Ways of Seeing

My daughter has just started an art class at school, and she described to us at the dinner table the other night a contour drawing she's working on. I remember filling a whole sketch book with contour drawings in my high school art class. Contour drawing involves looking at an object and drawing its outline in one continuous line. (Blind contour drawing, when you draw the outline without looking at the paper, is an especially good warm-up exercise for drawing.) This exercise trains your eyes to see the actual shape of an object from different perspectives.

Our dinner-table conversation resonates with how I've been approaching my crafting lately. The silhouette paper cuts that I've been admiring and trying my hand at are essentially contour drawings in cutout form. Finding images to silhouette has made me look at the natural world more closely and actually see its shapes--the rounded edges and subtle colors of rocks, seedpods, and twigs that have been battered by the lake's waves; the delicate curves of a multi-lobed leaf; the shy droop of a wildflower's petals.

(NOTE: My son just brought home a wildflower identification field guide, and I think this yellow wildflower above is greater celandine (Chelidonium majus), a member of the poppy family. Its leaves are what I used in my silhouette, shown below.)

This transformation in the way I see things has been inspired by two bloggers in particular, and I wanted to be sure to mention how important they have been in this creative journey that I'm on.

I'm not even sure that I can capture the pure joyfulness that characterizes artist and blogger Elsa Mora's work and how it has inspired me. First of all, she seems to be able to work in any medium--paper, clay, fabric, flowers, even shrink plastic. Her drawings and prints and sculptures of people combine realism and fantasy, and each little person she creates has a story and powerful symbols to go along with it. The best I can say is that reading her character's stories and all of her posts and looking at the images she creates just fill me with joy. Elsita seems to have such a generous and happy spirit, and it shines through her blog. I just love the way she sees the world--as if everything she observes becomes fodder for her creations.

Her blog about her Plant Creations was a revelation and an inspiration. She described following her son's lead exploring their backyard and noticing things from his perspective. After doing so, she created these amazing, exuberant, delicate (I can't use enough adjectives here) flower collages of little people.

Since I read that post, I have been waiting for spring to arrive so that I could get outside with my son and see what little people we could put together from flowers. We've done this several times, and what we end up doing is going around our yard and collecting flowers, twigs, seedpods, and other little things that catch our eye. (So far they end up a little pile rather than as flower people.) In the process, I have noticed for the first time the incredible diversity of flower and leaf shapes and sizes just in our small patch of yard. I have come to appreciate even the "weeds" that I usually hate to see coming up in the lawn.

I discovered another absolute treasure of a blog through Elsita's blog. Resurrection Fern is written by Elsita's friend (a friendship formed through Elsita's blog!), a full-time family doctor and expert spinner, weaver, sewer, stitcher, and knitter. She's also an incredible collector of vintage items. I get an amazing sense of peace when I read Resurrection Fern's blog. There is something about the clarity of her writing and photos and the timeless quality of the objects she creates and collects that makes me think that she more properly belongs in an earlier age--before technology made our world so fast-paced and hurried. She regularly documents her walks through the woods, and she names and describes the plants that she photographs. As a chemist who wrote her PhD on the potential of synthesizing the medicinal properties of the may-apple, she knows her plants. She has inspired me to try to look more closely at the natural world and to use it with scientific precision in what I create.

What strikes me about both of these bloggers is how closely language seems to be tied to their creations. Part of the charm of Elsita's art comes from the "back story" she creates for each of her creations and the old-fashioned Spanish names she gives her characters. Resurrection Fern names the botanical beauties she photographs with scientific accuracy. For both writers, close observation of the world and the meditative act of crafting an object inspire a bright thread of words to further embellish their work. I think that's why, as a writer, I am so drawn to their work.

I think that it's an important creative exercise to try to see the world the way that both Elsita and Resurrection Fern do, even if we don't aspire to be artists ourselves. Their way of seeing involves slowing down and observing the world with a razor-sharp gaze. It involves carving out the space and time to translate these observations into the fine details of a drawing, a piece of writing, or any other creation.

The beautiful thing about this approach to observing the world is that it goes beyond crafting. I think it fosters a closer relationship with the people around us and a greater appreciation for our planet.