(Above: Michael Shelby Suberlak (née Edwards), Goldilocks, etching, 2008. )

A Special Time

I’m getting that feeling again. Perhaps you could call it “the poetic urge.” Maybe its situational—things are going okay and I’m just coming out of an emotional low. Could it be sleep or diet related? Is it about my cycling hormones? Is it some low-level neurotic disorder and I’m moving out of a mini-depressive-phase and into a bit of a manic-phase? Is this thing rather spiritual in nature? I don’t know. But I’ve learned that when it comes, whether faintly or strongly, I need to honor it. This is the fuel I need to make something. This is my chance to easily exercise my artistic faculties; to function as an artist. 

What I’m talking about is a gentle tug in the heart; a delicate, almost imperceptible pull toward the transcendent possibilities that surround me and simultaneously teem within me, an invisible ocean of life. There is a sense of appreciation for what exists. There is a deliciousness within. Suddenly, recollection, rather than distraction, is possible. True contemplation seems within reach. 

It’s not always easy to recognize this feeling when you’re raising three little ones. Alone-time to commune with delicate inner states is almost non-existent. Any Catholic mother who attempts to practice prayer and meditation with little ones around will tell you that recollection—the pulling-together the seemingly scattered parts of the self into a kind of focus that enables meditation—is almost impossible. Not to mention having enough of the focus and singleness of purpose needed to make even a small work of art.

But the feeling still beckons. In this state of mind, even five minutes apart from the crowd will lead me along a sweet, gentle path of contemplation. The world around me takes on a glow of meaning. Its not always like this. It comes in cycles, I’ve noticed. One day, all I want to do is “veg-out.” I can’t believe I ever had the energy or inclination to make art. This can go on for so long that I’m afraid I’ve lost it. Then, out of nowhere, the feeling comes back and I’m ready; ready to turn off the TV, put down the smart phone, move away from mundane thoughts and find out where this quiet urge is leading me. 

I’ve learned over the years that there are different ways of nurturing this function of the soul, if we can call it that. Not all “poetic urges” are asking me to make something. Sometimes, I’m stunned that although the urge is there, when I enthusiastically open my sketchbook or stand in front of a blank canvas, there’s just nothing there. I’m blank. Or perhaps, there are so many nebulous possibilities floating around in my mind, but nothing comes into focus. 

This can be frustrating. The hankering to connect with “the muse”—or the part of my psyche that makes art, is activated. With precious little time to spare, I want to make use of it. But there are no ideas. Or, there are numerous ideas, but one is not more important than the other. I’ve figured out that forcing myself to make things in that state is more likely to lead to frustration, half-baked projects and a waste of energy. 

What’s the alternative? Well, I’ve discovered that its helpful to look at my art life as a cycle—an aspect of self that doesn’t look or feel the same day after day, but has various phases or seasons—”a time to reap and a time to sow,” as the The Good Book says. The concept is simple enough. It applies practically everywhere else in life. Why not here? And it helps me because it lets me know what it is that I need to do next. It allows me to interpret what’s happing in my creative life so that I don’t become discouraged when I’m not making things at the moment.

There are times of such abundance that I can’t move fast enough to release all of the artistic output pouring through me. I’m drawing, painting, writing, sculpting as if there is nothing in the world that could stop me. I’m in “the zone,” as they say. I’m perfectly at ease with myself and God and the world. I know what to do. I live for times like these. Then, there are fallow times—winters of the soul where all one can do is curl-up and try to survive. And this is okay, too. It’s all part of the design of life.

Feeding the ‘Soil’ of the Soul

In a situation like this, rather than seeing myself as being “blocked,” it’s better to look at as a time phase of the cycle that requires nourishing input, before meaningful output is going to be possible. That means I’m going to take this gentle poetic urge and give it what it needs to thrive. I’m going to feed it. 

With what will I feed it? This is an important question, because whatever I choose to feed my soul is going to contribute to whatever comes out of the soil of my psyche when that growth and harvest time comes back around. So I try to choose sensitively. I don’t mean that I’m rigid. I am rather, quite exploratory. This is a time for variety; to offer a number of different things to the growing ‘culture’ of my soul. What sounds good? What feels good—really? What kind of creative food seems truly nourishing for my soul right now? What might give a taste of joy?

It could be a time to listen to a piece of music that I haven’t heard in ages. Or watch a film (notice I say ‘film’ to distinguish motion-picture art from a bit of flashy pablum designed to merely entertain). Better yet, to feed the poetic urge, why not open a book of actual poetry? Pick a poem, and sit with it. This is the perfect time to stand around before a bookshelf loaded with fiction, poetry and art, and just graze. Art-books that show paintings are, for me, an incredibly important food for the soul. This gathering-in time is really one of the only times when I find myself looking at them. 

I remember hearing an interview with Anthony Esolen, an American Catholic writer, translator and professor, wherein he talks about the concept of “culture” in this metaphorical connection with “the soil.” He made the point, more eloquently than I can, that the role of the family is to “culture” the soil of a child’s life, much as a farmer enriches his soil, by feeding-in great literature, art, music and ideas. I must admit I am not only inspired by this philosophy for the home-education of my children, but for nourishing and maintaining my own artistic life as well.

Beware of the internet when feeding the soul. As useful as it can be to have instant access to so many images, songs, documentaries and films, something about surfing the web can tend to lead to mental distraction, gluttony and finally disgust. Feeding the delicate, child-like poetic urge from internet stuff can work out at certain times, when limits are carefully set, but often web-surfing ends up feeling like you binge-ate an entire bag of Cheetos when what you really needed was a home-cooked meal. 

