Studio Note: 5

03.20.25

Well, would you look at that?

I’ve made it to the FIFTH note. Consistency has not always been a strong suit. Yay, me! And yay, you— thank you for sticking with me, for your feedback, for reading and for sharing. Here are a few more thoughts for you, fresh from the old gray matter:

There are three questions I most commonly hear when people first encounter my art. Last week I answered the third-most-common (did you get all of this from your head?). This week I will answer the second: where did you learn to do all of this?

The answer is…slowly, over a long period of time, with a lot of repetition and too many mistakes to count….but mostly with crazy, dogged persistence driven by passionate love. Let me try to explain.

I first put my hands to clay in grade school

art class, under a teacher who is the main reason I love art today. I encountered a lot more than art in her classroom (which smelled of paint thinner and still-wet pottery). She did not push me to make things perfect, or even for them to look “a certain way.” Much to my 12-year-old surprise, it wasn’t the students who made the most perfectly elaborate or pristinely smoothed project who earned her gentle cluck of approval or kind exclamation of delight.

It was the kids who might have made a bit of a mess,

yes— might have sort of garbled the anatomical proportions of their attempted subject, but they were the kids who had some thought behind their work. The kid might not have had “an artistic bone in his body” but there was an intent and a purpose and a humble effort behind what he made. There was thought put into “why” he drew his mouse just so…there was honesty behind what he depicted…the kid wasn’t able to make a perfect drawing of a mouse, so that wasn’t even his end goal…the kid was honest to goodness putting down on paper what what he noticed about Johnny Townmouse. Sometimes (often!) they were seeing something more than the actual, physical lines that Beatrix Potter had drawn. Sometimes they were seeing something more-than-physical that shone out of the original drawing— about the mouse’s character, or something about “mouseness” in general. Un-cramped by pretenses of perfection, they sure as heck made a great drawing, gosh darn it.

That wasn’t me.

I was the kid in the corner agonizing about getting each stinking line right, and never finding it perfect enough. Funny how just the observance of those other kids, out of the corner of my (slightly envious) eye both taught me volumes about unconditional love and at the same time opened for me a door onto the vast concept of what Art really is.

But I digress.

I first tried my hand at sculpture in grade school: an Egyptian relief, in the making of which I discovered how delightful it is to get something “just right” from all angles, not just one. I discovered that the shapes of things are both complex and simple. Complex when you try to make them, and simple…well because God made, them, I guess. I learned that you might think you know something but you really don’t until you wrestle to find it in a piece of clay. That isn’t easy. You can’t find perfection. But usually you find something else along the way. Something more about the “thing-ness” of whatever you are trying to create. Something beyond the mere shape of the thing. It’s best not to overcomplicate it. I’m still trying to be like that kid in grade school, what was it? un-cramped by pretenses. I learned you have to be really still and humble before what you are making. I can still hear my old art teacher’s voice in my ear, tersely saying “draw what’s THERE, don’t draw what you think you see.” Now, the phrase I whisper to myself most often while I am sculpting is, “come on, don’t make stuff up!” It takes a lot of humility and silence to see things as they really are. It is way easier to leave them as you wish they were. But then, that turns out to be a terrible sculpture.

That was grade school.

Then I finished high school, travelled, went to college. Wait— that’s an important point— I travelled. I spent one year living in France after high school and I believe that a huge part of my artistic taste was formed there. There, among the stony cathedrals and roadside shrines, the tree-lined avenues and the quaint cafés! Ah, yet again, I digress. Excuse me for I must now dust stars from my eyes. It was great. In France I learned to love medieval sculpture, which has inspired all of my current work. (My own style, however, is not medieval— which is another topic for another day!)

Fast-forward to the married version of me,

in our tiny first home. We wanted to enthrone the Sacred Heart as King of our family. An image of His Sacred Heart is a required item for the ceremony. I couldn’t find one that I really liked. Well, I suppose it’s typical of me then to have found that the only way forward was to “do it myself”… and so my first statue, that of the Sacred Heart, was begun. I took great joy in the freedom of wrapping my hands all the way around the earthen thing, of being able to spin it in every direction, to look at it upside down and backwards and in every sort of light until I liked it every which way. I fell in love with sculpting and have not stopped since. That’s how I started.

Since that time, I have had the great good fortune

to live in the same town as two incredible artists: one, my cherished art teacher from grade school, and another, a talented sculptor who has taught me nearly everything I know about mold-making. I’ve often submitted my work to their scrutiny and begged for criticism, knowing that the only way to get better is to see it how it really is. Besides these heaven-sent mentors, I can thank my husband for pushing me to practice my craft consistently and deeply, over the course of years. Historically, I have not been the most consistent or deep when it comes to hobbies, but Eric has been my anchor in this work. He’s told me over and over that the only way to become great is to try and fail and fail and try and fail again. So that’s the course I have been taking, and that is where you find me now. You see my triumphs— but for each one there are at least 100 mess-ups. Blessed be God who has allowed me to come back to the clay time and time again, and continually find wonders there. He is in it all, letting me crash against reality in frustration, and also (but less frequently) letting me uncover reality in sheer wonder. That’s when my work takes my breath away, and that’s when I know I’ve hit upon it.