A rare flash of genius prompted me to show Jude's 'What if' to my daughter, as an example of a visual diary, and What Artists Do to keep track of their ideas.
Very inspired, indeed, was the Creative Genius and, being home for a week with the flu, she then spent a respectable part of it establishing her own, on paper.
However, it turns out that a visual diary, to Mym, differs from a conventional personal diary only insofar as the private thoughts and secrets recorded are accompanied by painstaking and elaborate illustrations. Exquisitely beautiful, naturally, but inaccessible to everyone but her, and quite unbloggable. Even I was reluctantly offered only the briefest glimpse on the solemn promise that I will not read the text ever, or look at any of it in her absence, on pain of slow and monstrous death.
Now, we take promises seriously, here at Chez Poppalina. You could blow your credibility for life, breaking a promise around here and this, let me tell you, is a Seriously Challenging Promise to Keep.
A part of me acknowledges that I have a lot to learn about teaching. Having her make art that I couldn't share in was Not What I Meant At All; creating work that I couldn't post online and brag to everyone about even less so. Somewhere along the line it seems I lost control of the ball.
But then, I paused to consider what Jude herself might have to say about this, and although I'm not sure precisely what that would be, I do know it would be something non-interventionist, philosophical, and celebratory. Something about letting it run and seeing where it might take you, about allowing the process to unfold, about the journey being the creative experience and the result essentially a biproduct.
In short, a brief and eloquent treatise on the Yoga of Art.
So I said nothing. I let it ride. The preconceptions and aspirations I had held about a controlled and structured environment in which my daughter would regularly churn out work to improve her skills and provide me with convenient blog posts to wow you all with, I tucked away in a little box at the back of my underwear drawer, along with a number of other Almost Brilliant Ideas.
After all, who am I to tell a Creative Genius how to create?
