I just finished reading Enemy Women by Paulette Stiles. Although the writing is not as high quality as the story (just needs better editing), it is an interesting book historically and an interesting tale. About the Southern women during the Civil War in the States, their strengths, their struggles, how they were persecuted and abused.
The story is related through the experiences of Adair, an eighteen year old girl who becomes a strong forceful woman through her travels, incarceration and escape from the Union army (the story takes place in 1864). In the course of the story, she is forced, with her younger sisters, to leave her home, is captured and, having to leave her sisters, jailed, and befriended by the major in charge of the jail who then wants her to write a confession that would help her to be released. A task she ultimately did with great wit and intelligence, revealing her strong character and developing a bond with the major who did help her to escape.
Adair hated needlework and she could not imagine sitting and stitching the fine crow’s-foot seams……….Writing was the same, the pinching of thoughts into marks on paper and trying to keep your cursive legible, trying to think of the next thing to say and then behind you on several sheets of paper you find you have left permanent tracks, a trail, upon which anybody could follow you. Stalking you through your deep woods of private thought.
This struck home with me, the deep woods of private thought. It describes so well the creative process. Those private recesses of the jungle of the mind from which comes a reality that transcends, climbs to the highest tree and transcends even that in order to fly.
When I first started painting I was convinced that every piece of art I produced had to be completely spontaneous. An exhausting process coming from a dense jungle. At times I found various methods to organize this “spontaneity.” But when the “method” became a ritual stronger than the product, it had to be abandoned. Over the past ten years or so I have used literal visual cues as starting point, silk-screened photos of people important in my life, people to give me a charge, excite (for pleasure and pain). But these “permanent tracks” are deeply buried in the work. They are not there to be followed but to inspire, to jar, to open up, clear the jungle. To me all great art transcends “your deep woods of private thought” to reach a deeper private area, publicly.