Author: klgonnerman

You don’t get to pick your passions. Your passions pick you. Much as we might prefer to be passionate about one thing or another (what’s cool and would set me apart? what could make me a million dollars?), our passions tend to emerge unbidden. And if we can turn our enthusiasm on and off? Then it’s not really a passion.

In college, I used to love sitting around the dining hall and hearing what folks were thinking about, just because their passions were so diverse. Solar car racing. Ultramarathon running. 1920’s fashion. Speaking Chinese (that was me).

A colleague told me once that she could sense a passion by the way someone’s eyes light up when they talk about a particular subject.

Art, so often, is about passion. Passion that we didn’t really get to choose.

I know a young art student whose passion drives him to do interesting, unpredictable things. He had an idea of something he wanted to make out of clay. So, having never taken a ceramics class, he figured out how to make what he was inspired to create: a giant octopus. It’s a magnificent octopus. But if he had told someone in advance that he was spending all that time for an octopus? Would someone tell him he should work on something “more productive?”

If we could each harness just a little of that authentic energy, we could make magic happen. But only when we do it for our passion. Better that we each do something to make our passion speak, than that we try to force something else because it’s what we should do. (And no, I don’t mean quit your day job to be a traveling bard! Our lives have room for responsibilities and passions and lots of things in between.)

If we all supported our passions and threw ourselves into the joy of that, wouldn’t whatever we created be amazing?

 

My grandmother used to make rag rugs out of pantyhose. They coiled around, textured and tan, with an occasional scrap of hot pink sprinkled throughout. I used to wonder if she put the pink in on purpose or if she just couldn’t bear to waste them. When did she wear hot pink tights anyway?

She and her friends made quilts, too, a patchwork of our outfits over the decades. We could spend hours tracing the events of our lives through those squares. Snuggling up with them was just a little bit cozier, knowing that they held so much of us in their very threads.

So when Hartford Prints featured an artisan quilt maker, Denyse Schmidt, in a fantastic panel of women designers talking Color last November, I paid extra attention. The whole evening was fantastic — hearing Vanessa German, an artist, talk about color and her choices; sharing with a group of creative women struggling to make art and a living; coming together around art.

It’s quilt season now, and so I recently went back for a visit around Denyse’s website. This particular couture quilt was a favorite. Aptly called “Drunk Love in a Log Cabin,” I love the color, geometry and layering of this art.

Drunk Love in a Log Cabin, by Denyse Schmidt

It’s definitely not my grandmother’s quilt. But it still reminds me of her.

And isn’t that what art is all about?