What Listening Looks Like

I don’t think I have ADHD.  I say this having a child who has been diagnosed with ADHD.  I see, outwardly, the manifestations of this thing in him: the constant movement, the need to be focused before he can hear, the inability to filter.

Hmmm.  Maybe I do have ADHD, without the H.  I have no problem sitting still for really long periods of time.  My head, though, my head is always moving.  When I “don’t hear” it just usually means that whoever is talking to me didn’t pull me out of my head before they started talking to me, so I just missed paying attention to the first things they said.  I caught the end.  I mean, my actual hearing is fine.  I’ve had it checked.  Twice.  You just need to call my name and pause until I’m with you.  I can hear you.  Really.

Strangely, this is not what I was going to write about.  I was going to talk about how I can’t seem to settle into one kind of art, one kind of career, one kind of… anything.  But that’s a decent illustration about how I get off on a tangent.  What I’d love to be able show you is that these tangents are all parts of the same thing.  I’m going to try to tell you.

My fascination with art supplies is only rivaled by… every other artist’s fascination with art supplies.  You see it on Instagram all the time – pics of mounds and mounds of new paint tubes or brushes or shipments of canvas.  We all love it.  How could we not?  It represents endless possibilities.  However, I can’t seem to stick to one thing.  I don’t abandon anything completely, but I don’t want to reexamine the examined.  When I say that I mean I don’t want to redo things.  There are lots and lots of artists out there whose work is instantly recognizable because they basically paint the same painting over and over again.  It’s sort of a variation of Monet’s haystacks.  He sat himself in the same spot and painted the same thing, painting it at different times of the day.  These artists are exploring some sort of expression or body or movement over and over. 

That is so hard for me. 

I have found that if I do a work and I feel it is successful, that when I try to do something like it again, it is usually worse than the first one.  I’m not passionate about it.  I’m not feeling it.  I’m not hearing. 

However, if I am saying something with a different material (aha!) then the work can be as interesting and challenging and the end result can be as “good.”

As you can imagine, in my work this looks like a hot mess.  In my studio, too.

When you start to look around, though, it begins to make sense.  I do a flower piece in resin that collects papers and metals and thoughts about selective beauty.  I do a flower piece on canvas with different papers about education and the arts with a really dark back ground.  I do a dark background in encaustic that shows light filtering down.   I do an abstract in oils that explores the light changing from dark to light and the prismatic effect in between.  I do another mixed media piece that has the prismatic effect with elements of flowered papers in different colors that viewed from far away look very neutral. 

Of course, then I make a coffee table and it throws the whole thing off.  But I’m ignoring that right now.  You should too. 

My point is, it’s not different.  Not really.

If you look at my resume, you won’t find this at all surprising.  I went to school for English/Psych and got an Econ minor.  I went to grad school for gerontology/social work.  I got a job in IT, worked help desk, did some network admin work, some coding.  I went back to school for poetry.  I taught at the college level, worked in reading centers.  I had a kid or two.  I taught fitness classes, did some writing on the side.  I started my own business. 

Where’s art?  Art was always there.  It is in the background, in the art supplies I brought to my teeny weeny college dorm and used to make gifts.  It is in the painted television I made for myself in grad school (the first time.)  It’s in the classes I taught at the half-way house where I did coursework.  It’s in the design I built for the website.  It is in the light fixture I made for myself, the painting I made for a friend, the class that I took at the community center.  It is the market that I entered at the gym. 

I forced (or I allowed) art to be a side.  Until now.  Now it is the focus.  I heard it call my name and pause. 

And you know what is great about art?  It doesn’t require that I do the same thing every day.  Clearly, that is not for me.  I have too many interests and too many fairies in my head for me to sit down and explore the same answers to the same projects every day.  Art welcomes my ADHD – or whatever it is – with open arms.  Ultimately, my art exploration has a path.  If you pay attention, that path is a path of learning.  It is learning how materials work, how colors work, how to build, take away, or change. It is exploring. It is paying attention to the world around me and putting it down in another form. 

I think, all along, that’s what I’ve been doing.  Paying attention.  Even if it doesn’t seem like it.