Making art
and learning to trust emergence
I go for a run, I do an errand, I walk with Tepals and my horoscope for Cancer season (June 21 - July 22) pops into my mind—to take a risk, to trust following the thing that keeps tugging at the edge of my awareness.
What is it that sits on the edge of my awareness? Is it a big change like quitting my day job and opening a record store/art studio/pop-up grab n’ go kimbap lunch spot with Reed? Is it finally ‘becoming a writer’? The kind of writer who writes for publications and is awarded writing residencies? Is it making enough art to have a show at a gallery? Is it opening a fabric store and expanding my teaching?
More likely, it’s many little things. All the forgettable, mundane, small moments adding up over 12 years—this is the timeline for Jupiter’s orbit—into something more. The kind of change that you can’t really remember when you started doing it but never mind, you’re here now.
I push against this inner knowing because part of me thinks change is meant to be BIG. The kind of change that is transformational in an instant. But, when I reflect on this, none of the BIG changes in my life were changes made in an instant. Instead, those big changes had a presence in my life over months, sometimes years, that gathered into a focal point that to not see them would have been to live in madness, despair, and denial.
My current hesitation to feel content with the incremental nature of change is not because the current shifts aren’t big enough, but because I’m unwilling to trust what emerges on its own. Which is to say, I’m uncomfortable with the unknown, despite how many times I’ve already leapt into it.
There is an irony to this because isn’t trusting emergence the exact process of making art? And with this I struggle, too! I should take the hint! The lesson I’m meant to learn is to trust emergence, or at the very least, let it be—don’t push back against it constantly. I have to accept that failure (making bad art, in my case) is part of learning, like in everything else I do—something poorly written, the many mistakes made while knitting a sweater or creating a pattern for a pair of shorts, all the photos that are blurry or overexposed, so the list goes on.
These photos are of a watercolor painting I started at PLAYA, like 2 days before my residency was over. I had been stressing, “what do I do on this BIG piece of paper?!” The answer was obvious, you paint something.
We had been talking about the ever changing nature of color. We think color is static, but it’s not. In fact it is also always changing in small ways, both apparent and disarming to our eyes. And so I was tracing a lot of shadows, that shimmer in the wind and twinkle as our eyes observe their constant movement. I woke up and traced a Nootka rose bush in front of my cabin. Over that past month, I’ve painted in more of the outline with earth and lake pigments I’ve made and bursts of neon synthetics (from Case for Making). I let the paint bloom and drip, creating their own little tributaries. At some point, it’ll feel complete. And then I’ll start on another big piece of paper, maybe feeling less stress (or not). I’ll keep painting.
Beautiful!