Making a Life Conversation No. 5: A Holiday Gathering with Kaffe Fassett & Erin Lee Gafill

hey hello and welcome to making a life the conversation number five which is also known as a holiday gathering you may have been here for our first conversation which happened in june and the very first conversation of this series was actually with caith and aaron it was to celebrate color duets the book that they created as a catalog to go with an exhibition that is going to be happening at the monterey museum of art in may that conversation became really actually turned into a master class in creativity and right away when we finished we thought oh my gosh we should be doing that this again this was such so valuable to so many people we weren't sure at that time how or when but then as the holidays started to approach and our calendars aligned we decided that this would be a really good time this is a year when we have all faced all sorts of new challenges and fears the pandemic has demanded that we change our expectations of what our daily lives and our special occasions will look like so we are here today to celebrate creativity which is in fact one of our most powerful tools it is an innate tool which with with which we were all born i liken it to a pilot light my hope is that this event this exploration of creativity will help all of us to feel connected inspired and resilient as we begin this holiday season during which we are being called upon to change our perspectives on what is normal and what is possible aaron is going to lead us in a card making activity and then we'll continue the conversation with kaif but first i'd like to introduce caitlin reclusado the book buyer at the phoenix shop our partner for this event the phoenix shop is part of nepenthe the destination in big sur where kaif and erin both grew up 25 years apart and where aaron still lives caitlin hugh melanie hi everybody i just want to say it's so amazing to see so many of you here gathering in this celebration exploration of creativity and as melanie mentioned i am the book buyer at the phoenix shop and i just want to start off by saying thank you you know as an independent bookseller any of you that might be choosing to use us to add one of these incredible books to your collection or to offer them up as a very lovely gift to the people you care about um just want to say thank you for supporting an independent family on business like ours we've been a business for over 55 years and we have a really long history of being a place of creativity and culture and community and our founder lolly was an incredibly generous woman she really treated her staff and her guests like family and for so many of us that is a tradition that is very much alive and well today and big store is also um to many traditions and as melanie mentioned there is a beautiful one of handmade cards which aaron is here to tell us about so erin can you get us started yes oh it's so exciting i think this is such a miracle i can't get over that we're all able to do this together and see into each other's worlds like this it's wonderful um i grew up in big sur and i was born in 1963 and i remember the handmaidness of life it's still very much that way but there was such a focus on everything coming out of your creative impulse there was so much that we would gather from things that were thrown away and make them into things that were really beautiful and there was a tradition in our family and in the community of we have hand making cards christmas cards there was a local artist named emile norman whose partner brook clemons would start making their christmas cards in july to be able to have enough ready to go by by december and um in our family that was something that cafe was sort of the one who while his sisters and brothers were told to go off and shop wood and build the kerosene lamps and big ditches cape was assigned the task of um painting the family christmas cards and in our own family that tradition has continued annually and throughout the community the work i do in the community has a lot to do with keeping those kinds of handmade traditions alive so um it's a beautiful tradition to come from but it's also something wonderful that you might start in your own life in your own in your own family just if it's not something you had in your history looking around and finding what's available and what gets me really excited is color so today i'm going to show you how to make a card simply with gathered materials and what i have assembled today are colored papers some glue glue stick and um a card base that i'll be working on which is actually a recycled card so that's gonna that's gonna be how i'm gonna take it away and i think i think melanie you want me to just start making a card yeah absolutely please okay great so we have my hands spotlet here and i am an intuitive colorist i really thought about how i wanted to start this and i've been having dreams about this color um this is the color that i got so excited about painting out for making a card with and it may not be a traditional christmas color but it's the color that ignites in me this excitement so i go with that it's going with the energy and i'm just going to take my recycled card on the back of it is another card that i cut poorly so i'm going to take the blank face and just lay on top of it this color and i know i know i want this really rich fuchsia to be where i start so i'm just going to lay it down on top of the card and figure out the dimensions just by folding i don't really like to use things like rulers and i don't really even like to use things like scissors i i just find myself getting more excited by the possibilities of tearing and the randomness and accidentalness that happens when you tear i just find that to be stimulating you can end up with sort of a soft handmade edge and within a minute i can