Resilience cards - 2023 12 31

 

I have managed to get some time to myself after family caregiving during the holiday season that left me frayed and exhausted.

I was recently reminded of the writings of Ellen Dissanayake, an American author and scholar who focusses on "the anthropological exploration of art and culture".

She uses an behavioural approach to understand our continuing, pervasive human activity of art making. She is concerned with the importance of artistic activity as behaviour rather than a pre-occupation with perfectionistic finished works. She talks about how the results of art making, what she calls 'artification', is the treatment we give to ordinary objects, surroundings, etc. that imbues them with extra-ordinary meaning.

Last winter I spent time with a flock of chickens and collected reference photographs for future drawings. There was something evocative about the spirit, the movements, and the presence of the chickens that fascinated me. These digital reference photographs yielded several images that I could use for drawing chicken portraits. The experience of making these drawings and the resulting works gave me a sense of the 'extra-ordinary' arising from artitistic activity.

Today, as I sit down to draw, the extremely ordinary experience of looking at a digital photograph becomes an extra-ordinary adventure. I follow the initial inspiration of rendering the drawing in multiple layers of graphite. I move from one elaboration to another until it is clear that no more can be done in this sitting.

When I stop drawing, I don't know what I have made. I don't know it what means, what it is expressing back to me about my own conscious and subconscious knowledge. I put it up on the wall and come back to it, over and over, as its meaning takes shape in my own mind and emotions. 

I laugh at the serious image of the chicken, the idea of 'chicken' taken seriously as a legitimate subject for art making. I notice the position of the head, the direction of its gaze and the movement of its beak. It feels like it is about to move out of the picture frame, or swing its head toward me to get a better look. I transfer my own identity onto the chicken and imagine myself as intensely unapologetic and unappeasing in its comportment and composure.

I draw strength from the chicken and feel bolstered in my resilience to  in the day to day difficulties of family caregiving.