Art School

Art Studio 

One of the things Eleanor dreamed of doing when she left her job was spending more time in her art studio. For years, Eleanor had been making collages and drawing. Most recently she had been drawing roses. She had a lot of roses in her yard and picked them to put in vases. One day she began drawing them and found it addicting, trying to get the shapes she drew to match what she saw in front of her.

But collage had been a part of her since she was a child. Eleanor remembered sitting under a buffet table at the age of 6 or 7 and cutting out paper dolls. Families of them. Fathers, mothers, children. It occurred to Eleanor when she became a therapist, that young Eleanor was trying to put together a family because her own was falling apart.

Harlequin

Eleanor created a studio in her garage almost 15 years ago. She spent once or twice a week in the studio making collages out of paper, magazine cutouts, original stencils and spray paint. She was drawn to making figures which could hang from the rafters in the garage and dance in the breeze. One of her favorite pieces was a Harlequin figure, which was originally called Pierrot until Chauncey pointed out that Pierrot usually dressed in white.

Muses waiting at the door

Now that Eleanor was not employed, she devoted some time each day to doing art and was finding it hard to keep going when the voices in her head suggested that what she was making was not really any good and looked quite amateur. Chauncey, a lifelong writer, told Eleanor it was important to just keep showing up and ignore the voices. Trent, an experienced painter and art teacher, told Eleanor to leave the critics at the door and keep doing what she liked to do. He added that there was nothing like a trip to the art store for more supplies to call forth the muse and handed Eleanor a bag full of assorted colors of spray paint.

Trent's comment reminded Eleanor of the time her friend Nate took her to an art store in Taos where he was supposed to be writing poetry but ended up making hundreds of incredible postcard-sized collages during his residency there. Nate and Eleanor combed the store looking for nontoxic liquid and a special tool to transfer photos and words from the advertising pages to paper for collages, a technique Nate had perfected. 

Belle Bottoms

In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell states that it takes 10,000 hours to master one’s craft. Eleanor wondered how many more hours she had before she could call herself a master with scissors and glue.