But that's not right, because my kids are me. They are my life and that space between me and their lives only half exists, it's impossible for me to be a single parent of two and carve a separate space for a life that's solely mine. We are all, the three of us, in it together in a very real and physical way.
But I remembered: I am working on a fort. And as I began talking about it I realized, this is totally the biggest, size wise, piece of art I have ever made.
It is constructed from found materials: wood, metal, glass, acrylic paint, plastic toys, mirrors and cement. I made it with my bare hands, dreamed it up, inspired, just because I wanted it to exist. I didn't use a plan, I didn't follow directions, I was even kind of obsessive and feverishly devoted to it. My friends and family could tell you I was kind of annoying, always talking about it.
"Where is it?" He asked, and I told him "my backyard".
"So it's just this giant thing sitting in you backyard?" His eyes sparkled with curiosity now. imagining a bizarre structure mystifying the neighbors
"Well it's a play fort, so that's a good place for it."
"Oh, it's for your kids." He looked disappointed, and his interest faded.
"No I meant like what kind of art you're working on, like installation stuff?"
So, some giant strange building sitting in my backyard is interesting, but if children are allowed to play in it, it's not art. Okay.
And this brings me to what I have been mulling over lately.
Small acts throughout the day, when I combine brown sugar, cream and wheat,. place it in a vine embellished bowl, and decorate with fresh blackberries from my Dad's yard. That feels like art-making to me. I concentrate and create in the same way. But because a one year old eats it, it isn't art?
Or scavenging abandoned rose bushes, designing my flower beds, pruning, weeding. I am physically designing and making and shaping beauty. I am bringing things into existence, that weren't here before, for the sheer love of beauty.
My life with these two children, making their home, feeding them well, hearing their stories, telling them mine, the love and the creation of our history together, to me, it is one giant creative act.
But according to some it isn't.
And this is what really chafes my hide:
The only difference is really: product. There's nothing to sell. The idea of what we will call art, is all tied up in capitalism. If it can't be made into a product and sold away, it isn't art. It is something else, it is home-making, it is craft, it is some other womanly thing that doesn't qualify in the high brow universe that determines value.
If I was a conspiracy theorist I would say our connection to art, like music, like God, we are told is outside of us. It is in a place that needs to be travelled to and bought. That we need to be instructed in it, that others are experts.
That we aren't it, and it isn't us.
It is something much closer to God. And by God I mean my own definition of God: that beautiful mysterious thing that exists between and around all of us, that shared love and magic, that awe-inspiring breath taking wonder that amazes and humbles me.
Art is everywhere, anything I do, that I do not for time-saving, not for a 'good' reason, not for a pragmatic and sensible reason, there is art there. Taking time to plant sunflowers in wiggly wandering rows with my 7 year old. making the bed and placing the pillows just so, decorating a toddlers room, building beautiful african peanut soup and garnishing with a flutter of cilantro before we sit down to dinner, and building a sky blue play-fort out of scavenged wood. My life is a creative act.
My life is art.
