The Surprising Expanse of Limitations: Thinking About Carolyn Lord
When a master pianist improvises, it’s called jazz. When someone sits at the keys for the first time and tries improvising, it’s called noise. Same tools: Piano. Hands. Desire.
The difference is knowledge.
I’m thinking about this difference as I edit Carolyn Lord's interview (Ep 21 coming November 9th.) Lord went to art school and she’s never stopped learning. You can hear her insatiable curiosity in her enthusiasm whether she’s discussing the sky dome or the nuances of individual pigments.
Lord unapologetically returns to the same motifs in her art. Similarly, she’s been using many of the same pigments, paper and processes for decades. All of this sameness gives her the ability to truly play in the ideas of the paintings themselves.
There is a freedom that can only come with knowledge. Try and write a journal entry about what you’ve done today. Depending on your ease with your mother tongue, that’s probably not too difficult.
But now try it again using those two isolated years of german you took in school. Suddenly it’s much harder. It’s harder because you have to contend with the individual clumsy components of remembering vocabulary and verb tense before you can even begin to get to the poetry of your day.
Whether it’s writing, playing music or painting, art forms are like this. As artists we have to travel through our tools to get to our expression. Musicians travel through instruments and notes. Writers travel through words and sentence structure. Dancers travel through body movements and timing. And how easy that travel is greatly depends on how much time we’ve spent with our tools.
It can be easy to feel constricted by the idea of limiting ourselves. Limiting our palette feels like limiting our colors. Limiting our subject matter feels like limiting discovery. But listening to Lord speak, even when she speaks of subjects she returns to year after year like the California coast or her very own garden, she sounds anything but limited. In fact, she sounds like a jazz musician sitting down at the keys. She sounds like an artist who lives, unbound, in total freedom.
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