The Bigger the Better
Yesterday I sent an email to my students reminding them that we are going on a field trip tomorrow morning to The Natural History Museum at Harvard to sketch. My wonderful student and now friend, Maureen, wrote back that she would be there and—’I always have such grandiose ideas.’
I LOVE that. The bigger the better! Seems like so many of us have been rather small thinkers and with good reason. I consider this a concern of women. When we Baby Boomers were girls it didn’t look like grandiose ideas could apply to us. I remember being ten and suddenly getting it. I thought that God was a man, Jesus was a man, the Prime Minister of Canada was a man, Santa Claus was a man, Mark Twain was a man. If it weren’t for Lucy Maud Montgomery and the Queen of England I would have shot myself right then and there. I decided that I, too, would be a writer because I couldn’t be Queen. Though, at the time, I was holding out hope that Prince Charles might cast an eye my way.
That was then. I’ve had plenty of grandiose ideas myself over the years but too often I haven’t believed that all is possible. No more. So, tomorrow, we nurture those visions in the company of one another after breakfast at the local diner. Stay tuned.
I popped down to the Art Center this afternoon to deliver some prints of my art for their shop. Yes, this is the same art center which rejected my paintings from their members’ show. No hard feelings at all. The program director is a truly wonderful woman, perhaps too wonderful. She said, ‘You are going to submit work to the faculty/studio artists show, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ I explained that I don’t have much spare art lying around. I try to keep things moving and they seem to, one way or the other. I said I’d just been playing around this fall but I think I know the direction I will focus on now in my art. I’ll be going back to my paintings with words. I didn’t say I’d lost a little hope that my work might pass muster after the last couple of rejections.
