I was surfing etsy.com one day in a search for both information and inspiration, and I came across the work of Nicole Docimo, the artist behind the etsy shop bluebicicletta. I was pulled into her use of negative space and words immediately, and contacted her to see if she’d allow me to interview her via e-mail and show some of her work on this site. Part of what intrigues me about her work is her blending of words and lines—I look not only at the space between lines, but also the silence, or space, between words. The viewer, or reader, responds to Nicole’s work on a number of levels. The Conversation (right) is one of my favorite examples of how she plays with space and word—by placing words where she does, there is both a complementary and contrastive nature to the interplay between the lines of the drawing and the words. The title creates additional negative space—as a viewer/reader, I want to create a relationship, a context, impose details on the individuals I believe are there.

Although I personally love work that plays with words and images, my favorite of the works I've seen so far of Nicole's is Open (below). To me, it illustrates better than anything the sense of something existing in a space of "nothing," or negative space. I've included below my questions and Nicole's responses to them.

Open

Q: Your work might be described as “minimalist” by some. What do you think of that term? Is it accurate? Why or why not?

A: I think the term “minimalist” is accurate for many of my pieces, especially works like “Seed” (see below) that really just use a black line on white paper to tell their whole story. I guess I wouldn’t really describe myself as an intentional “minimalist,” but I am often interested in simplifying an image---creating the simplest version of something so that it’s still recognizable to the viewer, but it has almost become a symbol, or just an idea of something.

Most often though, I’m just trying to have fun on paper and convey the images and ideas that appear in my head, without any specific theory behind me. These are the images that excite me---simple, basic line drawings and bold black and white illustrations.

I also work quite often in the realm of abstraction—I just love lines, but I will also abstract recognizable things to a point---like my miniature landscape pieces---so that they conjure the idea of a place or a thing, but it’s playful and just remotely based in reality. A lot of these pieces are not minimalist in their style because they have a lot of visual texture, but I suppose they are still conveying a simple idea of something.

Q: Can you describe your creative process?

A: My creative process varies a little depending on what type of piece I’m doing. Sometimes when I just want to draw, and I don’t have any specific ideas, I just sit down with pen and paper and draw a line, and a piece will build from there. This is especially true with my completely abstract pieces like “Obelisk.”

With my more illustration type drawings that include words and line images, there requires a bit more planning, because one wrong line and I could have to start over. Pretty much all of the time on these, the idea comes first (sometimes like a lightening bolt), then I start tossing it around in my head, trying to refine the words and/or images. Once I’ve gotten a good feeling for what I think it should look like (or say), I will draw up some parts of it, or do some practice drawings in my sketchbook, sometimes using pictures from the internet or my own sources to get an idea of the general shape of something (like a human profile). Then I put the basics down in pencil and then start in with the pen.

Q: What are some recurring themes in your work? Why do you return to these?

A: Words, nature, and everyday bits of life are some of the main themes that keep coming up in my work. I like making art about appreciating the small things, and words are just a wonderful way to talk about them, but words in and of themselves are also really interesting to me---both their meanings, and the actual shapes of the letters. Nature and everyday things going on around me (like dinner and relationships) remind me of what it means to be in this world, and I want to appreciate life and share that appreciation with other people through my art.

Some more stylistic themes that come up, as you can probably see, are high contrast black and white, pattern, repetition, and negative space. These are all just inherently visually interesting to me, and I think to most human eyes. I just love the punchy contrast of black and white---it’s high drama, and I find both black and white space to be full of richness. Pattern, repetition and negative space play with this richness---the minute you put a black line on white paper, you’ve really done something bold, and I like to find ways to play on that.

Q: You describe yourself as an artist and a writer, and you use words a lot in your work. You also say that rhyme is one of your favorite materials. I began initially as a writer, and it’s only been in the past year or so that I’ve begun to explore visual expression. I found it a relief not to use words in expression, although I now find myself moving toward incorporating both words and visuals. Can you talk about how your writing influences your visual work and vice versa?

A: I feel like words and visuals work together side by side---they are two tools I use to talk to people. I don’t often set out to create word art or visual illustration---an idea will just occur to me and it will mostly come along with a direction about how to convey the idea. I don’t quite know how to describe it, other than I use both media as a means of communication, and I love both equally.

