100 Days Project

There are so many projects like this— photo a day, poem a day, drawing a day, etc etc. I wind up quitting all of them because they end up feeling forced. I understand the concept of pushing yourself through to the other side— the idea that sometimes, the thing we feel like doing the least is the thing we need to do the most, but part of me says, life is short…why spend time doing something you just don’t feel like doing anymore?

In fifth grade English class we were assigned the reading of different genres of books. While the titles could be my choice, I couldn't just read pony books or Judy Blume novels. I had to read poetry, a biography, something from the science fiction shelf, etc. I’d gotten through everything except the sci-fi and still nothing caught my eye at the library. My teacher handed me a classic: Have Spacesuit Will Travel, but with sincerest apologies to Robert Heinlein, 10 year old me just dreaded it. The only way I could get started was by dividing the number of pages by the number of days until my book report was due. By the end though, interestingly enough, I didn’t totally hate it. Was it my favorite book ever? No. But it must have taught me something or I wouldn’t remember the title decades later.

100-day projects bring up sort of the same feeling of dread. While the idea of honoring creativity in a small way every day sounds sparkly and wonderful, inevitably it seems to turn into a have-to, not a want-to, and I feel doomed soon after I start.

Next month though, with great optimism, I am trying again thanks to Suleika Jaouad. Suleika is a writer, musician, and artist who survived leukemia as a young adult, chronicling her experience in a column for The New York Times. She then went on a road trip around the country with her dog Oscar, meeting up with friends and people who wrote to her during her time in the hospital. The journey became her memoir, Between Two Kingdoms.

She since founded the Isolation Journals, an online writers group I joined that’s turned into an inspiration for creatives of all kinds. Sadly, Suleika recently relapsed, and after undergoing a bone marrow transplant, she’s marking her wait to find out if if the transplant was a success by engaging in a 100-days project of her own. She’s asking Isolation Journals followers to join her on April 1 and begin their own 100-day projects, and because she’s the person who inspired me to get off my duff and blog again, I thought I would give it a go.

I've wanted to get back to putting my hand on paper. Sometimes I am just tired of photography. It is so everywhere. Even having mostly abandoned Instagram and Facebook I still feel bombarded with images. It wasn't much more than a decade ago that I still had a querty keyboard cell phone and carried around an actual camera if I wanted a photo of something. Anyway, I’m thinking that my 100-day project might be about drawing,but there's all this internal pressure to not make bad art. Getting some kind of special sketchbook for it sets me up for failure before I even start— why would I want to mess up a beautiful book with crappy drawings? So I've raided my stash of unused stationery and notepads that I've collected since—er—high school and I am folding up pages, stapling them together, and calling it my sketchbook. I will use a pen so I can’t spend time second-guessing and erasing, and it doesn’t matter what I draw. It can be what’s in front of me, something from a photo, or if I’m feeling particularly uninspired, stick figures and smiley faces.

I think so many of us fight with ourselves over needing to be good at something inorder to make it feel “worth” doing. My brain will try to trick me into thinking that sketching is something I don’t really want to do, but I know that if I liked the end result I’d probably be carrying around a sketchbook all the time! So then I think, well, you don’t get good at something if you don’t practice. But then I think, that’s not the point of the 100-days project at all. The point is to gently nudge yourself past caring whether what you do is “good” or not, or whether you do or don’t get “better” at it— the point is to show up for your creative self for even the smallest amount of time. The tiniest mark on the page.

Wish me luck!
(Or better yet, join me— Pick a 100-day project and let’s keep in touch about it!)

Blind School Update

I thought it might be time for a little update on my work with the Ohio State School for the Blind. Thanks to a TeachArts Ohio grant from the Ohio Arts Council, I’m at the school once a week, working on creating a timeline of the school’s history depicted on a series of banners.

These first couple months have been about deciding what events to choose, finding imagery to go along with them, making a banner mockup, and working with students on image transfer experiments so that we can decide what method to use for the final project. While it would be easy to just use an inkjet iron-on transfer, we wanted to get a little more creative, so we’re using gel medium (basically glue) to transfer a color copy to fabric, letting it dry, then wetting the back of the paper and peeling it off. The color copy pigments are embedded in the dried glue, leaving the image intact, but with a lovely, not-so-perfect end result. For their own personal projects using this technique, students can then embellish the image however they want using pastel, marker, crayon— anything really. (see Jana’s beach image overlaid with pastel above)

Peeling off the paper…

Getting creative…

What’s been interesting is that everyone wants a perfectly transferred photo and that never happens. It amazes me how quickly some students “give up” when they don’t like what they first see.

Jaden’s photo of a clay bowl he made didn’t turn out like he thought it would. Somehow most of the image peeled away and you couldn’t tell what it was anymore. He seemed thoroughly discouraged. But I said, hey wait a minute, forget this was ever supposed to be a bowl. Just use it as a starting place for an abstract piece— it doesn’t have to BE anything. Didn’t you guys just finish a unit on abstract expressionism? He added color, glued on some string he took from the frayed edges of his canvas, and voila! (He has titled it Not a Bowl, lol.)

Jaden’s abstract

Maya didn’t like that the image of her dog didn’t look “real,” so she just started coloring over the whole thing and painting a big purple border— she likes how it looks more like a cartoon now.

Maya’s dog

It’s so hard to let go of expectations! Good grief, I can certainly relate, but what I’d forgotten is how early in life this starts, the thinking that we’ve failed at something because we don’t like how it’s turned out after the first try. I think of my own work, how “stuck” I feel not knowing how I want to print photographs anymore. I don’t even give myself the chance to play around with ideas. Maybe I need to be a student in my own class :-P

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** The question I am asked most about my work at OSSB is “How do blind kids make art?” and the first part of my answer is that the students there have a wide range of visual ability. Some have blurred vision while others can see shapes or colors or varying degrees of brightness. Fully blind students might need a little extra guidance or a different way of showing them how to do something, but everyone has a good time in art class (and, yes, they all have Instagram accounts).

This Moment in Time

A year and a half ago Covid cancelled my in-person work with the Ohio State School for the Blind, and it’s so good to be back again, sitting on my tiny chair at the round table in the art classroom. Through a TeachArts Ohio grant from the Ohio Arts Council in 2020, we were researching the history of the school, presenting and responding to our findings in creative ways. Before the pandemic shut down classrooms, we discovered a lot in the basement, in old school records, and on rarely seen walls— including a framed letter from Helen Keller herself!

While it was disappointing not to have our plans for exhibitions and an open house come to fruition, the pandemic honed our focus on one important thing: documenting the present moment in OSSB’s history. We reached out to staff, faculty, alumni and parents, asking them to share school memories, stories, or even anecdotes about themselves. Students shared OSSB experiences via quilt squares, wrote essays, and created artwork in response to the pandemic. They made self-portrait photographs to share parts of who they are. The result was a self-published book titled This Moment in Time. (have a look and/or purchase here!). A braille and audio version are also in the works.

The most rewarding part of the experience for me was my conversations with students about their artwork and writing, whether in the pre-Covid classroom or via Zoom while we were all at home. Sometimes funny, sometimes solemn—always poignant—our exchanges rarely stayed on the surface but dove into the heart of what were sometimes difficult, emotional topics.

It's an honor to be back via another TeachArts Ohio grant (thank you, OAC!) to resume work on the original concept for this project, creating a timeline of important events in the school's history. We’ll be making a series of display banners using image transfers and collage. Updates to come!