, seeing it through to the end in whatever form it winds up taking, thinking deeply as they create, connecting their ideas to elements and principles of art, facing a judge, and lastly, coming away with feedback, experience, and a better understanding of themselves as artists.

I’ll post more about this experience as it unfolds. But for now, I am busy cutting mats, spraying fixative, and reassuring nervous students…and myself.

Sigh…

The end of summer break is drawing near, and I find myself at the zenith of my creative energy. June was for decompressing, exercising, and sleeping. July was all about business: Dental appointments, doctor appointments, various household administrative tasks that had been held til summer break. Around the middle of July, the electric buzz in my head meant ideas were finally heating up and bouncing around in my brain, and my “work” began. By August 1st, I was in the throes of jewelry making, photography, listing new items on Etsy, and planning my next moves. Art shows to enter, new beads to make on the torch, and suddenly, I realized that school is less than two weeks away…

Sigh.

You might think that I am not looking forward to school. Not true. I love teaching art, and I love what I do for ten months out of the year. It’s just that the next two weeks are in many ways the hardest part of the year, and require a shift in thinking for me. A shift that takes me away from my much awaited regenerative, creative time back to lesson planning, meetings, parents, anxious teenagers trying so hard not to look like anxious teenagers, more meetings, more lesson plans, new schedule, new problems to solve, and the like…The Friday before teachers return to work is always the hardest. Four projects to wrap up this weekend. Somehow get to sleep Sunday night. Show up Monday morning, with a smile on my face, ready to begin a school year anew.

Every year this happens. I press the “pause” button on my tidal wave of creative energy. Then I spend two hard weeks preparing for the real work of the school year to begin. And, as always, when I press that “pause” button a second time to unleash the creative thinking again, I realize that I have a better use for that creative energy than just me.

Here’s to a new school year.

As a part of my professional development, I am taking a course in Digital Citizenship through my school district. Very informative. Very cool. Very much a prerequisite before they let you take even more informative and even cooler technology courses. I’m really looking forward to some exciting high tech connections in my teaching this coming school year.

One of the requirements for completion of the course is a journaling. I’d like to share an excerpt from my journal with you now:

“In closing, I am glad to be a part of the generation that might not have always lived with high tech goodness, but was of age and open to it as it came around. I turned 40 this year, and I remember -and lived- taking programming in the 7th grade, also while learning how to use a word processing electronic typewriter. I remember -and lived- the morphing of the telephone from the big black one in the hallway or kitchen to the tiny one in my back pocket that does WAY more than just send my voice across the air. Remember how cool and new pagers were? Remember when a fax was solely a separate piece of clunky machinery? While my son and my students have never known anything different from the high tech world in which we live, and because of that they think they’re all that and a bag of chips, I LIVED through the advent of this high tech world. Its history is a part of me, and it gives me context, it gives me appreciation for what is happening and what is to come. And that’s pretty cool…”

Something to think about…

Cooking is a lot like art, especially for me. I cook like I paint, adding a dash of this, a bit of that, until whatever I am concocting is just right.

I’ve been slow to ramp up this summer in the art department, but our garden has made it possible, even necessary, for constant creativity in the kitchen. The most exciting thing in our garden this year is our San Marzano tomatoes. I ordered seed from Seeds of Change, and planted the little seedling trays in January of this year. An heirloom variety known for making a delicious paste, these plants are the big-daddy-behemoths of our garden. A couple of these plants are taller than I am!

I’ve been harvesting and saving the San Marzano tomatoes for about a week now, and decided today they were ready to be used for homemade pasta sauce. Using oregano, basil, bay, onions, and tomatoes from our garden (plus a gigantic elephant bulb garlic from the farmer’s market), I created our first ever homemade pasta sauce. It turned out great, and was fun to photograph.

I made just enough -two pints- to eat with various dishes in the next week or so. I may make a much bigger batch later in the summer, and can or freeze it so we can enjoy the fruits of our labor year round!

Asked what I’d like for Mother’s Day, I responded, “Let’s make garden gnomes!”

So that’s what we did. Down we sat, clay and tools in hand, in a sunny yellow kitchen overlooking our beloved garden. Armed with imagination, a few handy hand-building techniques, and a sense of humor, we all managed to create a gnome worthy of a garden.

It was a great day of art, indeed.

Spring is definitely here. My favorite color, the tender green of springtime, is everywhere. My Jeep matches Mother Nature, and I love it! Blessed with beautiful Spring Break weather, my family has taken full advantage of it: washing the Jeep, taking the top down, working in the garden, putting up the long-awaited purple screen door (more on that later), painting, sweeping, napping with the windows open, and watching our precious cats mesmerized by birds and bees they see through the latched screen door.

For Spring Break 2009, I had grand illusions of days and days of uninterrupted art, though. I have beads to create, jewelry pieces to design, and a canvas just screaming at me from its lonely easel post in the kitchen. So what happened to my creative energy? That’s simple. I diverted it to creative tasks (blessings?) around the house.

