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I recently led an online writing workshop about the unexpected good and bad of this pandemic. The good is dwarfed by the bad, of course, but it’s there and is worth exploring. In preparation for the workshop, I started thinking about my own experience. On a personal level, there were a number of things that made it on to both sides of this ledger I was making. When several other workshop participants also found this, it surprised me, but what surprised me more was the effect that making the list had on me. My ledger goes like this (many of these also apply in non-pandemic times but right now have gained a high level of intensity): The Good Toilet paper all for me! (Yes, I live with dogs, not humans.) It wasn’t until toilet paper rationing started that I even saw a roll on the shelves. I was almost ready to buy a bidet, because family members said that would reduce the need, and it was a rewarding luxury. We won’t go any further on that. My bathroom is not bidet worthy, so I was very happy to get my toilet paper, just for me. Dozing off without care. Fingers on my keyboard, I stop to think, and there goes the head drop forward and zzzz. Let’s call it power napping. No arguing about what to watch, delivery vs. pick up, money vs. safety and who ate my secret stash of Easter candy. So good. Zoom! Having scheduled conversations with advance knowledge of the topic. This is weird but good. Sound delays, time limits, and avoiding awkward silences have created this need. Also, I suggest you bring props to your next Zoom meeting. People love visuals. Seeing and talking with many of my extended family every week! We go the beach together every year but never thought to have get-togethers every week before now. Being outside many times a day just to breathe and feel the sun. Even when it rains, I go outside and breathe deeply and listen. This is amazing for people who work full-time inside a building with no windows. Sometimes, “I love you” comes right out of my mouth to the sun when it warms my face. Once, my neighbor broke the moment with “What did you say?” My public love declarations stopped. The Bad Arguing (with myself) about whether to watch Tiger King so I don’t feel even more alone when everyone talks about it. In general, watching too much TV, be it PBS or Bravo! No one to take turns with going out into the COVID-19 world. The lines, the fear and guilt of making the mistake of moving too close to another, the judging eyes on my questionable necessities. Zoom! Seeing and talking with many of my extended family every week: 24 screens, with an average of 3 people to a screen, except my little single one. And most of all, Zoom meetings with those Brady Bunch screens and silence: very awkward. Talking to myself. Pre-homestay, I talked often (some might say too much) with humans at work, or when socializing. Now, I don’t Zoom talk much: a sentence or two in meetings, though it really hasn’t become natural. But it’s also not natural for a human not to speak. Luckily, it seems I can talk to myself quite comfortably. And yes, of course, I talk to my dogs. Barking dogs! There is no good side to this. My neighbor dog, Elmo, an otherwise lovely dog, can bark for an hour straight, with my dogs helping out with the chorus. This made me a nervous wreck until I started wearing big headphones and having a dance party of one until Elmo was called in. The ledger goes on. It was a good exercise in relieving the internal pressure of the more serious side of this situation, the serious side that eats away at you: the sorrow for a cousin in NYC nursing the sick, and all the medical people, the food workers, all the essential workers earning low wages for dangerous work, and the greed of people making money off of tragedy. It can lead to some dark places even in the safety of my home, so to look at the pandemic's effect on my own everyday life let me escape from the enormity and feel the trivial. And I am grateful for the trivial. - written by Nancy Kirkwood, Center for Creativity Assistant. Find Nancy's work on Instagram. Illustrations by Mike Campbell, Center for Creativity Assistant. Find Mike's work on Instagram. Have you ever seen a creator’s work and wondered how they arrived at using characters, styles, or themes? I’ve been sketching a lot since I have been home in quarantine and thought this might be a good time to reflect on why I create what I do, and talk a bit about my own themes. Because of my own feelings about making and the nature of working at the Center for Creativity, I continually see and incorporate new ideas into what I’m working on, and I experiment with different techniques, media, ideas, etc. But there are still concepts and symbols that tend to permeate my work. Frogs I only can guess how frogs have ended up in my work. I know it started in my 2D design course when we had to take an image from a magazine and play with patterns and colors around the image. I chose a Pacman frog. I have always had a strong affinity for water and swimming: I love beaches, pools, and lakes, and just walking near water. I also caught a lot of amphibians growing up. Around this time, I played Yu-Gi- Oh and had a frog-themed deck. Eventually, frogs turned into my avatars. Besides