Let’s make art together, you and I

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up." – Pablo Picasso

Dang. Sometimes an email starts a revolution. Sometimes a spark is all that is needed for a full-fledged conflagration (I love that word) to occur, flame up, heat the air around us.

Donna gifted me (and you) with an Artist Trading Card based on one of my recent posts, and I loved it. I mean, I really loved it.

Several years ago, after finishing a class at the Penland School of Crafts here in the wild hills of North Carolina, the Significant Class During Which I Had a Huge Revelation, there was an auction of work from students and faculty who were in my session. Well-dressed city folk also drove in for the event, since the quality of craftsmanship at Penland is well known. They had the look of people who bought art for investment’s sake, though I could have been wrong about that. Not that there’s anything wrong with investing in art, but I really do quite enjoy the person with nothing but loose change in their pockets who pulls it all out on the counter and starts counting pennies because they’ve found a small piece of art that they absolutely can’t breathe without, and the well-dressed cocktail party people who appeared at Penland that evening didn’t seem to have that hunger or gasping for air at the very beauty and meaning of it.

So, the auction progressed (you can get a sense of auctions like it at the very end of this wonderful video about Penland). I had my little eye on something that the photography class had made as a group. It was an unusual deck of playing cards they had created and placed in a little box they had made, each card faced with one of their photographs–not glued on, but printed on.They had worked in the studio next to mine that session, so I had gotten to know some of them. I thought the little card set was spectacular. I couldn’t stop touching it, and since I have a Big Thing for Boxes, Especially Small Ones, well. I needed it. I wanted it. I had to have it. I would feel lost without it. I would ache for it. You get the picture?

Suddenly, it was on the block. My heart leapt up. My face got hot. I soon found myself bidding against a small whiff of a woman sitting a few rows in front of me to the left in an auspicious hat. Sure, there were other people bidding at first, but she and I started gnawing the same bone and left everyone else mute and very still in their seats. Mind you, the metaphor I used earlier of the person counting pennies wasn’t actually a metaphor as much as a real, true-to-life illustration of my reality, so I didn’t have the money to take her on–but the higher the bidding got, the more determined I was that those cards deserved better than her.

They are beautiful cards. I take them out every so often just to touch them.

And so, when Donna sent the Artist Trading Card she had created, I started imagining a whole set of them, 37days trading cards with the challenges on them, artfully interpreted, maybe in a little handmade box that I could open each morning and pick out one to carry that day in my back pocket with my index cards or in my wallet with my Philip Glass Pocket Shrine. I started imagining other readers of 37days creating 37days cards, each their own interpretation of what these words and challenges mean. And then as I drove to Ingles to buy cat food and toilet paper and tiny calorie-free Reese’s Cups, I started imagining the book version of 37days illustrated by readers of 37days, each creating an Artist Trading Card to express one of the 37 essays that will be in the book, to introduce the essay.

I emailed the publisher from the parking lot of Ingles. She loved the idea.

What a wonderful thought–that we could work on this book together, you and I. Come play, won’t you?

We’re off and running and it’s a fast train we’re on. If you would like to help create art for the book (and for this luscious set of trading cards that I think we all need to collaborate on and make and enjoy and touch each morning before we get on our Schwinn to go to work), more information is here (PDF). And remember, we are all artists. Don’t exclude yourself from this process because you’re "not really an artist." We all are.

[Donna, thanks again. Not just for that card, but for much more–for energy and passion and engagement, and for waking me up.]