just transform the background color i'm a painter so i'm i'm always working with color usually on a canvas but working with um working with white is one of those things that is always so terrifying it's like if i can just quickly get rid of the white of this card and turn it into something that wow it has so much impact with that color and then take a little bit of glue i'm using acrylic medium here i'll stick this where you can see it a little acrylic medium like hodgepodge and i'm just going to put it down and it's going to hold it there just enough i don't have to do too much more than that just to get started i may change things around so i may not want it to be too gluey at first and then i'm going to look at all these colors and i have been painting up papers for classes that i teach online and i have this array of color to play with and i i just like to start by taking one color and putting it next to another color and then another and i'm i'm kind of gathering a little rainbow here to see what might ignite a spark what might get me really excited and that's the first thing that's that's the place from which i'm going to start and i'm just feeling warmth i'm feeling i want something to be vibrant i want something that's going to radiate and figuring out the orientation of the card and i don't actually figure out too much i kind of just start playing so this color is really on my mind it's in my heart i should say it's just this color that keeps showing up in my paintings this really warm and radiant color and again i'm just using the cards and tearing to start creating another band of color and as you're making a card along with me what i would really just encourage you to do is just feel your way as you go feel your way in what colors are giving you a charge and play and if something is not pleasing you put another color on top of it so this these two now are beginning to feel kind of like this exciting little world that i want to play with and this this other thing you can do with colored paper is tearing so i'm tearing a piece and just getting this really soft rugged edge and maybe that becomes the shape of a mountain underneath a bright sky in fact this morning this was the color of dawn as it came up over the mountains so i'm gonna go with that i remember looking at that this morning thinking wow i wish i had my camera i wish i was out there painting it um but instead it just showed up while i was tearing paper because that's how it works you guys notice things and you pay attention and they start popping up and becoming part of your internal well of ideas so i am i'm going to continue just following that intuitive feeling really with the color being the forward the forward emotion and the forward feeling and gluing it down as i go and you have an option when you're working this way to glue as you go or to just position things and then after you've gotten everything organized and arranged then gluing down and making those definitive those definitive decisions so it's up to you how you want to move forward with that um i think that there's something very very good about having a decision you have to work with so i'm going to go with the decision first which means gluing down first and i also am bringing in scissors because even though my rule of thumb is not to use them all rules are meant to be broken and i'm going to just give myself a sharp edge and create something which will resemble a star in the sky who says stars can't be pink so message of this is really go with your intuition start with color have fun make decisions as you go or wait and make them at the end this isn't filming very vibrantly but it's it's vibrant enough close up so i've got this big star over the mountain and that's going to be basically the the beginning of my motif i've i've got a mountain of pink i've got some beautiful color working together and i've got everything i need around me and i'm going to continue playing with looking at which colors want to resonate with other colors and and carry on so i hope you've been i hope you've all begun making your card with me but if not this is the time to start and take the ball and roll with it great thanks so much erin um kaif i wanted to switch over to you and i i want to talk to you first a little bit about your upbringing in big sur and you know when you moved there which i think was in 1947 with you when you were a young child it was way off the beaten path and um you if you wanted to have fun you had to make fun if you wanted to have art you had to make art and i feel like um that became a muscle that was so you worked on so naturally that it and it became your superpower in life so i'd like you to just talk a little bit to us tell us a little bit about that and tell us if you have some memories of making those holiday cards um for your family oh yeah well i mean it was always lovely to sit down and have to paint out all the cards and of course i put far too much detail and interest in everyone and uh so i was at this table painting away for for um days and days and days it was lovely but um otherwise we used to entertain ourselves i i used to dress my sisters up and uh we would pretend that we were great uh royalty and we would roll around the parking lot and in i would put them in a wheelbarrow and push like a golden carriage and uh you know with wonderful costumes and things like that so you know it it was fun the way we made our own entertainment um uh we all had very big imaginations and we were all big characters you know whoever screamed the loudest got the attention right and so um i actually as some people here may know i was the editor of your autobiography and i was looking at that last night and i found this quote something that you wrote it said one thing i did learn during those solitary days of wandering the countryside was to look at things more intensely if i