Finding your way home

Continuing in the Louise Penny's series of Armand Gamache is The Long Way Home, home being something that means many different things. Gamache and his wife have retired to a new home in the village of Three Pines to be among their friends there. Home can be the structure, the village, or the people with whom you live. It may be the feeling of safety and security that we all crave. In this story it was about traveling far in order to return in two respects to home the place and to home within one's self.

At the heart of this story are Clara and Peter Morrow, a husband and wife duo of artists. At the beginning of Penny's series Peter was the well known, successful artist and his wife - well she dabbled until she had her big break through. Very quickly Clara's star rose and outshone Peter's and he responded with jealously. With their marriage in jeopardy, Clara asked Peter to leave their home so that each of them could sort out their feelings. They set a date to meet one year later to discuss what their next step would be. When Peter failed to keep their appointment, Clara fearing for his safety goes to Armand for help.

I will leave the synopsis there since what I really wanted to discuss was the poignancy of the characters' discussions surrounding art and creativity.  Ruth Zardo, the curmudgeonly, poet laureate who lives in Three Pines invokes a quote of Robert Frost's "A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness," (Source  Robert Frost Quote) stating that writing a poem is much like coughing up that lump.

"Any real act of creation is first an act of destruction. Picasso said it, and it's true. We don't build on the old, we tear it down. And start fresh."
"You tear down all that's familiar comfortable," said Gamache. "It must be scary." When the old poet was quiet he asked, "Is that the lump in the throat?" (p.153)

The act of creating whether or not it is writing or a painting, a symphony or a dance is a scary thing to do. I've begun to work with mixed media and very often that fiend, perfectionism, sits on my shoulder and criticizes what I am working on. I've discovered that a finished piece is rarely like I thought it would be when I started. Take for instance the piece below.

Collage - brown paper bag and magazine scraps.

What you can't see is some of my own handwriting that I didn't like the look of. Instead I continued to look for images or phrases that could convey the same message. This is a work that evokes my thoughts about travel and exploration. Now compare it to the work below. These two pieces were completed on opposite pages of my sketch book. Clearly this one speaks of my desire to snuggle in and stay in one place. The two opposing sides to my nature.

Collage - Woven strips of magazine with scraps. 

"Don't get me wrong I believe in using your head. But not in spending too much time in there. Fear lives in the head. And courage lives in the heart. The job is to get from one to the other."
"And between the two is the lump in the throat," said Gamache. (p.277) Now isn't that the truth. To create you have to use your head and your heart. There is thinking to be done with the head, but one needs the courage to just get over the inner critic and do the work.