Pour Your Art Out

My sister, at age 35, has taken up painting on canvas. (These are her paintings, at the beginning and end of this post.) She began painting small craft projects like birdhouses or napkin holders about five years ago, and gave them as gifts or just used them at her own house. Then she moved to painting walls, and took a faux finishing class to learn a few different techniques. But, it's just been in the last year that she has put paint to canvas. She was afraid to do it, afraid that painting on canvas meant that she was trying to be a "real artist," not just messing around with little arts-and-craft stuff.

I understand that hesitation. I felt like that before making my music CD -- nervous that now people would think I'm trying to "become a singer" -- me, with my lack of musical training and my rudimentary songwriting skills. As if I were somehow trying to get "above my raising," as they say in the South. Of course, these days just about anyone with a microphone, a laptop, and ProTools can make a record. The intimidation factor was still there for me, though. I am very aware of my limitations, and I still worry sometimes whenever I play a gig, that people will think that I think I'm better than I actually am.

Why do we feel it's so risky to put our creative impulses on a canvas, instead of a napkin holder? To make music on a recording, instead of just in one's kitchen? Why do we recoil from the idea that people will think we take our creativity so seriously that we are actually willing to... play around with it? I guess this is another reason why being child-like is so important. CS Lewis says, "When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of being child-like."

When my 9 year old nephew came to stay with me for a weekend a couple of months ago, we went to the big park downtown. He wanted to play on a playground. I parked the car, and we walked across the big open field towards the children's area, and when the playground came into view, he was like, "Can I go? Can I go?" He wanted permission to leave my side (whereas I had made him stay right next to me when we were walking around the busy downtown streets by the library). As soon as I said, "Yeah, sure," he just took off running towards the playground at full speed, so excited to go slide down the slide, climb up the ladders, and hang upside-down from the monkey bars.

Remember when you were a kid and you had that "Why walk, when you can RUN" feeling? -- that complete, unabashed enthusiasm for doing whatever it is you were doing? I remember it. I remember it, and I miss it sometimes.

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The numbers of people who are dead or reported missing in Myanmar continue to climb by the thousands of heartbreaking thousands. This morning it's up to 22,000 -- possibly even 40,000, based on aerial photos showing whole towns wiped out by a tidal wave. They say it's the worst natural disaster in Asia since 143,000 people died after a cyclone in Bangladesh in 1991. That is an unfathomable number to me. I was a teenager, but why don't I remember that happening in 1991? I guess the first Gulf War was happening. Maybe it didn't get a lot of news coverage. I don't know.

But now, this crisis in Myanmar -- it is excruciating to consider. I cannot help but imagine what those people went through in their last minutes. Mothers clinging to children. Fathers watching helplessly as their wives and kids are swept away, before they themselves go under. The utter confusion and fear. The panic and grief, and then the wet and murky darkness.

I don't want to not imagine it -- to try to pretend that they were numbers instead of friendly eyes and nimble fingers and warm smiles and bright minds and unique souls.


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So, what's the big deal about painting on a canvas? Or singing into a microphone? Or putting the chisel to stone, or the words on a page?

Well, it's not a big deal, really, except for the fact that it is completely necessary. These efforts say that there is beauty worth seeing, and worth striving to create. Melodies get plucked out of a perceived silence, and help us feel what we need to feel. Colors swirl together to make us see what we didn't see before. Words come together to help us keep feeling, and not succumb to numbness.

Because numbness is easy. It's the feeling that's hard.

But I am going to fight to keep feeling the ache. Because I am blessed to feel it.

Yes, I am blessed to feel it.