So be careful. My advice to myself is to turn away from the internet, unless it is only to retrieve a specific artifact to be examined more carefully offline. In general, it’s better to take this time to get more familiar with the physical books already on the shelf. Most of us have books lying around that we haven’t looked at yet, or could use another more careful going over.

Gathering-In : The Work of Childhood

The other important thing to remember is that this is a time for creative input, not output. I am not expected to generate any artistic fruit at this time. I can take the pressure off myself and know that by feeding my creative soul like the soil of an inner garden, I am doing the work of an artist. I am working, just like a little child is working when they are wondering around in the back yard, examining rocks and the petals of wild flowers.

I smile when I think about the growing pile of clam and cockle shells that my daughter, Stellamaris, has been collecting on her beach-walks with her dad over the last few weeks. There isn’t much rhyme or reason to the collection. Sometimes, small buds and leaves are lined up next to and among the shells. I find quaint little piles of them in various places in the house; in baskets and buckets and pockets of coats; on the ledge above the fireplace and on benches outside. When she tends to her shell collection, I see her uniquely absorbed. Which is rare (my husband adds). My highly verbal and extraverted four-year-old suddenly becomes monk-like in her contemplation of the minutia of her special objects. I know the feeling.

The need to reconnect to the child-like activity of gathering-in objects of interest, is something that occurred to me pretty early in my formation as an artist. I was barely out of childhood myself when, in a time of gathering-in, I fell in love with the surreal and often terrifying paintings of Paula Rego (a fellow artist-mother, and a rather famous and successful one, too), who deliberately chose to surround herself with the accoutrements of childhood to help feed her creative process. According to her biography, she did things like laying big pieces of paper on the ground and getting down on her belly to draw. She did this in order to reconnect with the childhood play that initially caused her to fall in love with art. She fed herself with picture-illustrations and books that had filled her with wonder and awe (and fear) as a child, and she made artwork about that.

As an experiment, I put some of these approaches into practice in my graduate school years with fruitful results. During that two-year period of formation, I spent a lot of my time studiously revisiting Grimm’s Fairy tales. As a young child, I had a copy of Tales of the Brother’s Grimm, published in the Weekly Reader Classics series, along with 19th century engravings. I loved this book. Even though I was barely old enough to read the text myself, I loved it. Recently, in a fit of gathering-in, I found a copy for sale on the internet identical to the one I had cherished as a child. Of course I had to get it for my collection. These pages, both the language and the imagery, touched some of the deepest places in my imagination and made me want to draw.

It didn’t take long before I touched upon these things as a source for both subject matter and for notions of style and technique. At this time, I was able to audit a class in printmaking at the Pennsylvania Academy, and experiment with etching some of my own images inspired by the tales. An unabridged collection of Grimm’s tales by folklore historian, Jack Zipes, became a goldmine for me. As an academic, Zipes included even the most weird—and sometimes offensive—elements that other publishers deliberately left out. I suppose these stranger versions did for my adult imagination what the slightly cleaned-up versions did for my childhood imagination.

Here’s another example of creative gathering-in: I have always had the habit of listening to background music to keep my energy up while working in the studio. It occurred to me that what I listened to might have an effect on the content of my work. Since I was focused on recovering creative moods and subjects of interest from my childhood, I finally settled on Enya as the background music of choice for this period of time.

Like other chance elements of the culture into which I was born, Enya was just around. I had been exposed to her dreamy, New Age, synth-pop style on the radio during my 1980s and 90s childhood. I distinctly remember the thrill of being taken to a one-off kid’s drama class, wherein the movement game we played was backed by the irresistible strains of “Orinocco Flow.” It doesn’t matter how cheesy it may sound, this music grabbed my attention as a child, and so it worked as part of my gathering-in process. Listening to the most imaginative music I knew as a small child, while sitting or laying-down on the floor of my studio, helped me tap into another place within my psyche, and opened-up some interesting themes for me as well.

One example that came from this experiment is the large pastel drawing “The Handless Maiden,” based on one of my favorite tales from the Brothers Grimm. My interest in the human form, the tradition of the nude, the sometimes ambiguous relationship between figure and ground (a concept familiar to those who study both abstraction and illusionism in painting), the tradition of self-portraiture in art, and psychological states symbolized by the imagery in those fairytales—all these notions lent something to the conception of this piece. It became part of my master’s thesis work. The drawing ended up being collected by Linda Lee Alter, a prominent collector and philanthropist in Philadelphia, and finally became part of the permanent collection of the Pennsylvania Academy. 

I write about this, by the way, at the dining table, flanked by my three and four year-old daughters, who are both absorbed in their own delicious soul-feeding activities. There is an otherworldly buzz all around us as they both softly hum their own little made-up songs, independent of tone or harmony or each other (it’s hard not to laugh at the silliness of it) while one is carefully cutting images out of a magazine, and the other is dreamily examining the various interlocking shapes of a wooden train track.

These children are not worried about output. There is no pressure for them to make anything, or to have anything to show for what they’ve been doing with their time. But they will. There is something within themselves which they are carefully, instinctively building. You don’t have to be a developmental psychologist to know they are hard at work. Given time and guidence, these hours spent feeding their imagination by careful attention to shapes, colors, sounds and textures, will manifest in the fruits of their imagination, the next phase of creative work that is yet to come.

They are reminding me now that I need to be like them. In the mean time, I’m putting on some Enya. 

Sail away.