Experience Journaling – Day 12 – Working Small

Day 12 – A Watercolorist’s Journal

I write in defense of small sketches, in writing and in painting. Gesture drawings, a tiny tree, small studies of herbaceous leaves. Like character sketches, flash fiction, sketch stories, drabbles; they hint at whole worlds.

Experience Journaling – Day 11 – Depth

Day 11 – A Watercolorist’s Journal

Painting with watercolors is all about achieving depth through layers. You learn to think in stages, planning and blocking off white space, setting down light washes, waiting patiently for them to dry, and then resisting the urge to keep them just as they are, working up the resolve to paint right over the tops of them, giving the piece depth. Preventing it from lying there, pretty but flat.

As an exercise, prescribed in a book, you choose two colors, blue and orange, their light and dark cousins, and you paint leaves and branches, petals and buds. Each layer filling the page, but also submitting, ready to be overwritten by the next, like transparencies placed on the glass. The result should be like a handful of wildflowers, you’re assured, tossed in the air and let to lie where they fall.

But the last layer is too vivid, too Cookie Monster blue. You wait, paint over it, and now the color is right, but the forms are heavy-handed: slopping handfuls of wet seaweed slung atop all the rest. So it’s not what it was meant to be. But underneath you see some of the depth you were going for. You think, yes, next time, I’ll choose that midnight blue color from the start. I’ll make test swatches, use more delicate shapes. Next time it will be better.

Experience Journaling – Day 10 – Composition

Day 10 – A Watercolorist’s Journal

What we like and what we don’t, what is pleasing to the eye, is not random. There are rules for it. And the rules–ironically enough–prescribe randomness, asymmetry, and imperfection. Take the Rule of Thirds, for example, which instructs that, if you imagine little dotted lines dividing your page into thirds, top to bottom and left to right, the four points where the lines meet are the ideal locations for focal points. Why have such a rule? Because our brains–the logical, precise, orderly central processors that have managed to clothe, feed, and shelter us over millennia–they appreciate nothing more than order. Left to their own devices, they would put a focal point right in the middle (eew), or pairs of them arranged in a row (nope).

This leads to the next rule: The Odd One Out. Focal points must exist in odd numbers, so that our eyes, frantically roaming the page for static pairs, can never rest, is always left with that one odd point of interest to move on to. This keeps things dynamic, asymmetrical, and interesting.

For the same reason, between warm and cool colors on the page, there must be a clear winner. Because equality and balance, things we strive for in so many other areas of our lives, are just plain boring when it comes to painting.

Now, these are called “rules” for a reason. Guidelines, principles, precepts, doctrines, maxims, credos … those are all so serious-sounding. But rules? Rules are made to be broken.

Experience Journaling – Day 9 – Basic Training

Day 9 – A Watercolorist’s Journal

I began to feel I should go back and learn some basics, rather than flitting aimlessly from YouTube tutorial to YouTube tutorial. So I opened up a book: Everyday Watercolor, by Jenna Rainey. It appealed to me because it was based on a 30-day learning model, with a different lesson each day for 30 days. I did some basic color swatches, experimented with saturation, value, shade, and tone. I did this one night when everyone had gone to bed. It was a serene experience, just me and my paints in the glow of a lamp, at a table in a dark room.

And, because reading about doing something is the irresistible enemy of actually doing it, I made a cup of tea and read on about value scales, split-complementary color schemes, the way pigments are valued (4 is the best, 1 the worst), grades of paper (weighed in pounds per ream and grams per square meter), and how the really good stuff is not paper at all, but cotton stretched on a block.

I knew about the wet-on-wet technique, where you paint a shape first, invisibly with plain water, and then quickly, before it dries, nudge drops of color in to swim about in the wet surface you’ve created. But I hadn’t yet learned the best little trick of watercolor painting: bringing two shapes together, both wet, closer and closer until, they leap to embrace each other, paint from one exploding joyfully into the other. The exact path seems the result of fate or, more probably, the mysteries of fluid mechanics: volume, viscosity, surface tensions. I spent  a lovely half hour corralling bubbles of whale blue and honeydew green paint into little “kisses” of this kind.