As we hung the screen door, as I painted the window in my master bath, as I spray-painted an antique chair and created a new and purple-y focal area by my front door, I thought a lot about creative energy. About creating art. About what art is and what it isn’t. I concluded that the creative and artistic energy that flows from us isn’t confined to being appreciated in a drawing or bead or sculpture. It’s the artful life we lead; it is the artful approach we take to creating the world in which we live. As I worked around the house, I used creative energy no differently than if I were working on the torch or at the easel. The main difference I see is that my accomplishments at home can’t be sold on Etsy or displayed in an exhibit somewhere. Not likely, anyway.

What this means to me is that whether we see ourselves as traditional artists or not, we all can lead our lives artfully. We can pour our creative energy into the world around us, our communities, our schools, our neighborhoods, and our homes. I’m pretty sure someone has already written this book, and yes, I know I’m stating the obvious, but it seems like something worth saying over and over again.

I wish you a creative Spring.

In addition to adoring the artistic creative process, I love the creative force behind gardening and the natural world. For most of 2008, I wasn’t able to do much gardening, at least not compared to previous years. However, our citrus trees (lime, lemon, orange) continue to be a source of delight and satisfaction. While we burned through our limes long ago, our lemons and oranges are just now blessing us.

I just had to take some pictures.

My husband, Arden, and I had an opportunity to attend a recent retreat for board members and volunteers of a wonderful and local non-profit organization called Georgetown Art Works. Our goals were simple: Clarify our vision as an organization, write (or at the very least agree upon the basics of) a mission statement, work on our 2009 calendar, and designate specific responsibilities and opportunities for each of us in attendance. We had an incredible facilitator, a dedicated board president, plenty of food, great ideas, and most importantly, a creative outlet. We made incredible progress.

The creative outlet, which was strictly optional, was to design a chair made from various materials: pipe cleaners, wire, beads, and imagination. As we listened, ate, talked, prioritized, laughed, and became better acquainted with one another, we also created a chair representative of us and our task at hand of “chairing” some event or task.

By the end of the retreat, several completed chairs were passed around for oohs and ahhhs…Oh, how I wished I had brought my camera! Each chair was indeed unique, representative of its creator, and just spilling over with artistic genius! The funniest, and certainly most endearing, moment was when my husband and I placed our chairs side by side. If you know us, you’ll love this picture (I snapped this picture at home):

While mine was, well, what you might expect from me, Arden’s was delightfully sturdy, stable, well-made…also what you would expect from him. I love the contrast the two chairs created, but it wasn’t until we showed the chairs to our son, Carter, when he commented on their scale. The way he put it was something like this, ” Whoever can fit into one chair can also fit into the other, isn’t that cool?” Pretty astute for a 13 year old, I think. What he hit upon is that our chairs shared the same scale. And in that moment I realized that our chairs were a perfect snapshot of our life together, me and Arden. Some similarities, some differences…well, maybe a lot of differences to those who only look at the outside, but we live our lives in scale with one another.

Perhaps that accounts for the harmony we so often experience in our household, even in these tumultuous times.

At any rate, this art activity ran deep and wide for me…I learned a lot that day of the retreat, but even more about myself, my love, and our life together later on.

Art is like that. It mirrors your reality, makes things clearer, gives voice to your life and times.

Art is worth doing.

I am working with jewelry designer/metalsmith extraordinaire, Jane Estes, on the International Society of Glass Beadmakers’ Convergence Project. The fundamentals of this competition are that two artists are paired, a lampworker (that’s me) and a jewelry designer (that’s Jane), to created a wearable object of art that is inspired by the four elements of water, air, earth, and/or fire.

We’ve been planning, brainstorming, sketching in our notebooks, and visiting each other’s studios in order to learn more about one another’s style, ideas, art form, and expectations. It has been exciting to collaborate with another artist on a project, and we have gotten off to an incredible start, despite one hip replacement surgery (me) and 4-year old twins (Jane)! I have found Jane to be a fountain of inspiration, with an incredible eye for style and design. My most memorable moment so far has been watching Jane play with and pick out colors from my glass inventory, creating a palette from which I would create glass beads. Pulling out the pretty rods of glass is sort of like opening a brand new box of crayons, but without the fabulous smell. It’s good.

So far, I’ve experimented with nails and screws in glass beads (see last month’s posts), and I’ve really enjoyed creating the most recent Earth and Water inspired bead set, which I will feature below. Next, I am going to focus on truly Earthen tones, and see what inspiration is derived therein.

For the last week or so, my life has been focused primarily on painkillers, sleep, and physical therapy. All good. All helpful. I’m glad my surgery was successful, and I am profoundly glad to be home. Thanksgiving dinner at the hospital did not suck, by the way. Quite tasty.

I know I’m feeling better in significant ways, because I’ve felt some creative stirrings today. Specifically, I woke from a nap with a slew of ideas, and as soon as I am done crowing about that fact I will be sketching and writing my nap ideas out.

To that point, I have gotten several really key inspirations after a good stretch of sleep. I know that when I am worried, sleep-deprived, or feeling down, my creativity takes a serious hit. Rest is good. My husband is the ultimate nap artist, and he will be so proud to read this admission: Naps are Good.

Speaking of naps, I shall now snuggle up with my sketchbook and attempt one more nap before dinner…