Image Making: Then & Now | Exhibit Opens Nov 15: Laurie Doctor & Martin Erspamer, OSB

(Above) Works in clay: Collaborative Masks, 26” x 7 “ Laurie Doctor & Martin Erspamer, OSB

This week I have been reading Image Making in Arctic Art*, an article written in the 1960s about the the indigenous people living in the desolate Arctic tundra. It’s hard for most of us to imagine that in addition to no electricity, running water, heat, etc. …it is so cold that nothing grows. No trees in a flat landscape. They live in a white and gray shifting world of wind and ice. Life is uncomplicated by email, texts, phones, radio, TV, internet, cars, and airplanes. Their days are made of bare essentials — of finding food and oil for their lamps, to have enough light and warmth inside their ice igloos. In this bare existence, poetry and art are also part of survival. Poetry and art are food. There is no separation made between the need for the hunt and the need to create. Being makers is part of their sustenance. They make their own music, singing and humming as they work, reciting poetry, asking the unformed tusk: Who are you? Who hides there?

Moonrise, 3’ x 2’ Oil, cold wax and mixed media on wood — L Doctor — Photo by Geoff Carr

Edmund Carpenter* records a story from the 1700s of two Arctic hunters following a snowshoe print in the vast empty landscape; it leads to a young woman sitting alone in a hut. She has been there for seven months without seeing a single human. She tells of her whole family — her parents, her husband and her baby — being murdered by a hostile band. She alone survived. What struck these hunters most deeply was her dignity and composure. In spite of this unimaginable loss, and having to survive alone for months by snaring small game, she sat beautifully dressed, taking the time in her isolation and grief to decorate her dress with small found objects, placed in pleasing patterns.

Perhaps in the story of the young woman there is also the idea that you can open your imagination to finding what you need to be a maker, regardless of the circumstances you find yourself in.

Reading that when they have to leave their home, that they leave everything behind, including all the lovely carvings, I had a moment of sadness, and then clarity. Why is it that in our contemporary world we work so hard to accumulate things, and then with the difficulty of “letting go”? Is it that we are so far from feeling what is truly essential? What is it, in the end, that cannot be taken? I don’t want to live in the Arctic, but I do want this non-hierarchical, reciprocal connection between inner and outer, song and landscape, heart and stars.

There are amusing stories from the 1960s of tourists asking an indigenous artist to carve a seal, and receiving a walrus, or asking for a chess set, and receiving pawns that are each a different animal. The Arctic carver, like Michelangelo, assumes that the creation already exists, and that it will reveal itself it by beginning. This is an ancient idea, that the act of making, is not so much about creating something new, as it is an act of remembrance. 

Wheel of Time, Oil and cold wax on wood, 11” X 24” L Doctor Photo by Geoff Carr

What is new for me this morning is the obvious correlation this makes with all kinds of creation: If you wait until you are ready to have a child, you will never have one, as one is not ever ready to give birth or raise a child. Nothing can prepare you for what happens, for what will come forth.

If you wait to begin your project until you are “ready”, you may keep delaying. Conversely, if you act as if your painting is already formed, your book already written, your sculpture already inside the clay — hidden — you will begin. 

At least for me, it is in the process of doing that I make discoveries, that I find my way. Don’t wait until you have done all the research, got all the right materials, have the right amount of time; just begin. You will find out where you need to go by going.

Are you waiting to begin? I’d love to hear from you.

Our exhibit opens Friday, Nov 15, 2019 at the New Editions Gallery in Lexington KY
Please come if you can.

*Sign Image Symbol, ed. by Gyorgy Kepes: Image Making in Arctic Art by Edmund Carpenter, 1966