“I always look at playing guitar as an attack,” says Jack White in the September 2010 edition of Guitar Player. “It has to be a fight. Every song, every guitar solo, every note that’s played or written has to be a struggle. It can’t be this wimpy thing where you’re pushed around by the idea, the characters, or the song itself. It’s every player’s job to fight against all of that.”
When working on a new piece of pyrography I don’t always feel like fighting with the piece that is emerging. In fact, I tend to be more one trying to get out of the way of the piece, to make space, and to be sensitive to what is coming to light in the piece without trying to impose my will upon it. I start with an idea or inspiration when approaching the wood canvas but once I begin working on the piece I don’t hold to the original inspiration as sacrosanct, though admittedly there are times when I do try to course correct back towards my vision of that original spark. The piece I’ve been working on for the past two weeks centered the struggle of it’s own birth within the creative process.
Over the winter and spring I’ve been combing through my journals and photographs as I walk a different path than the one which resulted in the Shepherding A Butterfly collection. The current collection is on the same mountain or perhaps where Shepherding A Butterfly was in the meadows at the foothills of a mountain the current collection feels more like the ground beneath my feet is increasing in elevation in a way which requires more of the body and of stories held within the body. With the current collection I’ve found myself drawn to textures, the kind of textures of a place that reflect the passage of time and the untold stories of a place. I’ve also been drawn to passageways, staircases, pilgrimages, and prayers.
The current piece of pyrography, entitled A Visit to the Little Flower, started with a picture I took of a concrete staircase in an outdoor passageway leading up from one street in the city of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. There’s nothing special about this particular staircase or passageway including its location within this city. Part of the appeal to me of this image is the very ordinariness of it: this is not a staircase one would give much thought to as one went up or down the steps. To the extent that one gave it any thought at all these would be along the lines of how little attention the passageway as received in terms of maintenance. One might even hurry along at the whiff of urine or resist wondering what the stains are beneath your feet.
Almost as soon as I began burning the wood canvas for this piece the doubts began. Was this the right image? Why this staircase? No one cares about this staircase? What art can come from something whose aesthetic appeal tends towards the ugly? And still I burned the wood canvas. I do think there is value in creative folks exploring areas which they personally see or feel would commonly be described as ugly. Spend time with the ugly. Easier said than done. One can quite easily shift to the abstract and find the beauty in that which they eyes label as ugly. How to stay with the ugly itself though. Linger in an atmosphere of urine without fetishizing. Just be with the ugliness itself.
The more I burned the wood canvas the stronger the voices of doubt became about the value of this piece. There were days when I thought, well, who in the land of performative happiness will see this unremarkable pyrographic staircase as the kind of art they want to hang in their homes. Still I think I must listen to the muse and the muse calls me to spend time in this ugly staircase. At this point I’m speaking of the staircase burned onto the wood canvas. Stripping down the image to it’s essence and burning the staircase only amplifies the voice that says: this is ugly and no one’s going to care enough to give this work even as much as a glance. Still I worked with care at observing the different textures in the original image.
My doubts about every aspect of A Visit to the Little Flower persisted.
More than surface doubt I felt hints of depression in a darkening overcast sky within as issues unrelated to creating this particular pyrographic artwork began to cloud my thoughts. As I burned the wood, the smell of burnt wood rising, doubts about the artwork mixed with these seemingly unrelated issues.
While working on the work that became A Visit to the Little Flower I was reading The Tears of Things by the Franciscan friar Richard Rohr, founder of The Center for Action and Contemplation.
I came to Rohr’s book via U2’s song The Tears of Things released earlier this year on their Days of Ash EP. Reading Rohr’s book led me to the podcast The Sacred Speaks (on Spotify or YouTube or Apple Podcast). In a chapter of this episode of The Sacred Speaks entitled Personal Struggles, Doubt, and the Spiritual Journey, Rohr quotes Saint Therese of Lisieux as saying:
Whoever is willing to serenely bear the trial of being displeasing to herself that person is a hiding place for Jesus.
Saint Therese is also known as The Little Flower and in fact there is a Society of the Little Flower in the United States dedicated to her.
I specifically work on small canvases of nine by twelve and eleven by fourteen inches because I want works that retain the intimacy of the human scale, works which would feel comfortable in private places of a regular person’s home or if they share a residence then in their own bedroom, works which allow an individual to feel a one-on-one intimacy with the subject of the pyrographic work. With A Visit to the Little Flower I came to the realization that for myself this pyrographic piece manifests that feeling of serenely bearing the trial of being displeased with one’s self in a way that allows one to stay with this feeling in a spiritually enriching manner. I realized that as long as the viewer faces this image they will be at the base of this ordinary, weathered staircase with a hint of urine stays and only a small patch of blue amidst overcast skies. We are all there on different days. We all experience being displeasing to ourselves at some level. A Visit to the Little Flower reminds me of the spiritual benefits of staying with internal discomforts just a little longer, not to the extent that one plunges into depression, just a little longer, perhaps even to simply pause, to better understand what the feeling of being displeased with one’s self at that moment is trying to give voice to, is trying to surface which I might label initially as ugly as in so labeling turn away from.
The struggle in the creative process with A Visit to the Little Flower wasn’t only an internal struggle. After I settled on the name I put a couple of coats of a water-based polycrylic protective finish. This was an older can of polycrylic, one which I hadn’t quite properly put the lid back on last time. After the second coat there was a thin white veil across the work like a shroud. It felt like I had ruined the work. I had to sand off the white veil which added another texture to the surface of the wood canvas and faded much of the areas I had burned. I had to go back over the wood canvas again with the wood burner. It felt like St. Therese was saying, no, really, find serenity as you struggle with your displeasure. And struggle with that serenity I did as I re-stained the wood canvas.
Now that the work is completed my eyes focus on the part of the work which seems most amateur to my eyes: what should be the exit of this staircase at the top, that to which the eye is guided by the perspective of looking up the staircase.
(Detail of A Visit to the Little Flower)
To my eyes this has the texture of a human touch and therefore it strikes me in the context of this work’s theme as an invitation to sit serenely with what I would consider ugly in the human touch including “amateur” as a descriptive.
I begin to see how this work could be placed in someone’s home in a place of prayer or meditation inviting them to contemplate the serenity of sitting with that which gives them displeasure within themselves with kindness and compassion.