Experience Journaling – Day 8 – Economy of Motion

Day 8 – A Watercolorist’s Journal

So far I’ve drawn parallels between painting and writing.  It is also sometimes  like yoga. Or maybe it’s just my writer’s mind (or my lawyer’s mind?) that can’t stop drawing comparisons between things.

In yoga, ashtanga flow-type yoga, at least, your instructor will tell you to have good economy of motion. You can transition from mountain pose to plank in four steps, pausing to wipe sweat from your forehead, fix your shirt, and adjust your hair or glasses. Or you can ignore all of that and make one graceful sweeping motion between the poses. You practice doing less and less with your body, stripping down the movements and focusing on the poses not as stopping points in a connect-the-dots picture, but as freeze frames in a flowing arc.

To paint a leaf, you can make an outline of a leaf and color it in, like a child’s coloring book. It will be flat and lifeless. Or you can make the same shape by pressing your brush lightly for a thin stem, then firmly so that the bristles splay out and the leaf gets thicker, and then, with a little flourish, lightly again, for the tip of the leaf. You can do this twice, once for each side of the leaf, and leave a small sliver of white down the middle for a natural highlight (I’m still working on this). If you get good at it, the leaves roll from under your brush like little green tongues, seeming to sprout from the curving stems and branches you’ve drawn like real growing things.

You practice. Slow, steady, with economy of motion, and put down your brush. You may even feel the urge to bow your head and say “Namaste.”

Experience Journaling – Day 7 – Color Theory

Hi writers! It’s been a busy week and I fell behind a bit. Here is yesterday’s post. If you are new to the site this month, it is not too late to join in our challenge: experience journaling. Pick something new to try (I chose watercolor painting), dive into it, and chronical your experience. Or choose from a list of new experiences to broaden your worldview and jumpstart your writing. Have fun!

* * *

Day 7 – A Watercolorist’s Journal

I am sitting next to my mother, madly mixing colors, serenely applying them in little dots and swirls to the penciled grid on my page, not worrying if the colors are ugly, if they “match,” if my circles are a little bit messy. I have in mind the final effect and I know it is almost better if it isn’t perfect. My mom does her own, tentative version, very neat, very precise. “We’re supposed to fill the whole square?” she asks. “Isn’t it sort of ugly?” Yes. And yes. But it will be beautiful, when you’re all done and you step back. I assure her of this.

The first time I made Kandinsky circles I was a freshman in college, studying architecture, sitting in a studio class called Basic Design 2. Basic Design 1, the previous semester, had–indulge a big of exaggeration here–broken me.

My BD1 professor was a peer little woman named Gretchen, with a minimalist bowl of chestnut hair cut in an heavy fringe of bangs, squinting behind avant garde frames. She worshipped Frank Lloyd Wright as a personal deity. We were her protégés, conposing her atelier. She expected great things of us. And she set about teaching us tedious skills like hand lettering and the Goff method of rendering finely detailed three-dimensional perspectives of building interiors. We learned how to draw little dots and triangles to represent concrete and sand in cross section. (Actually, I liked that part.)

On the whole, it was difficult. It was not something I was good at. And as a, until thus far, straight-A student, this had the immediate effect of cracking my brain in half. I wasn’t good at this. I couldn’t do it. I became paralyzed. I procrastinated until, the night before my final set of drawings was due, I had hardly begun. I called my mother, sobbing. She came to me, assessed the situation, and said quite sensibly, “Just do the best you can. Between now and tomorrow morning. Just finish it. You can do better next time.”

I was thunderstruck. I sat myself down and took her advice. And I’ve realized, many times since then, that it was the most important thing I learned those four (okay five) years. And I learned it from my mother, in my living room, not from some credentialed professor with office hours and weird glasses. In the end, I got a C+. I was devastated. But I went into my second semester fueled by the fires of redemption.

My BD2 professor—also named Gretchen (I can’t make this up, folks)—was a former ballerina turned artist, following some mysterious injury. She was wistful and sad, with dark circles under her eyes. I wanted to please her. I took her class very seriously.

And one day we made Kandinsky circles. We used smelly opaque gouache, not watercolors, but the effect was much the same: colors, next to each other, speaking to each other, advancing, receding, evoking memories and associations in their particular combinations.

