ON A MUSE AND CHANGE

I've been a writer for as long as I can remember. Events and experiences and reactions have always translated into words for me. When I was younger, I wrote volumes of poetry. In school, it was editorials and articles for the school newspaper. After college, I started a zine, The Latest News, that allowed me to write without assignments. Writing was why I started Words by Jen. It has been a great outlet for wrestling with all of life's twists and turns.

So it came as quite a surprise when, following a rather difficult life twist this past winter, I found my thoughts taking shape as art, not words.

Art is new to me. Besides a dabble in photography here and there, I've always stayed away from the hand-eye coordination required by things like painting and drawing. And yet, the Muse of the moment seemed to demand something visual, something bigger and more tangible than mere words.

And so it began. I read. I sketched. I went online. I wandered art stores. I found images and ideas. And it took shape--slowly. Like my writing, actually--small bits and pieces of thoughts weaving together to communicate something larger.

About half-way through the process of creating what has become a mixed-media, three dimensional, collage piece*--this Muse is especially potent, it appears--I realized I had no clue how to put it all together, how to get the thoughts from brain to paper. Writing requires little more than a keyboard and a blank screen. This art project? "Slightly more" is an understatement.

And so it was that I found myself, last night, at the first class of a 10-week course in "Approaches to Collage" at the Guilford Art Center.

It's always interesting when life's twists spit us out in a new direction, and there you are...unexpectedly changed.

I wrote to a friend of mine recently, "Everything changes, it's just the way it is. We humans don't like that very much, so we try to implement...rules and parameters we think will thwart it off. But it's not that easy. Change just comes."

Change just comes. And this time around? I'm wide open to it!

*[Click here to see the the final creation]