Working with paint and glue cultivates a kind of patience I don’t yet possess. In the inspiration journal I started last week, I’ve been working with different types of paint, mostly water-color and acrylic, and gluing paper in layers. The hardest part for me has been waiting for the different elements to dry.
When I write, I don’t need this kind of patience. I scribble (or type) words down on the page and I work them until the poem (or piece) is finished. I don’t have to wait for my words to dry on the page or for the layers of meaning to adhere to each other. They already are doing those things, with little to no waiting.
As I think about this process, it reminds me of when I took an introductory photography class in college. My favorite part (of course) was taking the pictures. I could snap rolls and rolls of film and I was happy in that process. What I dreaded was the dark room. Some photographers really enjoy the chemical fixing process, watching the images bloom on the paper. Me, I hated all the waiting I had to do. I had to unravel the film perfectly, something I could never do, wait for the chemicals to fix the negatives. Then I had to look through all the negatives, find a few good and unblemished frames, burn the images on the paper and then develop the paper. Ugh. I couldn’t do all of those steps quickly enough. Of course, now I have a digital camera and I have instantaneous results and virtually unlimited frames.
I wonder what this instant gratification does for my creative process. The benefit of working with paint and glue is that I am forced to wait while the materials do their work. This morning, I am painting the background of an art journal page and I have to wait for it to dry. As it dries, I’m doing other things, but thinking about the next few layers I want to add. I ponder the various techniques – do I want to use inks or stamps? Do I want to paraphrase the Emily Dickinson line or not? Where would I put these words? When I write poems, I only think about these things after the draft is finished and I am hurtling towards revision.
I also have to forgive the materials a bit. The problem with my art journal now is that the pages bleed through to each other. I envision the page I’m working on this morning in a certain way, but then the darn watercolors from the previous page are stubborn. They like to show themselves, even under layers of paint. This morning, I had to surrender and allow those stains to become part of the page.
I don’t know how all of this will affect my poetry or my writing process. I know back when I was taking photography class, my poetry shifted and became more image based. Will working with paint and glue urge me to layer more in language? Will I learn to forgive (and even encourage) the constraints of the words I use? Even though these are all separate mediums, I know that they must come together, somewhere.
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Jessica