Also, going back to the minimalist idea, I think words can create a minimalist image---visual art makes things visual for people, but words can create an image too, but in order to do that a viewer has to read the words and create the image in his or her head.

About four years ago, I was focusing mainly on poetry as my art form, but it frustrated me that so few people opened books and read poetry---it seemed hidden to people in our visual culture. So I started thinking, “if I could just make poetry visual, then people would really see it.” It took me a while to actually start making art that incorporated words because at the time, I wasn’t really doing much visual art, but it’s funny how a theme will come up later that resolves a frustration from before, without you even realizing it.

This last point is what led me to experimenting with the visual arts. Back when I was an undergraduate creative writing major and struggling with poems, a wonderful professor told me that poems are really in the white space around the words, and that you have to pay a price for every word you use. (I think that's what finally made me dump adjectives!) Creating is about seeing old things in ways that make them new--precisely what Nicole mentions here. I'll be back in a few weeks to ponder this some more.

From teaching to crafts

Creativity is a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts, creativity is fueled by the process of either conscious or unconscious insight. An alternative conception of creativeness is that it is simply the act of making something new. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity

In wrestling with notions of creativity and negative space, I think a lot about teaching. Sometimes, when I work with my students who are planning to become teachers, we have lively discussions about the metaphors they would use to describe their students and classrooms. It surprises me how often the notion of clay arises. They often describe their future (and in some cases current) students as unmolded clay and say it’s the teacher’s job to shape them. Personally, I hate that metaphor. I don’t believe our students are simply waiting for us. Like their teachers, students struggle to perceive outlines and attempt to create their own metaphors for creating and communicating with the world around them. As teachers, I believe it is our task to interact with them and assist them in creating the language they need to do that. The best teachers (and I refer now to teachers of any level, in any capacity) continue to struggle, seeking new ways of seeing the student, the subject, and ways of presenting it. Sometimes we—and the student—succeed, sometimes not.

The creation of something new, then, does not refer to the student as that which is created. For me, it refers to the creation of a new way of engaging with the world. New associations, new metaphors. (I’m still trying to decide what metaphors I would use to describe my own students.) The incredible aha! moment of teaching occurs when a student succeeds in finding that new way to engage--when she suddenly sees something that she never saw before, or sees something new in what was there all along. It's the moment when a single line in a poem transforms one's understanding of a memory, or when a few chords of music suddenly awaken dormant emotions.

I think about the connections between my career in teaching and my recent forays into crafting and art. I think they are connected, and I think they complement each other. My whole career is based on language—the study of words, the creation of words, the use of words. In working on the teaching part of my life, perhaps I started to lose touch with my own attempts to make new associations and now turn to connecting the physical nature of using my hands to create what I don’t have words to say and don’t need words to produce. I love being in my garage for hours on end, wearing my grungy paint-covered clothes and turning totally inward.

Last spring I sold a painting (my first ever sale!) to someone I didn't know well who said she saw in the painting images of her own childhood and past, things that she wrestled with as an adult. The thought that those hours of turning inward allowed me to find a language that a virtual stranger needed for herself--what I felt at the moment she told me that is what I feel when I know that a student and I have found our connection.

Negative Space

Negative space: empty space in an artwork, a void. To some people, this term suggests unpleasant things. Sometimes when we say "negative" we mean "bad." Both "space" and "emptiness" suggest a lack, a shortage of something. This is unfortunate... (www.masterpieceart.org/Dictionary%20of%20Terms.htm)

Negative space as a concept in teaching is one that I cannot get out of my head. In a discussion about Pearlstein's paintings last year, I heard someone refer to the human figures in his work as the negative space. I have been thinking about the notion of negative space and what it might add to how I think about teaching--an activity that, I am beginning to believe, focuses fundamentally on potential and the unseen. In that discussion of Pearlstein's paintings, I felt for just a moment that I suddenly saw things--my teaching, my long-ago creative writing, my recent attempts at visual work-- in a different way. My education and interests have until only recently always focused on the written word, not on visual representations of the world. This blog, is, I suppose, an attempt at bringing together the visual and the written, and to do so in a way that explores negative space in both.

As a professor in the humanities, my adult life has focused on creating metaphors to communicate with and about the world around me. In exploring the language of the visual arts, I have found a new vocabulary to talk about this. I hope to continue to do this in far more detail than I have in this post and to have conversations here about this with you.