my liking of them, as a young gay person growing up in rural Pennsylvania, maybe I empathized with the narrative of the frog who becomes a prince as a metaphor for the way I, like many gay youth, felt awkward and out of place but eventually finds a community and grows out of that awkwardness. Crosshatching and bold lines My high school senior project was on documenting and talking about graffiti as art. Although I was never able to fully grasp graffiti style, I began using the bold style in my doodling. Because I was often doodling to alleviate stress and process thoughts, the repetitive and therapeutic use of crosshatching and simple line-making began to permeate my sketches, and in some classes like printmaking, this would be what I played with when learning techniques. Spirituality Although this is something that has become less overt in my work, I think it is important to talk about some of the spiritual symbols in my practice. I come from a family of pastors and identify as a spiritual agnostic. This developed into learning about themes and ideology of various religions in order to understand my own thoughts and beliefs. Because this development was happening while I was a student, some of the ideas that I have been fascinated with at one point or another have continued to influence my work. I often incorporate figures with no clear features or that are slightly amorphous. As opposed to the frog, where I am often drawing myself and my direct feelings in a moment, these figures are often reflections and meditations on thoughts. I often highlight a major chakra point or convey energy or spirit in these pieces in some way. Human experience and emotion is something I reflect on in pieces, frequently through shading or the cross-hatching in pieces. American society and gay culture also provide their own set of almost religious iconographies that are reinforced through collective experience. As someone in society who has a hand in upholding these, for better or worse, I also incorporate these into my work. If I don’t strongly oppose the icons, I use them without revealing whether I am doing it because I subscribe to them or am simply observing the way they influence others. These are a selection of my recent sketches since I have been in quarantine. I made these all before I wrote this piece, and they inspired me to reflect on a bit of why I was drawing in my current style. - Mike Campbell, Center for Creativity Assistant. Find more of Mike's work on Instagram.
The experiments with making my own materials continue! This week, I made sokui, a glue historically used in Japan and made with only white rice and water. When blended into a smooth paste, the starch in the rice creates a strong bond that is both acid-free — so it won’t degrade the materials being glued over time — and water-soluble. Sokui is commonly used with paper crafts, shoji screens, and in bookbinding; I also found a blacksmith who uses it in making hilts and scabbards for swords. Its solubility makes it super easy to clean up and kitchen-friendly. In my research, I found that sushi rice is recommended, but in my experiment, I used plain off-the-shelf white rice. Brown rice contains the husks of the grain, which won’t break down in the mashing process; even with white rice, I found there were a few husks, but for my purposes, this wasn’t a deal-breaker. With only one sample, I was not able to tell whether or not the additives in the “enriched” rice — such as niacin — had an effect on the final product. The process is very simple: start by cooking a small amount of rice as per the package instructions. I found just 1/8 of a cup of dry rice to be enough to start with. Do not rinse the rice beforehand; in contrast to rice meant to be eaten, you want all those gummy starches in the glue. Once the rice is cooled enough to handle, the mashing process begins. This takes a fair amount of time to fully break down each grain. Some folks will crush the rice in a food processor before cooking, which could speed things up a considerable amount. Overcooking the rice a bit will also help the grains break down. I used an old gift card and the back of a spoon to mash the rice into a paste, working small amounts little by little into a smooth, translucent, and fairly dry paste. Friction is your friend here, so don’t add any water until the final stages when you’re ready to use the glue. The final paste can be pigmented easily; the paste itself dries clear. I added a small amount of homemade India ink. I thought this would be a good chance to try monoprinting. I used a paper towel and the gift card to smooth out the blackened sokui and smudge a design into it. Getting the right consistency takes some experimentation, but is as easy as adding a few drops of water or mixing in more glue. This stuff did not roll out very well with a brayer; it could have been too sticky and thick, which you can see where the paper was pulled away from the ink. The paste will keep in the fridge and can be reconstituted with water, but does get quite rubbery, so it’s best to use it the day it’s made. The result was not what I had expected, but that’s the appeal of a monoprint, I guess! I do like the rough and rustic look in the print; it seems to go well with a saguaro cactus.
