Janet Geib Pretti, Sculptor

I have had two shows this year.  Each time pieces were finished just before packing the car.  Two will require some re-do.  The pre-show grind seemed especially brutal.  A recent day job promotion had added hours of commuting time and work time, leaving little time to get into the focused state needed to make the final  critical decisions to finish a sculpture.   But our college was closed for the Christmas holidays and I had enough vacation time saved to set budgets, long range planning, staff and student issues aside and slip back into the world of sculpture for a precious ten days before each show.

 

Sigmund Freud in his essay Civilization and Its Discontents wrote "beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it.  Yet civilization could not do without it."  I can't seem to do without it.  When a piece is finished and I finally see it for the first time after the long treasure hunt of discovery that slowly uncovers what it is to become, I always wonder if it is worth the months of neglecting  friends and family, leaving books unopened and movies unwatched to steal enough time to work in the basement.  After each show is delivered, comes a time of emptiness.  I am incapable of making simple decisions and I have to wrap my hands around my coffee cup each morning to uncurl them for the day ahead.  Yet glimpses of future pieces gradually began to surface and slowly my mind kicks back into gear.  

 

My mom gave me Joyce Carol Oates The Faith of a Writer for Christmas.  Oates believes that "we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called "culture" --- and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species.    She  feels that " we work to create art that will speak to others who know nothing of us.  In our very obliqueness to one another, an unexpected intimacy is born.    The individual voice is the communal voice." 

 

Making art, especially in these economic times  seems such a frivolous thing.   Building college programs for our isolated county seems so much more needed.  But I love to stand back watch people explore my pieces at shows.  I make sculpture because I need the dialog, the insights it  gives me that might never come without it.  But when I watch others interact with the finished pieces and begin their own journey of discovery, the making of them seems less frivolous, less self-indulgent.   

Larry Brooks, Unblocked, Unleashed & Uninhibited

For the last 12 years I have been coordinating the South Coast Writers Conference in Gold Beach, Oregon, on the Friday and Saturday of President’s Day weekend. Every year it is a huge undertaking for our small college outreach center, and every year we manage to pull it off with a small but mighty group of volunteers. Every year the day before the conference, I wonder why we keep adding its pressure and stress to an already full workload and every morning after I wake up with a head full of notes to make things work just a little better next year. I have just spent two days swimming in the currents of 100 plus people learning, thinking, challenging their pre-concepts of creativity and writing. It is contagious. I don’t consider myself a writer, I am just a sculptor who writes as part of my process, but creativity is creativity, there is always a nugget I can take home to use in my work of making sculpture.

Every year I manage to attend just one workshop in the session after lunch when all the presenters have had at least one round of presentations so I can assume any glitches have been resolved and before the final session which we use to begin packing things away. Inevitably I am always late.... so I go to the library where I can slip in with the least disruption. Larry Brooks was presenting Unblocked, Unleashed & Uninhibited. He was already nearing the end of his list of ten suggestions for becoming unblocked, and then he began discussing what it takes to be unleashed - to break in to being published. Brooks began a discussion of the six components of writing. Four are essential - concept, theme, structure and character, and the two are necessary but not critical - voice and execution. He believes the odds improve considerably for a book to be published if at least two of the four essential components of it are stellar, fresh and memorable. You really will have to attend one of his workshops (usually in the Portland area, but he has tentatively agreed to come back to the SCWC next year) to get the full gist of this concept. I don’t think he ever made it to unfettered, but I was distracted trying to translate and apply his ideas to the visual arts and specifically to the making of my sculpture.

I have gotten so much better about avoiding dead-ends and detours early on in the making of a piece, but I still struggle with each and every piece. As I gear up for my first show off the coast in 23 years, I know I will be mulling over his ideas and trying them out, hoping to use them as a guide to stay on track; as a lens to reconsider previously finished pieces for modifications and as a measuring stick to assess the progress of the new pieces.

Information on Larry Brooks is at www.booksbybrooks.com and information on this years writers conference is at www.socc.edu/scwriters.  Planning for next year's conference is just beginning so it will be awhile before any news on it gets posted to the website.  You can be added to our mailing list by emailing scwc@socc.edu.

Kate Wilhelm, Getting Started

The keynote speaker at the February, 2004 South Coast Writers Conference (which I have coordinated since its inception) was Kate Wilhelm.  I lost my voice to laryngitis on Thursday.  By the beginning of the Saturday afternoon sessions everything was under control and I slipped into the back of library just in time to hear Wilhelm ask everyone to close their eyes. She began describing the entrance to the school just outside the library and then said "The door opened......" and stopped. After a few minutes we opened our eyes and she asked "who walked through the door?" She went on to say there were two types of writers:  those for whom someone had walked through the door; and those who were still deciding if a person was coming through the door, after all it could have been blown open by the wind. I perked up my ears, as much as they could be perked up in my sick haze, because no one had walked through my door.

Wilhelm said the conundrum of the first group, the visual writers, would be that they would be able to get to work quickly but would end up with too few words and would always be in search of more to flesh out their stories. For the second group (the intuitive writers) - they would have trouble getting started but would end up with too many words and have to learn to cull. There was a noticeable sigh of relief from a small number of people in the room. I am sure it was from the intuitive writers. Because it is the intuitive writers, and sculptors, who have such angst over where to start, who wonder if a person is ever going to come through that door.

I was awake before dawn the next day with an urgent need to begin preparing for my first sculpture show in 12 years. It was scheduled for October, 2004, and I had been struggling with where and how to begin again for months. I was too sick for the physical work of sculpting, so I sat down at my computer to busy myself with retyping some of my old piece statements. But the words kept coming, and coming, and coming - a lifetime of words flowing through my fingers. I began scouring my workroom for the words scribbled on scratch paper that accumulate when I sculpt. I reread my graduate thesis. I sifted through slides for a record of the false starts and forgotten versions. Finally, I began to put the words and the pictures together, rearranging them, writing more words, finding words for pieces I had long avoided, uncovering words from which pieces had yet to grow. Slowly, the words began to stitch the images together and as the gaps and loose ends became glaringly apparent, I knew where to begin again. Unfinished pieces were resolved, new pieces evolved, and the parables of my life coalesced - in sculpture and words.

Mulling over a concept visually and verbally had always helped move me past the blind spots, detours and dead ends. But I used to view the words as a by-product and rarely tried to hone the words, complete them with the same care and clarity as my sculpture.  Now, I finally understand that I sculpt and write, write and sculpt. The words are an integral part of what I do, not a by-product. I am not just creating a snap shot of a moment in time, I am trying to capture the lessons learned. I need the words to dissect my life and thoughts down to the core, where my sculptures wait to see the light of day. My work is about form and negative space, but it is also about color and about words, and about life. For the first time in my life I have a string of titles, of problems, of lessons, stretching to the horizon. I know what I do, I know how I do it, and I look forward to the dialog, the lessons, each piece will bring. And, as Wilhelm predicted, I am finally having to learn to cull.