I worked on a painting of Tobin Branch Library today. It’s a brick building. If you’re a 2-D artist you know what it’s like to paint a brick building. Do I add the detail? Allude to it? Leave it out all together? I decided to add the detail. So far I’m happy with it. It’s time consuming but satisfying.
I listened to a podcast while I was working called Homies of Lit. Two guys talking about literature. It was an old interview of Sandra Cisneros where they discussed channeling rage into art. I love hearing positive messages and these guys are positive. I think it is a struggle to figure out how to deal with all the negative emotions we experience - frustration, disappointment, rejection, abandonment, and trauma - without needlessly adding to our pain. I too would like to be a productive artist, not just productive as in making a large body of work, but productive as in using my emotional life in a positive way. That’s why I’m painting libraries and writing this blog. I want to celebrate something that has helped me deal with life’s trials and tribulations in a constructive way.
I moved to San Antonio in 1998. I went to the Fiesta Arts Fair at the Southwest School of Art and Craft (now Southwest School of Art (soon to be part of UTSA)) and I walked over to the recently built Central Library. It’s a pretty incredible building. I plan on painting it and will tell you all about it when I do so, but for now I want to share how my personal story with the library started.
I spent a lot of time in the library in school when I was growing up, and I enjoyed reading, but as a young adult out of school I was buying books from Borders and they were beginning to pile up. I’d always thought that having a big home-library was romantic and a sign of status and I wanted one, but when I had my first apartment I soon realized that they take up a lot space and collect a lot of dust. So, impressed by our beautiful library I decided to get a library card.
I lived a fifteen minute drive from the Central Library, so every three weeks I would drive my 1973 BMW 2002 down Broadway Street, cruise into the parking garage and peruse the library for a few hours. I would look up books and authors I was interested in, write down the call numbers and go search the stacks. This would take most of the day, which suited me just fine. Sometimes I found books better than the ones I had set out in search of.
This was when I started to devour books. At the time I was interested in self-help - Judith Orloff, Marianne Williamson, John Bradshaw, Harriette Lerner. I would also grab non-fiction books about spirituality and personal growth, biographies. I wouldn’t always finish every book, sometimes I just flipped through and grabbed nuggets of interest, but the library was full of books of interest and relevance and that was exciting. Plus, no pile-up of books all over my apartment. Eventually I got tired of the romance of collecting books. I knew on some level I was doing it to impress others, thinking they would come over and see my huge book shelf and think highly of me. Being able to go to the library and check out a book, even if I wasn’t sure I really wanted it, felt like freedom and permission, two things I really longed for.
I believe that because of these books, because of the freedom to devour them guilt free, I was able to learn a lot about myself, about how to manage my emotions, how to mature. At the time I identified as an artist and wanted to be successful, and I knew that artistic expression was a form of channeling, of expressing myself, and what better way to do that than to know who this person is that’s being expressed? Books have helped me learn to deal with life’s trials and tribulations and be a productive artist, and for that I am grateful - to writers and to libraries for providing me with what those writers put out there.