Very carefully.

I finished my Heart yesterday…it took just about an hour to add some dimension to the crane legs, touch up the base, and detail the river.  I could’ve worked on it many more hours; either I wasn’t satisfied that it was perfect or I wasn’t ready to be done.

My mom was with me again – which, as an aside, has been an awesome consequence of this project – and we talked about how difficult it is to let something go that we have put so much time and effort and love into making.  After a while, I’m not sure we were still talking about the Heart.

Last year, the daughter of my best friend graduated from high school.  This year, there is another one.  In three short years, Dave and I will go through that with Luke.  When I was growing up, my mom had a print hanging in our basement that said “The two most important things we can give our children are roots and wings.”  It took me a long time to get what that meant.

Tomorrow, my Heart will be picked up and taken away.  It will be clear-coated and then, probably by the end of the week, it will be installed at a particular location in Lincoln.  It will stay there until October, providing (I hope) enjoyment and inspiration to hundreds of people on a daily basis between now and then.  In October, my Heart, along with all the others in the Nebraska By Heart project, will be auctioned off.   While I am sure I will visit my Heart a few times when it is in Lincoln these next six months, I have no idea if I will ever see it again after the auction.

Is it perfect?  Heavens no.

Am I ready to be done?  Mostly.

Will I miss the stress of the deadline?  NO.

Will I miss my Heart?  Without a doubt.

***A big shout out to Dean Thomson (or, Dad, as I like to call him), Shane Allgood, and Kent Blum.  They bravely risked life and limb — seriously, I would have spilled blood had they broken it somehow — to maneuver my Heart from the ‘studio’ on the second floor of the NCTC house down to the main level.  As it was, there was only a slight bit of touch up required on the very top of the heart.  Whew.***

I am calling today a success.

I had set today aside to be a Paint Day, a day to work on my Heart.  Just after noon, I was finally able to clear (almost) everything else off my desk and decided I was ready to start painting.  My goal was to finish one more crane…that would leave two cranes (the final vignette) and the base to complete.  To give me more motivation, I contacted the Nebraska By Heart folks and told them I would be done by Monday.

My dad’s old cassette player was acting up, so I worked in silence.  I took one break at around 4 p.m.  I had to call it quits for the day at 6:30 p.m. so I could go home and get ready for my church’s Good Friday service.

Friends, I am almost done.

I finished all of the cranes — I only have the legs of the last two to do.  That means when I get there tomorrow, I’ll do those legs and the base…and that’s it.

Check out a video here of how it looks as of 6:30 p.m. tonight.

For more than two decades, I have aligned my work habits with a certain Calvin & Hobbes cartoon strip.  It’s the one where Hobbes is asking Calvin about his homework and Calvin replies that he will start it eventually.  You can’t turn creativity on and off like a faucet, Calvin says.  You have to be in the right mood.  Hobbes asks exactly what that mood is and Calvin replies, “Last minute panic.”

My NE150 Nebraska By Heart project is due Saturday.  This Saturday, April 15, 2017.  Three days away.  I still have two crane vignettes and the entire base to do.

As much as I like to plan things out, I also am a darn good procrastinator.  I’ve always admired those people who seem to be putting things off until the last minute and suddenly – voila! – you have a masterpiece.  I think of Alberto Giacometti’s 1947 Man Pointing sculpture and what he had to say about it.  He recalled: ‘I did that piece in one night between midnight and nine the next morning. That is, I’d already done it, but I demolished it and did it all over again because the men from the foundry were coming to take it away. And when they got here, the plaster was still wet.’  That sculpture, by the way, set a world record a few years ago as the most expensive piece of artwork ever sold at an auction – $141 million.

There are two things about Giacometti’s story that speak to me.  The first is the frenzied outburst of creativity that happened in the course of one night.  That’s what we see in the movies, isn’t it?  That’s the romantic way of making art, writing, cooking, living.  The second is Giacometti’s throwaway admission that he was a perfectionist.  “…I’d already done it, but I demolished it and did it all over again…”  I live that life.  When working on a book, or this blog, or an email, or even a text for crying out loud, I write and rewrite and reword and rephrase.  When creating art such as the Heart, even when under a looming deadline, I often stop, dissatisfied with what I’m doing, and start back at the beginning.

Yesterday, on the Nebraska By Heart Facebook page, the photo below appeared.

The image shows a trailer bed full of Hearts loaded up and ready to be taken taken to their installation points in Lincoln.  This gives me inspiration to continue to work on mine and not wait for the last minute panic…although you’d think I should be panicking by now.  Oddly enough, though, I’m not.  I’m looking forward to my next paint day (Friday) and I’m not stressed about the high probability that I will not meet the Saturday deadline.

Maybe I should be…I’ll let you know how I feel Saturday.

 

So this is what you get done when your mom nags you about your homework.

On Friday, March 24, (the day of my last post) Mom and I painted the sky blue background around my sketches of the cranes.  I had another painting day set aside last week, but it got pushed back.  Yesterday, Mom and Nancy and I spent a couple of hours blending blues and doing an undercoat of grey for the cranes.  When I left, I was very happy with how the background is turning out.  It don’t want it a solid color…I want it to be a blurred landscape.  I haven’t gone back to look at it again today, but I think I will still be happy with it.  The state on the base isn’t going to stay blue.  I’m thinking greens in the east and sandy browns in the west with the Platte River snaking across the middle.  Truly, the detail of the cranes is going to be the biggest challenge.  That is scheduled to be tackled this weekend.

One fun thing that has happened with all of this is that I am reintroducing myself to some of my favorite music.  I have a selection of cassette tapes (for those of you under a certain age, Google that) with music that I loved to listen to when I was growing up.  There are several soundtracks – Forrest Gump, Dirty Dancing, Star Wars – and a LOT of New Age – Enya, Narada, Jim Brickman.  I have fun music from the Nylons and Neil Diamond and a collection of songs from the 1950s.  There is Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. (mine) and a mixed tape of songs by Prince (pretty sure that belongs to Dave).  I had almost forgotten how much I listened to music growing up.

These cassette tapes have stayed with me longer than any actual cassette player, so I asked Dave to buy me a cassette player the last time he ran errands.  He was nice enough not to laugh directly in my face.  Apparently cassette players are not easily found on the shelves of your local retail store any more.  I ended up borrowing a player from my dad in order to listen to them.  Dad still has our old Atari and Betamax player, so I figured he would have a cassette player.

So the heart is in progress.  This week, I will take the quiz bowl team to competition, go to five or so musical rehearsals, make two ads and a poster for Arbor Day, encourage my Academic Decathlon students as they do the first part of their Online National competition, create a newsletter for the Friends of Arbor Lodge Foundation, go to a band concert, support my husband on a new adventure, and take a friend out for a birthday dinner.  Come Saturday morning, I will don my “Earth Without Art is Just ‘EH'” paint shirt, slip the Hunt for Red October soundtrack into the player, and study the detail of crane feathers like I never have before.