This is a simple way to experiment with a simple printing technique without the expense of commercially-manufactured ink. By using pigments found in the kitchen, such as various spices or some of the organic inks I’ve been making from cabbage and black tea, I had no reservations mixing this up in my kitchen. I’m also excited by its potential as a glue for wood projects. Because of the ongoing pandemic, it’s very cool to be able to make this versatile material on-demand and save a trip out. Happy making! Further reading:
- Chad Brown, Center for Creativity Assistant. Find Chad's work on Instagram. When you have any dietary restrictions, either out of moral obligation or for the sake of your health, you’re bound to come up with fun ways to satisfy your wants while adhering to the rules. I’ve been a pescatarian* for some time now, so I’m accustomed to consuming a fair amount of odd meat replacements. Of course, there’s tofu, the vegetarian diet staple equally beloved or hated by all. (Once I discovered super-firm tofu, I’ve been firmly in the “love” camp.) It's easy to mold into whatever you need, from a filling smoothie thickener to the basis of an awesome chick’n sandwich. I’ve even used it to make fake beer-battered fish and, while I can’t say the result was a perfect replica, it definitely hit the spot. There’s also beans and lentils, which are great for burgers or meatballs; jackfruit, which makes some pretty good barbecue pulled pork for tacos; and nutritional yeast for a cheesy topping for popcorn. I’ve even had luck with finding good meat replacement options at the store, my favorite being Beyond Meat Italian sausages. It’s been a while since I’ve had real sausage, so I’ve had to ask my meat-eating friends and partner to make sure I wasn’t kidding myself with how weirdly accurate these were to the real deal. (Seriously, they even have a realistic casing: all hail science!) And like my experience with tofu fish (or its cute portmanteau, “tofish”), there’s options out there for things I still eat, like aquafaba** for egg whites, and the endless supply of milk replacement options like oat and almond milk. Aside from nutritional yeast, the jury is still out on cheese, unfortunately. As I love figuring out ways to reinvent foods I either have loved or still love, I keep an eye out for social media pages that inspire culinary creativity. Recently, I came across the new internet superstar (and absolute cinnamon bun) Tabitha Brown, a decades-long vegan who makes videos showing how to cook inventive and delicious meatless meals while giving you room to make them your own. One video I came across recently was a recipe for making tacos and, while the usual route people take to making meatless tacos includes the aforementioned tofu, beans, and jackfruit (all still great and creative options), she decided to use a protein I hadn’t used before: pecans. I was equally skeptical and excited to give it a try, so I planned to put the recipe to use for Cinco de Mayo, which my roommates and I would be spending safely together at home anyway. While I won’t go through Mrs. Brown’s recipe in detail here (you can find it on her Instagram page, among many other promising recipes), the recipe itself was so ingeniously creative that I couldn’t believe how easily the components came together. A handful of pecan halves turned into a scarily accurate imitation of ground beef. I added my own touches here and there, adjusting the amount of spice and substituting ingredients in my kitchen when I was out of the ones she prescribed. Mine didn’t come out perfectly: I kept it in the food processor for too long, so the texture was a little softer than I wanted (corrected somewhat when it was pan fried), but there was no denying how spot on the taste was. The experience of taking something like pecans to use in a way I hadn’t even thought to do before was both gratifying and inspiring, and I’m now thinking of all the different ways other things in my kitchen could be used differently. I foresee a lot of time rummaging through my cupboards and taste testing a lot of weird concoctions on the stove. In the meantime, I’m going to polish off the rest of those tacos.
You can find Tabitha Brown’s awesome pecan tacos on her instagram page. Definitions: * pescatarian: person who does not eat any animal-based proteins aside from fish and seafood. I personally am lacto-ovo, which means I also consume eggs and dairy, but this differs among pescatarians. ** aquafaba: an egg white replacement that comes from the leftover “water” from a can of chickpeas. Really useful for replacing egg whites in baking or frying, if not so much for making egg white scrambles. - Jasmine Green, Center for Creativity Assistant. Find Jasmine's work here or follow her on Instagram. Making Space: |
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