Visiting Artist: Amy Tan! (Part 2)
Visiting Artist: Amy Tan! (Part 2)
Helloo GUT friends! We’ve got a special one for you today.
This is the grand finale in our Summer series of Visiting Artists, and we’re ending it with a bang: a Q & A about Amy Tan’s creative process. (Pinch me.)
Last week we did some close animal observation and drawing with Amy Tan.
Before that you made a fantastic tableau with Alexander Chee… a Brushie Selfie with Austin Kleon… and saw an old friend from a new angle with Gretchen Rubin. Wow, Wow, Wow and Wow.) This week, the exceptional author/artist/observer Amy Tan shares with us her insights on drawing and creativity, perfectionism and process.
What follows is our conversation, part 2 of Amy’s drawing assignment, and the GUT Gallery: a curated selection of drawings shared by community members last week. But first….
Winners of WildWonder Conference Tickets!
Randomly selected from the GUT Gallery last week, the WINNERS OF THE WILDWONDER CONFERENCE TICKETS ARE DT SUBSCRIBERS: SUSANNE, PATTI and MERKURTZ! We’re so happy you’re part of the Grown-Ups Table. Please email community@DrawTogether.studio and we’ll hook you up.
Now without further ado…
Amy Tan, part 2!
(If you’re unfamiliar with Amy Tan and her vast body of work, check out last week’s newsletter or watch this beautiful interview at City Arts and Lectures with Amy and her drawing mentor, John Muir Laws.)
Conversation with Amy Tan
Amy Tan and WendyMac walk into a bar... Well, not really. I actually asked Amy questions over email. But last year we did have a wonderful day together bird watching and drawing with our friends Beth and Fiona:
Originally I was going to include this Q&A in the previous dispatch along with the excerpt from Amy’s phenomenal book The Backyard Bird Chronicles (if you missed last week’s dispatch, read it here.) But Amy took so much time and care with her responses I decided they deserved a dedicated dispatch. Hence a two-parter for Amy (also just because she merits all the space we can give!)
So here is our convo. I learned a lot talking with her, and so appreciate her taking the time and making the effort to share her insights with us at the Grown-Ups Table. I hope you do, too.
WENDY MAC: Like many members of the GUT, you came to drawing later in life. Can you share a little about what that was like, to start as a beginner in drawing when you are already so experienced and accomplished in another creative medium? Did you have any doubts of fears?
AMY TAN: To answer that questions, you should first know that I was raised to be self-conscious, to feel everything should be perfect and nothing I did would ever be close because I was lazy. In grad school, I was plagued by perfection syndrome and the need to achieve higher and higher levels of skills that would lead to my becoming a professor at increasingly prestigious universities. But I was also anxious that all the other students were smarter and more original. When I was 24, one of my closest friends was murdered, and for nine months, I had dreams every night of him delivering one visceral epiphany after another about the many ways I worried and held back because I did not believe in myself. My perspective on life changed dramatically. I became focused on sense and meaning and purpose—as deep as I could find it. Time after time, I would lose the focus, and through crisis, I would find my way back, often by taking on some activity that was meditative. Like playing jazz piano. Or writing fiction. I am so glad I had no expectations of being published back then. I wrote to find meaning and not to avoid bad reviews. With every book since, I have had to work to get rid of the feeling that someone is looking over my shoulder, like a critic or a Chinese mother.
I was raised to be self-conscious, to feel everything should be perfect and nothing I did would ever be close because I was lazy… I was plagued by perfection syndrome.
I started nature journaling to quiet my mind during a distressing time of overt racism. I took classes with John Muir Laws (“Jack”). Through Jack, I Iearned that nature journaling was about intentional curiosity, being attentive in the moment. By being wide open to wonder, I would naturally feel a connection to another being, and that, I found, helps me understand what is means to be alive, what is required to survive, why we have hope. The reward was in the moment of doing. I was guided by new epiphanies. I made deliberate choices to stave off perfection syndrome, and to feel free and loose to simply learn and practice. There was no thought I would ever do nature journaling or art for a living. So, for example, I bought cheap sketchbooks to draw without concern that I was “wasting good paper.”I logged in thousands of “pencil miles,” a term Jack uses for frequent practice. My main journal for The Backyard Bird Chronicles holds 200 page refills, each refill costing about $25. It is what I still use. The paper is so thin that watercolors bleed through and warp the pages.
The mess is authentic.
For a while, I did not show anyone my pages. I liked that the journal was private. I also felt I would plagued by self-consciousness and embarrassment if I showed people my early attempts. Everyone else’s efforts were far better than mine! However, being on field trips with other nature journalists, especially Fiona Gillogly, a young teen at the time, helped me appreciate the excitement of sharing what we had mutually observed. So I started posting on the Nature Journal Club Facebook page. To not draw attention to myself as an author, I used my Chinese name as a pseudonym: Enmei Tan. And thus, I experienced for the first time in many years the delight of doing things publicly yet anonymously. I loved that there were no expectations. People were as encouraging to me as they were to others. There was no such thing as a bad drawing or stupid mistakes. So that’s what I did for five years, from 2017 to 2022, until my longtime editor asked when I was going to finish my next novel. I admitted that the elections, covid, and the birds had derailed me.
