Nothing Changes. Everything Changes.
Not long ago, I wrote here about convalescing through a season of mourning and change. The world had become big, my life grew smaller in response, and for a while I was content to let it.
I painted, wove, walked, and tried to pay attention to whatever was immediately in front of me.
Then a week or so ago I lit a candle, gave thanks for the time to grieve and heal, and welcomed the now-stagnant energy to go ahead and move on to someone who needed it.
And just like that, life is filling up again!
There are projects and people, plans and deadlines, things I want to make and things I want to learn. I’m preparing work for a new shop page, planning a local weaving class, building websites and—for reasons that made no sense when I started—learning to play the ukulele while singing.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Then I found some old photographs, and suddenly everything made sense again.
In one, I’m sitting with a guitar sometime in the 1990s, apparently convinced I might learn to play it. (I didn’t)
Peak 1990s 🌸
In another one taken over a decade later, my daughter and I are wearing masks we made together.
Masks, circa 2010
I was reminded of these during a recent conversation with her when we commiserated over having too many interests and only 24 hours in a day.
She is an adult now, a junior in an arts college taking classes on bookmaking and ventriloquy. Go figure.
In another pic, I’m taking a self-portrait in a mirror with a Polaroid camera.
Self-portrait circa 2012
I kept looking at these seemingly disparate images and thinking the same thing.
Nothing has changed. Everything has changed.
Thirty years have passed since I strummed a few chords on a backyard picnic table outside State College, PA, and yet here I am still picking up unfamiliar instruments.
I’m still making things simply because I want to see what happens. I’m still interested in photographs and materials, in learning how things work, and in putting things together in ways they weren’t necessarily intended to go.
Most of all, I’m still following my curiosity wherever it leads.
Paying attention, still (again?)
I’ve been painting a lot lately.
Watercolor came into my life during that smaller season, when quiet and concentration were useful things. I’m still painting and steadily improving.
Though improving may be less interesting than what happens when you stay with something long enough to become curious about it. Ordinary subjects have become surprisingly worthy of consideration.
A banana can occupy an afternoon.
Pattern Recognition
Watercolor & Ink
Red-Headed Centipede
Watercolor & Ink
(fun faux-cyanotype watercolor studies in the background)
So can a Texas red-headed centipede.
Some paintings and other goods will soon find their way into my little shop. I like that something I began without any particular destination is slowly making its way out into the world.
My weaving has been doing the same.
One of my pieces is currently hanging downtown as part of a small local art crawl and auction fundraiser. I’m participating as an artist, but I also helped organize the event and built the Givebutter site that will carry the auction online.
I recommend perusing! We have some talented local artists.
In Black & White: The Receipts
Cotton & wool
Auction link
Currently exhibited at John Ryan Brewery in Williamsport, PA
There is something satisfying about occupying both sides of that process. I made one of the objects, but I also helped build the place where my work and the work of other local artists can be seen, understood and eventually carried away by someone else.
The loom and the website are very different tools, but both begin with much the same question: What am I trying to say, and how do I help someone else find their way into it?
Storytelling
I’ve spent the past few weeks building a website for a local woodworker. He lives and works not far from me, and when we started talking the request was pretty straightforward: he needed an updated website.
That was no lie, but the more we talked, the more there was to tell.
The furniture and cabinetry were only part of it. There was also the family farm and the woods he grew up exploring, a sawmill, a kiln and a workshop. Decades of accumulated knowledge, an instinctive understanding of wood, and an unusual ability to move between architectural precision and making something with his hands.
None of this was presented to me as a story. It came out gradually, in conversations about the work, the farm, how he approaches a problem by “thinking in AutoCAD” and why he does certain things the way he does. It came out in the venison, peppers and turkey he fed me during our meetings—all straight from his farm—and in the little “Walnut Grove” our families picnicked in together that he had tended from saplings.
The story was already there. I just had to notice it.
Greenleaf Nibert website, built for owner John Nibert
From there came the photographs, writing, typography, color, navigation, search and technology that turn all of those pieces into a website.
Those are the tools, but they aren’t really why I enjoy the work.
What I enjoy is getting to know someone and what they make, asking questions, noticing the things they might not think to mention or highlight, and finding the thread that connects it all.
Then I get to build a place where other people can discover that story, too.
Continuity
Looking at those old photographs, I realize I’ve been doing some version of this all along. The materials and circumstances change, but the impulse to pay attention, follow curiosity and make something from what I find has been remarkably consistent.
Maybe that’s why I enjoy building websites for creative people, too. The most interesting part is rarely choosing the right typeface or arranging photographs on a page.
It’s listening long enough to understand what someone does, why they do it and what makes their work distinctly theirs.
Often, the story is already there. It just needs someone to notice it.
If you’re an artist, maker, author or small creative business with a body of work or a story that needs telling, I’d love to hear about it.
