...I Want To Ride My Bicycle, I Want to Ride It Where I Like!
When I look back on the things I did as a kid, two things stand out: Painting, and riding my bike. Not a day went by without art and a bike ride.
A Day In the Life...
Painting was the catch-all term for everything artistic. I could be lying on the floor of my room glueing and drawing, blending chalks and pastels, or constructing a shadow box, and if anyone asked where Barbara was, my mom would tell them, "She's painting". Probably because most of what I did ended up with at least a little bit of paint on it somewhere. I've always mixed my media.
In between times, there were dozens of other things I did, usually with friends, and unless it was happening at my house, I ended up riding my bike to it and back from it. I wasn't really conscious of it at the time, but all those short, solitary bike rides to and from friends' houses and meeting places add up to a lot of collective time spent in thought. Or maybe out of thought would be more accurate, because really, I didn't spend that time so much thinking, as noticing. I looked at things. Everything. Relevant or irrelevant, it didn't matter. It was all important. It was all there to be seen, heard, compared and contrasted, and I did this like breathing--without thought. The entire world was my source of information.
Patterns...
Not to say I never thought. I spent plenty of my other time thinking about the things I'd notice on bike rides, and everything else, too. For instance, have you ever noticed how related themes and patterns seem so often to occur simultaneously? When I was growing up I'd notice that in a given evening, the themes on TV shows would often follow the same basic thread. For instance, if the first sitcom I watched that evening dealt with a hit and run accident, the next one might have a patient in the hospital who had been hit by a car, and a third might revolve around a teenage son learning to drive and in the course of it, almost hitting someone in a crosswalk. Entirely coincidence that all of them aired on the same night; None of the studios cooperating with the others or planning a blitz .
And while some of the more obvious patterns do occur by choice, often seasonally such as harvest themes in autumn, the patterns I've always been keen to notice are much more obscure. The more hidden patterns in life just seem to leap out at me and say, "Here I am"! I couldn't always connect the dots, but I knew that somehow, on some level, connections existed and could be found.
I didn't know it at the time, but pattern recognition is one of the great gifts of artistic participation. Because I created pattern, I recognized pattern. I could see it on the outside because it was what presented itself onto paper from inside myself.
They're Everywhere...
It was always fine until I mentioned this to friends, who'd roll their eyes and say, "So what?" But I found identifying patterns interesting enough to not let any of that bother me. Besides, I couldn't not notice what was so apparent to me, even if I tried. So I just kept painting and riding my bike.
In high school and college, this pattern recognition made learning languages, math, biology and chemistry much easier. Later, out of school and in the world, I noticed that in practice, medicine, psychology and forensics are all about identifying patterns, as are marketing, behavior research, and everything Wall Street. A government service job I applied for required an I-Q type test for placement. I wasn't told my score, but I was called in for interviews based on my knack for--you guessed it--identifying patterns and relationships. What they suggested to me was so far off from the job for which I'd applied that I scrapped the idea entirely and went to work somewhere else. Still painting, and for exercise and pleasure, riding my bike.
Connecting the Artistic Dots...
Back to my childhood, on Saturday mornings I'd ride my bike to the art museum for classes. I started there when I was four, and continued into my teens. The museum was my safest haven. It was a huge, echoing monument in stone to everything important. Even at 4, I knew that my artistic pleasures were also my most serious work. In the basement of the museum, I created with others side by side, most often silent to the ear, but loudly communicating our connectedness as we expressed our respective individualities in quiet.
Aside from the benefits of the classes themselves, which thankfully were nothing like some of the structured agendas presented in the school art programs, the building itself contained all things extant and all possibilities under its one, huge roof. Each work of art held it's own collection of infinite stories. More than the history of a period and a study of technique, each piece held and holds the biography of the artist as well as the biography of the beholder. The sum of these two contains the entire history of the universe.
But even more than history, art is communication, and each work of art is a conversation. On the way home from the museum, riding my bike, everything I noticed on the way over had been transformed through my experience with art. The ride home took the same streets and passed the same buildings, but it was new terrain. Without realizing it, I had discovered a great truth: Everything is new when you emerge from the deep sea inside yourself, the place where you dive to retrieve the pearls of art.
Connecting Challenges...
I still paint daily, although I spend more time now driving a car than riding a bike. I've spent the past week immersed in acrylics, creating various textured backgrounds to use in collage, and been having more fun than you can imagine making collage with the Crowabout group. With only a couple of exceptions, most of the images used in Bicycle Ride came from our Saturday morning collage sheet. When I began cutting and moving the pieces around, all the memories of bike rides past and a lot of the circumstances surrounding them came back like a flood. The next time I opened my in-box to check my mail, Creative Catalyst #80 was there. It said, "Tell us about something you cherished as a child. It can be a toy, or anything else". Nothing to think about here. Bike rides and art. In addition, Illustration Friday's theme is "pattern", and Created By Hand wants to see texture this week. Click to enlarge and the texture jumps out.
Today...
If I could get everyone where they needed to go strapped onto the back of my bicycle, I'd do it. But reality dictates that my kids need to be transported in a car, with air conditioning and seat belts. We're still experiencing 105 degree days, and when all is said and done, we travel about 60 miles each day on average, getting to and from the various places we need to go.
Along with other things, so far today I have been:
Wonderfully surprised by a phone call from the South Carolina wing of our An Affair With Art group
Thrilled by a package from another member containing more fabulous packages within
Catching up on email
Sipping tea, and
Preparing myself for the blast of heat when it comes time to open the door and go out into the hot afternoon
Have a great day, Everyone!
