"Interest" like "Willpower" or "Changing a Mind" are the great unsolved mysteries of our social world. Where is the generator that allows someone to become interested and even passionate about doing something, or that allows someone to make a decision to change as in for example, to stop smoking, or take up exercise or meditation; where does willpower come from?
I have read a lot of books on it but I can only speak from own experience which is that some things that captured my interest when I was a child, I nurtured throughout my life, and they blossomed like the branches of a tree into lifelong passions: Reading, Art. My mother sowed the seeds with books she got at the supermarket with green stamps and by reading to me at night and at other times. My grandmother nurtured the garden indirectly by giving me access to the book in her basement, her old family books, European classics, and girls books like Outdoor Girls On A Hike from the 1920's. It must be admitted that I was the kind of a child to venture to the basement and FIND those books and ask, so perhaps some of it is inborn.
My mother also subscribed to many magazine in my childhood, Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic and my father was a reader. The Saturday Evening Post was my introduction to Art, an art style that I still practice, representative genre painting, which means pictures from real life, in a realistic style. However whereas Norman Rockwell, my great childhood inspiration, may have practiced a very effective and beautiful Narrative art, pictures that told a story, mine tend to be more poetic, as in they are created from a feeling that something I saw inspired in me, and I try to recapture that feeling in the painting and hopefully the viewer will feel it too.
Just at this moment the amazon delivery man rang the bell and handed me two packages, new books. I read every day for many hours, magazines and books and the books inspire new interests and expand one that have already existed.
An interest that I developed from my father is for trains and train stations. He built a platform every Christmas with an elaborate train set-up - the real deal - Lionel trains with smoke and the smell of motor oil, track transfers, tunnels, and glorious snow covered villages of small European style bungalows with cellophane windows "Made in Japan." And many family vacations took in old time steam trains that would chug us up a mountain or through fields of corn like the Strasbourg train, the Jim Thorpe train, or the ones in West Virginia.
In fact, one of my father's great job accomplishments for Hake Rigging company was to move a train into the Smithsonian, which we went to see on family trips.
So, one summer when I was driving along the railroad that runs through a old hometown of mine, Maple Shade, and the town where I went to high school, Merchantville, taking photographs of the train stations, I noticed that the one in Merchantville was also a coffee shop to I stopped in. It turns out it was also an Art Gallery and Literary Center - Eiland Arts Center! I took an advertising postcard and blogged about it, then found out two of my old friends from my Art School days showed their work there. I went to an opening, and I decided to show my work there as well.
This Saturday, the 20th of Oct. I dropped off 3 paintings for the Winter Group Show running through November! I hope you will visit The Station and see the work, in the upstairs gallery, and perhaps buy a cup of coffee and a pastry and sit down and enjoy a peaceful afternoon. Who doesn't love a coffee house?
Eiland Arts also has a literary component called AlexandriaQuarterly, which you can find online And there, I saw a posting for an upcoming art project where you could submit 5 works of art based on 5 poems by Emily Dickinson. Since I believe, (along with many Dickinson scholars) that she was a groundbreaking poetry genius, I was excited by the idea. I found some documentaries on amazon (one was deadly dull because the actors adopted a stilted speech pattern I have heard in other period documentaries that I sincerely doubt people used in ordinary life in the past) and one that was exciting and enriching, which included observations by Dickinson scholars about her life and work. I heard recitations of at least 5 poems that I loved and found my inspiration to do 5 works based on them.
I have finished one already "Look back on time with kindly eyes - he doubtless did his best...." and a photo a friend gave me recently from our college days provided the image to go with the poem.
So that's how it happens, from the past to the present, from experience to endeavor, idea to inspiration. I stopped in Merchantville Library and found a collection of Dickinson's poems and plan to read 20 a day. I will let you know how it goes!
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