Wassily Kandinsky was a lawyer in Russia who gave up that career to become one of the first abstract artists. He was a synesthete; colors were musical to him. “Color Study. Squares with Concentric Circles,” was not meant as a finished piece. It was a small color study he made as part of his creative process. But it is perhaps his most well-known painting. For me, it is heavy with associations, symbolic of some early change in my personality. I sat down at that page all those years ago and painted my circles, not worrying too much if I was good at it or if they were perfect. I had an assignment and I did it. I just did it. And it turned out fine.

And with that, I leave you with a few quotations from Mr. Kandinsky:

” … lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and … stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to ‘walk about’ into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?”

“Everything that is dead quivers. Not only the things of poetry, stars, moon, wood, flowers, but even a white trouser button glittering out of a puddle in the street … Everything has a secret soul, which is silent more often than it speaks.”

“Color provokes a psychic vibration. Color hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body.”

Experience Journaling – Day 5 – Second Art

Hi writers! I want to take a moment this morning to talk about some standard elements you can incorporate into your writing journal. You may keep lists like these already. If not, consider setting aside a few pages at the end of your notebook to collect some useful bits for your future writing.

  1. Things to write about. This is just a list of writing prompts or topics that occur to you as you go about your day. One of the warmup exercises for StoryADay May is to collect at least three “story sparks” per day. That’s basically what this is. Jot down just enough to spark your memory later. On my list right now: that cab ride in St. Louis; ghost bikes/roadside crosses/flowers in chain-link fences; Flipper and Ms. Norma; death as the Irish “twin place.” All ideas I got listening to podcasts, reading the news, or just going about my day. They don’t mean much to anyone but me.
  2. Words and phrases. These can either be ones you heard and were unfamiliar with and had to look up, or ones that just sound interesting. On my list right now: myclonic, chickenhawk, partita, modus vivendi, Manichaean, Downing Street memo, sharkskin suit, necrotic, purulent, blunder.
  3. Names for characters. It is nice to have a list of these handy or to collect ready-made lists. I once clipped out an article listing all of the new lawyers who were sworn in this year in Chicago. It was a lovely, diverse assortment of Millennial names! On my list right now: Holly, Parker, Val, Gabe, Annika.
  4. A list of places/settings. Here you can list places you’ve been or want to go to, that you could use as settings for stories. Also the names of stores, bars, and restaurants, real or imagined.
  5. Snippets. Lines from books or poems that you love. Like this first line of Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, by Donald Antrim: “See a town stucco-pink, fishbelly-white, done up in wisteria and swaying palms and smelling of rotted fruits broken beneath trees: mango, papaya, delicious tangerine; imagine this town rising from coral shoals bleached and cutting upward through bathwater seas: the sunken world of fish.”
  6. Recommendations. Books, movies, TV shows, podcasts, restaurants to try. All things you want to follow up on later.
  7. Writing classes, retreats, and conventions.
  8. Literary journals and writing competitions.

* * *

Day 5 – A Watercolorist’s Journal

When I sit down to write about painting I am often drawn back to thinking about writing, and of all the ways in which the two inform each other. I ran across an article recently talking about how many famous writers either secretly practice or are devoted fans of a second art form. Nabakov was an avid lepidopterist, Henry James was a painter, EM Forster was passionate about music. Hemingway considered bullfighting an art, much as Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima felt about the art of samurai. For Willa Cather and George Sand it was the opera. Acting, rock music, film noir, ballet. What is it about a second art form that draws writers in? If nothing else, it is a wonderful excuse for procrastination! But there is something more to it that the author of the article seems to understand:

“We all have our shadow art, the one that isn’t ours, the one we might covet, feeling it knows something about us. Sometimes the novelist becomes a critic of that art and a very good one … but, most often, he or she will just imbibe it secretly, knowing that the novels could be enriched by the rules of other art forms.” Andrew O’Hagan, from “Writers in Love With Other Art Forms,” Financial Times, April 26, 2013.

So dive into your second art, writers. It’s all of a piece with your writing.

August Experience Journaling – Preview

It’s my favorite time of the month writers. Time to start thinking about a new challenge! In August we are going to try our hand at journaling. And not just any “Dear Diary, this is what I did today” journaling. We are going to collect some experiences, those moments of adventure, big and small, that expand our worldview,  that enable us to write more confidently and more broadly about the world around us.