He then suggested that we publish the journals as a book. I demurred, explaining that the pages were not what he thought. The pages were riddled with misspellings, inaccurate drawings of birds, smudges and wine stains. And he gave me the antidote to self-consciousness by calling the mess “authentic.” He said that this honest spontaneity of thoughts and drawings was exactly what people would want. I think that is a great way to describe what we do. The mess is authentic.
WENDY: You both write and draw. As a multidisciplinary artist, how do these creative practices inform each other? Do they overlap? Compete? Butt heads? Dance?
AMY: I use similar skills to write and draw. With novel writing, I make observations about human nature, situations and settings. I ask questions constantly about all the possible reasons a story might transform as it heads toward a kind of clarity that must feel unexpected yet inevitable. I worry over craft, tweaking every page a hundred times. With nature journaling, I have pure fun. I am a kid again, a beginner, naive and curious. I am mesmerized by bird behavior, and I always remind myself that I am only making guesses about what is going on. Today, I saw two little fledglings, one a Dark-eyed Junco, the other a House Finch. They were still begging and being fed by their parents. At one point the two different fledglings landed on the same rail at the same time, opened wide their bills and screamed at each other to be fed. I could see the moment they realized that the other bird was not their parent, but another baby of a different species. They looked at each other with close bill, then looked away. Were they embarrassed? That is what goes into the journal. Both the novels and nature journaling vignettes serve as a diary of sorts, a record of what I thought about at different periods of my life. Both are necessary to plumbing the depths for meaning.
WENDY: What do you do if/when you get stuck when you’re writing - or drawing (if that ever happens to you.) If/when you’re feeling frustrated, how do you move along a story (written or visual)? Do you keep on going, switch to another creative practice, or maybe make some tea?
AMY: You do not want advice from me on this subject. I am always late, stuck, frustrated. I find distractions, like drawing birds. Yet, I think a life of distractions, is worthwhile, if what changed my focus was meaningful to my life overall. That is the perspective of someone who is 72. That would not be a good one to have if I were younger and had to also figure out a way to support myself. As I grow older, I am ever conscious of time and how much remains. I love that birds are part of my daily consciousness. As I grow older, returning to being a beginner is important. I need to feel I am freshly learning, growing in my ability to see the patterns, the intersections of thought from childhood to now. Feeling deeply about anything is motivation for me to write. Meditating on birds feeds a compulsion to draw them.
As I grow older, returning to being a beginner is important. I need to feel I am freshly learning, growing in my ability to see the patterns, the intersections of thought from childhood to now.
WENDY: How does drawing a bird from life differ from drawing a bird from a photograph, both in experience and result? Does it make a difference at all? Do the two drawing practices inform each other? What are the unique values of each experience?
AMY: The quick cartoony sketches capture live action bird behavior I noticed. I draw those en plein air —which is, in reality, my sitting at a glass dining table, which faces a 12 foot wide expanse of glass bifold doors, which are often open. I can see the action on the patio ten feet away, or on either side where there are birds in the oak trees or shrubs. Since birds don’t often stay in one place for more than ten to thirty seconds, I might first sketch a few lines for the posture of the bird, or the object of a dispute. I continue to observe the bird to add in a few more details. I then add the notes on the journal page and write on my iPad a more extensive description of what I witnessed and felt. I might add colored pencil. The detailed bird portraits serve as a meditation on the life of individual birds. For those, I use photo references. They are always my own photos, because I draw only birds in my own backyard, birds that looked at me. I meditate over the miraculous life of that individual bird as I draw each feather, each curve of the eye and bill. I love that focus, and only arthritis in my hands keeps me from drawing all day into the night.
I meditate over the miraculous life of that individual bird as I draw each feather, each curve of the eye and bill. I love that focus, and only arthritis in my hands keeps me from drawing all day into the night.
WENDY: BONUS!! If you were stuck on a desert island with a billion birds to draw, what art supplies would you want to have with you?
AMY: Beth Gillogly of Wild Wonder Foundation gave me a fantastic speaker gift: a set of 28 Daniel Smith watercolor paints in a case the size of a credit card. My ability to do watercolors has improved with better paints and paper suited to watercolor. I have had to fill the quarter pans often. I have a 3” x 7” zippered pouch that holds the palette, two aquabrushes, two mechanical pencils, with .5 and .7 leads. For the dessert island experience, I would bring all that, plus ten colored pencils suitable for a variety of pencil and paint refills, and two or three John Muir Laws sketchbooks that are good for experimenting with watercolors. A couple of pages might be sacrificed for swatting mosquitos.
-
You can order a SIGNED copy of Amy's book Backyard Bird Chronicles here.
