Creating a life.

Gabrielle asked:

So fellow bloggers, what exactly is your motivation to create?

There have to be as many reasons as there are members, but I would like to hear from some of you personally. Whether you are a professional or beginner, why are you working in fiber? What drives you to create....to make art...to show your inner self or just play?
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The motivation to create in the broader sense came to me as an early teen (the decade of the 70's) after finding the poets and commentators that emerged in the 60's.  It was the first time that I felt I belonged, that I had found my people and furthermore, that all of the authors I found and read held a personal mission to call me to join them.  So, in turn, I wrote my first poem at 13 and wrote through much of my early teen years satisfied to read to my friends.  I did not encounter another "real poet", someone who self-identified as such in real life until I became a freshman in college.  The "real poet" was young and had just returned to her native city and was teaching a course I took.  I offered to give her a ride one day and from that time forward we developed a deep friendship.  She organized a "poethon" and asked me to be one of the readers. She later ran a neighborhood cultural center that had a speaker's forum that brought in many grass roots academicians and poets that I had read during my teens.  One of the multitude of lessons I learned from her is that artists are everyday people who honor what they feel intuitively and make time to do it, even if it is just 15 minutes a day and trust it.  I remember her telling me "a book is written one page at a time. if you write one page a day, at the end of a year you'll have 365 pages to edit".  The most valuable gift I received from Estella was incorporating into my personal life the understanding of Life is ALL process and trust the process.  So up through my late-30's I wrote poetry and did readings, performances, and some workshops around the city.

So how did cloth weave itself into my artistic endeavors?  At first, after graudation from college, I had decided to spend more time with my great grandmother, Willie Pearl, who had accused me of wasting her grandson's money if after four years of college, the school had not taught me to quilt!  She finally managed to give in and our first few sessions did not go well from my perspective so it was abandoned.  After she died and then my grandmother died, I decided to make a quilt (self-taught) to honor them. It was a traditional simple pattern in African Fabrics which I discussed and showed here when I first set up my blog.  (The link is funky so scroll to the bottom after you click the link to see it).

Through the magic of the internet during this time I found other African American Quilters through boards on what was then the main internet provider "Prodigy" and we did exchanges and round robins.  And then I had an opportunity to see Juanita's work at an exhibit in the late 80's and was intrigued that she lived locally and I loved her work.  But between a growing family and working and what was then beginning to become a series of pulmonary health problems, I just kept putting it off to contact her all the while just dabbling with my simple quilt blocks. Then I was mostly handquilting, so my finished creations where far and few. 

The ill health issues slowly decreased my ability to read, concentrate for long periods (which I always thought was my greatest asset), and to write.  During many frequent hospital stays I would dream images that I perceived as quilts but I never sketched them, saying to myself, "one day".  It wasn't until about 3 years ago when I had 2 hospital stays less than 2 months apart, one being 7 days the other 10, that I decided that the lights will never be green all at the same time...that life will have its downs and if I had to experience setbacks I'd rather them be while I'm engaged as fully as possible pursuing the things that feed my soul.  All during this time I was struggling to keep employed which means working on someone else's demanding agenda and being consumed by it that in order to gain some sense of myself again I decided to pursue art quilting and called Juanita.  I had already learned that artists are everyday people but who make time and space for creating, so my apprehension about calling a "real artist" had been resolved.  Even though I had never created an original art quilt in my life, I already had learned that life is process and to trust the process, so what I'm really most intrigued in learning is about processes, and least on creating the award winning quilt.

Just as listening to the call of poetry and Estella's friendship got me through the first half of my life, I believe that art quilting and what I learn from Juanita and other quilters will carry me the rest of the way.  Art is survival and I take that literally.