Marie Taylor, Ink

People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.    Roger Hornsby

As my Dad used to say, “Not every hit is a home run.” Okay, okay, he didn’t really say that, but he would have if he had thought of it. My Dad was a great baseball fan – a fanatic, in fact. When I was little we used to spend many Sunday afternoons driving through the western Pennsylvania countryside in our black 1950 Mercury listening to the New York Yankees on the car radio while Dad puffed on evil-smelling Italian cigars and Mom rolled the windows up and down.

Why am I talking baseball and art? Because once I was swinging at a lot of balls but didn’t get many hits. At the time I was doing Asian brush work. When you are painting ink on rice paper there are no second chances. Once a line is down, it cannot be changed, erased, or reconsidered. It is permanent. You can try painting over it, but that usually just muddies everything up and the purity is lost.

I had just finished an intensive four-week round of painting and instead of the 10+ paintings I usually liked and maybe three or four pretty darn good ones, I had four okay pieces and only one pretty good. Sigh. I was in a slump.

Typically, my pieces were either 5” x 7” or  8” x 10”. I thought maybe I could shake loose of this creative decline by switching up and creating larger works. I knew that this would be a challenge.

As I began my larger works, I started using up paper at an alarming rate. Mediocre efforts are inevitable until you get into the head space of a spontaneous, unthinking painting zone. It wasn’t long before I started worrying about wasting paper, being careful, planning designs out, etc. – all those creative dampening thoughts that kill spontaneity and creativity. Throughout the whole process there was a lot of starting and stopping; improvement seemed elusive.

Baseball is 90% mental, the other half is physical. Yogi Berra

When my paper was about 70% gone, I surrendered. I could not be creative and conservative at the same time. I put my ‘big picture’ lust on hold and finished up the work with smaller formats. What did I discover? That creativity can only bloom when the mind is residing in a state of abundance. My concern about wasting paper led to thoughts of scarcity and pretty much choked the creative channels.   

So then I took a short break from the ink. I did some sketching and a bit collage to exercise some other muscles. When I heard, “Batter up!” again, I knocked the dirt out of my cleats, waved the bat around a bit and got a chaw of Red Man.

If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant’s life, she will choose to save the infant’s life without even considering if there are men on base. Dave Barry