Dwayne Walker, in his YouTube video entitled “Where Does Art Come From” tells us that art has the power to capture moments and while time erases and diminishes, art saves and preserves. Time tries to wash things away. We make art because it lets us time travel. Art is a portal, allowing us to speed across time, documenting our presence right here and now, for then…proving we were here. Dwayne tells us that art is how we build a bridge between every version of ourselves. He says we make art because something sacred happens when we do. We make art because our soul has to. My final note from his video is where the title of this post comes from. The world needs more memory keepers.
Those are my favorite parts of the video. Dwayne puts words to what I’ve been unable to describe for over sixty years.
My daughter and I call ourselves memory keepers. We thought we were the ones to invent the term, but not so. There are many memory keepers in the world. We are artists, writers, musicians — creatives.
So like the Spanish sword fighter, Diego Montoya, from Princess Bride said, “we must go back to the beginning”.
I’m writing about this because I’ve been feeling quite blue lately. A lot of things are weighing on my heart. To make things worse, I’ve been feeling like my ability to do art is gone. It’s as if all the years of creating art were just a dream. Yet when I think of what Diego Montoya said about going back to the beginning, I find myself thinking back to my childhood – to when I was ten and discovered the wonder of writing and art.
Here I am, seventy years old, trying to reclaim that wonder, to see if it could rekindle a fire within me and shed light on the truth that the things hurting my heart of hearts aren’t bigger or truer than the fact that I’m going to be just fine. I’m looking at the world around me like a child, seeing it as if for the very first time. It feels like I’m learning to draw all over again, because drawing starts with “seeing”. Not looking. Really seeing. I’ve taught that in classes so many times and I believed it. I must have been seeing or I wouldn’t have been able to render things correctly. Yet I was teaching about seeing with my eyes. Now I’m learning to see with my eyes AND my heart and maybe even a childlike imagination. This time I want what I draw to have heart and soul in it – to have meaning. I’m doing the work for myself this time and doing it just to enjoy the doing of it.
It started the other day when I drew the circle piece that is at the top of my previous post. I used colored pencils on watercolor paper, wanting to see what colored pencil looked like on that very textured paper. If I’d used watercolor paint, it would have had a completely different look.
A while back I drew a cube. I tucked it away for several weeks. When I came across it yesterday, I laid it out on the desk, looking at it all morning, wondering what I could do with it. Also on my desk was a rubber band wrapped around three colored pencils from the previous circle project. Hm, I thought. What could I do with them? Why worry about ruining the carefully sketched cube? Just do it. I set about filling in the cube with the two yellows and one violet. The paper was Marker paper and had a very smooth texture. I loved the way it felt, softly putting colored pencil layers on that paper. It was a new style of drawing and coloring for me.
Working on the cube transported me up and away from my worries and made me feel more like the child I was long ago. It let me exist in the moment and that moment lasted as long as I wanted.
Here then, is the cube.