Here’s the plan:

Step 1: Set a journaling goal/schedule. Do you want to write one page each day? Every other day? For a set number of minutes per day? Come up with a schedule that works for you, buy yourself a nice new notebook, and get ready to write!

Then, you can go in one of two directions. Or you can try some combination of the two.

Step 2 (Option A): Try something new for 30 days and journal about it. This should preferably be some sort of tactile skill, something you can do with your hands or your body that is not writing, researching, or learning a new language. And ideally it should be something you can do for at least a few minutes a day or several times a week.  Here are some examples:

  • playing an instrument
  • learning a new sport
  • jogging, hiking, or swimming
  • yoga or meditation
  • taking up painting, sculpture, or photography
  • learning to knit, sew, or quilt
  • trying new recipes or learning how to be a mixologist
  • trying out birdwatching or gardening
  • starting a collection

Whatever you choose, remember, you don’t have to become an expert at it! Private lessons and classes are great. So are YouTube videos and how-to books. This is about trying something new and writing about it. It’s about expanding the universe of experiences you have to draw from when you sit down and write. There is no failure unless you fail to write about your failure.

Write about your experience from start to finish. Why did you pick this activity? What do you hope to achieve over the course of one month? Are you seeing improvement? Experiencing frustration? Have you met any fellow musicians/artists/chefs/birdwatchers? What is your setting? What are your tools? Describe what you are doing using all five of your senses.

Step 2 (Option B): Seek out new experiences to journal about. I’m going to post a list of 31 different ideas for things you can try, one for each day of the month if you’re feeling ambitious. Or maybe one or two a week is more realistic. The point is simply to experience something or someplace new and use it as a jumping off point for your writing. You don’t have to hike the Himalayas to expand your world. You can do it one small step at a time. Want some examples? Here’s a sneak preview of the list:

  1. Do something you are skeptical about. Go to a tarot card reader or psychic to have your fortune told. Try praying or meditating, essential oils, crystals, a gong sound bath. Try to keep an open mind.
  2. Learn to fix something. That broken hinge or leaky faucet, that button that keeps falling off. Write a little how-to guide for the project.
  3. Change your appearance. This could be as simple as a new color of lipstick or nail polish, a different shirt-tie combination. Try false eyelashes or unusual glasses frames. Buy (or borrow) a statement necklace. A fedora. Get a big belt buckle or a trucker’s hat. Feeling crazy? Get a tattoo. Chop off your hair, streak it pink, or push it into a fauxhawk. Let your three-year-old pick out your outfit. Write about how the change makes you feel and how others react to it.
  4. Sleep outside.
  5. Go to a bar you’ve never been to before and order a drink you’ve never had. Sit alone and write about it until your glass is empty. Optional: turn the page and order another.
  6. Give things the dignity of their names. Find yourself a good resource (if all else fails, Google is there for you), choose a category of things, and go ahead and identify the things in that category by name. Discover the name of every type of tree on your street, every flower in your neighbor’s garden, every bird native to your state. Learn the names of the fabrics the clothes in your closet are made out of, the representative architectural styles in your town, the names of streets, rivers, lakes, types of clouds, learn the names of the constellations in the summer sky, learn all of the fancy name for ways to slice carrots.
  7. Read a small-town newspaper from somewhere you have never been.
  8. Go to a fancy grocery store with a great produce section and identify a fruit you have never tried before. Buy it. Learn how to prepare it. Enjoy.
  9. Go to a restaurant you’ve never been to and (deadly food allergies aside) order whatever the waiter recommends.
  10. Go to a resale shop, estate sale, Goodwill, Salvation Army, a garage sale, or a yard sale. Find something completely weird that speaks to you, buy it, bring it home, and write its history.
  11. Visit with someone elderly. Really listen to what he or she has to say.
  12. Learn to prepare an extremely complicated dish. I’m talking  New York Times Sunday Magazine fare. Something you love that you have always been too intimidated to try. A flaky pastry or delicate mousse, a real molé sauce. Take your time with it. Write while the dough chills, while the soufflé bakes, while the meat marinades. Write with the windows open because your are trying to get the smell of burned soufflé out of your kitchen. Write about how it was a major success. Write about how it was an abject failure.

Sound fun?  Let’s do it! Join me on August 1 to fill your summer journal with new experiences!