Ellen Lindner: Art & Creativity

As part of the upcoming Transformations art exhibit, I’ve been paired with poet Marcia Denius.  The idea is for us to share our work with one another, get to know one another, and allow the experience to influence new creations.  This is being loosely termed collaboration, but we’re not actually working on one another’s pieces.

Marcia is a very talented poet, who writes very honestly.  Many of her pieces are highly personal, and she’s not afraid to make herself vulnerable to her readers.  The first selections that I read dealt with changes in her life, many of them negative.  I was having a hard time figuring out how that could relate to my current trend of depicting brightly colored vegetation.  Finally, it occured to me that these pieces referred to transitions and I thought this would be something I could work with.  I discussed it with her and she agreed:  we would use the word transition as our springboard.

I was still thinking that maybe I should depict a somewhat negative transition, to be consistent with my first impression of her work.  But nothing came to mind.  One day, when walking the dog, I saw a patch of Black Eyed Susans, and stooped down to pick the pretty ones.  Then, I noticed the ones with the missing and mangled petals.  They were interesting, too, so picked those as well.  Finally, I spotted the seed heads that had no petals left at all.  Then it hit me:  transition!  I had my subject matter.

I took tons of photos and my head began to spin with ideas.

In coming posts, I’ll show you how this piece progressed.

Ellen Lindner