The Muddle in the Middle by Nancy L. Eady

One of my (many) hobbies is art. Once a week during my lunch hour, I go to art lessons at a studio down the street from my law firm. Sometimes I paint with acrylic paint, sometimes watercolor, and sometimes oil. Other mediums I have tried include pastels, which are compressed chalk-like color sticks, and graphite pencils.

With every art project, I hit a point where I am convinced that I am just wasting my time with the painting. I feel I will never work out the kinks, and when done, the picture will look like a first grader’s finger painting.

For example, this is a picture of my current project:

In the future, this will portray Shadow, the first dog my husband and I had, based on a picture we took one autumn day long ago from a boat on Lake Martin. Right now, it’s squiggles and blobs of paint. Just getting the background right will be a challenge; I need the colors to show up enough that people can tell they are trees and water, but with vague enough detail that they don’t upstage the main part of the picture, Shadow.

I have done two other portraits of our dogs. One turned out well, and one not so well. Here is the pastel of our dog, Tyra, while she was still alive:

I am proud of that one.

Unfortunately, Mandy’s portrait left a bit to be desired. It reminds me of one of those early American paintings where the subjects have little or no neck. But even though it’s less than perfect, I’m still proud of it. 

The point is, with both portraits, somewhere in the middle, I became discouraged and convinced they would never work out.

Two years ago, I worked on a complicated oil painting of a friend of mine and her grandson. I took pictures week by week until finished. And that was worth doing.

Here is the first picture I took: 

And here it is ten weeks later at the end: 

Writing is very much like that. Right now, I am writing the first draft of a book—and I am convinced it is terrible. It’s disjointed, and I move from one scene where a group of people talk to another scene where a group of people talk with little else happening. I’m not sure I’ll be able to pull the plot out to the point where it supports a true novel length work. And probably, even when I pen the words “The End,” I’ll still feel that way. After the first draft, I’ll have at least three rounds of rewriting and editing the book before I can say, “I’m done and  proud of this.”  But looking at my pictures from art class reminds me that if I continue to work on my book, I’ll wind up with something I can be proud of, even if it’s not perfect. That’s how I’ll survive the muddle in the middle.


So here’s to perseverance and patience and plodding step-by-step through a process. It’s worth it.

What inspires you to keep going when you hit a point with a project where you become discouraged? 

Of Accidents and Art

The story of this photograph started off with an accident. I was watering the plants on my backyard deck, and I tripped and slopped water on the wooden boards. Suddenly there was a pretty little puddle at my feet. I spill stuff all the time when I'm gardening – dirt, mulch, compost. And since Mother Nature is not known for being overly fastidious, I don't bother cleaning it up.

So the puddle stayed. And it wasn't until I finished my chores and started back inside that I noticed it again. Only this time, it looked very different.

The angle of light was such that the sky overhead reflected in the still water like a mirror. The white clouds, green-gold new oak leaves, and slick black tree limbs were all backgrounded by a sky so clear and blue it looked freshly painted.

But this was no mirror, no flat oval of silvered glass. The water took an organic form, spiky at the edges, like a starburst. It shimmered with liquid grace, following rules of physics to arrange itself there. There was no design of mine in it. There was only this puddle, and the late afternoon sunshine, and the green spring bursting above it.

Soon the sun sank lower, changing the angle of light, and the puddle became a puddle once again. I am writing this post on another brilliant spring day, and I am tempted to try to replicate the effect. But I don't think I can. My intentions would get in the way.

Some artists are spectacularly good at getting out of the way of intention, Jackson Pollack being one of the best. His paintings incorporate fractal patterns typically found only in nature, patterns that at their deepest level cannot be ascertained by the human eye. We see only seemingly random drip and drops, splatters and splashes. And that's what most abstract work painted by humans looks like under the microscope too – a random mess. But Jackson's work, just like Nature's, has an underlying order. Spirals loop together into elegantly mathematical forms, graceful and precise.

I think of this process, the tapping of the underlying order in the chaos, whenever I sit down at the page. We writers are working with limited materials – in English, we have twenty-six letters and a smattering of punctuation marks at our disposal. You'd think we'd run out of interesting new combinations, that perhaps Shakespeare or Morrison or Dickinson would have used up all the really good patterns.

But no. New stories still abound. It's only natural. Our DNA works with only four nucleotides, and look at all the variety there. We writers haven't exhausted our twenty-six building blocks, not by a long shot.

So the next time you end up with a mess, whether wordy or watery, consider the beauty there ripe for the beholding. Perhaps like me, you'll find a rainbow in the ruin.

Overlooking Treasured Objects

It’s easy for me to walk by objects that I have owned for a long time without noticing them. They fade and blend into the background. This became apparent when a woman, who was measuring my house to install new carpet, commented that she enjoyed the beautiful art in my house. She put down her measuring tape and stopped to look at each painting like she was visiting a museum.

I looked, really looked, to see what she was seeing and took in one-of-a-kind art—pastels, oils, watercolors and mixed media. You may be thinking Picasso or Monet. Nope. Almost all the art hanging on my walls was made by family or friends.

 

Each piece is special to me and has a story. Here are some of my favorites.

My niece made this oil painting when she was just fourteen years old! It measures 4 ft. x 5 ft. Because of its large size, my husband and I hung it at the top of a staircase.

She is also an excellent writer but decided to forego a career in the glamorous and lucrative arts. Instead, she is studying to be a doctor and now draws gall bladders and hearts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A coworker gave me this pen-and-ink drawing for my birthday. It was part of a series he called “Beneath the Tile.” He believed that people were different on the inside than how they appeared on the outside. The drawing is hanging above my desk to remind me of that important lesson while I write.

 

This is my baby portrait painted by a man who, along with his wife, made a treacherous journey from Russia to America during the Cold War. Tibor eventually found work as a janitor in Arizona. My dad learned of his artistic talent and commissioned him to paint individual portraits of the females in the family.

 

 

 

 

 

 

My sister painted three small canvases before she went through cancer treatment and just after our mother died. She was inspired by colorful tiles on a staircase while vacationing in Mexico. Sunny and bright, they remind me of the Southwest where I grew up.

 

 

Many years ago my college roommate and I were visiting her parents. Her mother grabbed a box of pastels and a sketch pad and began to draw while we were studying. She had almost completed it when the three of us decided to run an errand.

While we were out, their dog presumably upset that he wasn’t included in the outing, lifted his leg on the back of the partially finished pastel leaning against a chair. Max, a beautiful Samoyed with one blue and one green eye, is no longer with us. But every time I look at this picture, I remember him.

 

 

Are there treasured objects in your environment that have become so familiar you overlook them?