got bored or sad there was always something to light me up even the grayest of rocks reveal delightful hidden shades when studied closely and it just it just really struck me that that kind of says it all about the way that that you exist in the world that that alertness that tool that you learned as a child growing up in a place where you know there weren't that many people and sometimes you were wandering in a solitary way and it seems like um you know when the pandemic started i know you had to cancel quite a lot of travel because you spend a huge amount of the time on the road teaching so i'm just wondering what what that was like for you to kind of accept that you weren't going to travel and and how you found your way well um it was fantastic i mean because in a way our life didn't change that much you know um i'm i'm kind of a hermit these days and i love creating and i sit and knit great swatches of knitting and for for different uh design briefs and also i i i paint a lot and i i do a lot of needle points and uh one of the needle points uh that we're enjoying doing now is taking my own kit that i have a great friend in california who loves to buy kits but she's not so keen on actually stitching them and i love it because i love stitching them i love stitching one of my own designs even you know because it's like like painting by colors and and you know you're just by numbers you just got all the the colors are printed on the canvas and you just fill them in and you watch this design come to life you know from a painting into a stitched three-dimensional object but um another thing that that i love doing is knitting complicated knitting and so this is this is a a very you know typical pattern for me to work with about 18 colors in a row you have to get used to this which a lot of people just couldn't couldn't even contemplate that they're they're off the minute you show them that but you know you get used to i work with manageable lengths of color and so if if it gets too tangled which it always does i can just cut it off and grab some other clean yarn and start again you know so it's no big thing but it is so much fun to build a pattern particularly a geometric pattern that kind of repeats like this um and so that is the way i do do like a design for peruvian connection there's there's a finished piece in wonderful peruvian cotton and you can see how um you know that they could take that and just make that into a garment it's got a nice top border and a bottom border mm-hmm and so yeah so um so being at home and having to cancel all that travel wasn't wasn't too hard for you because you were able to sort of just turn to your studio and get busy and what brandon said to me one day um my my wonderful partner in crime brandon he said to me one day you know the storeroom is a mess it's just full of buckets full of swatches of yarn and of knitting and you you've got to sort it out and throw away what you don't want and i went in and i started opening these boxes and i saw the whole history of my knitting career you know all the patterns i've done for proven connection for rowan yarns for for other people you know commissions uh experiments when i first started knitting and i was getting these huge coats and shawls and things and all these different colorways and all of it was there and so i i took these pieces and i started making sewing them together into collages because i thought if they're put together in a kind of tapestry then we've got something that could be uh shown in a gallery like this is one of them that i'm just working on at the moment it's kind of progress and so i don't know if you can you can sort of see all the different patterns wow yes but that that's that's just a very very bright one um but this is another one that is kind of softer grays i've got all the different moods going on so we've got some big flowers and um different motifs and how many how many years do you think that these these swatches span how old do you think the oldest ones are 25 30 years you know maybe even longer yeah it's the the um experimenting time i mean for instance here you can see there's tumbling blocks in two different scales there and lots of other designs um and this is a very sort of husky kind of cinnamon uh palette wow and defined all the ones that really went together color wise so how does it how do you feel when you're doing this and are you sewing them together yourself or people they're very very very crudely roughly sewn together i i am a perfectionist not i i just i sit there and i just sew them together just sort of hang together and eventually i want to show them in galleries and i'll i'll stretch them on to frames so that they um are nice and crisp and people can see all the details because i think i i think that pattern is just a very very fascinating subject i go around the world looking at all different cultures and i'm absolutely blown away by uh how different societies like the scandinavians or the japanese or the africans have their whole language of pattern and those cultures are fascinated with pattern and so um i come back home and i'm i'm playing you know with stripes with squares with geon with geometry with flowers with all of these different things um and and i collect fantastic books full of things so i'm actually going through my my um library and looking at things like carpet books and uh mosaics the decorative arts of the world feed my imagination in a tremendous way yeah it's kind of amazing that you know people have been making patterns you know as far back as history can record them you know that it is this instinct and that in this you know modern time we're faced with this challenge of you know our lives changing so greatly and yet you're able to find nourishment and excitement in the same types of things that have been nourishing people since you know the beginning beginning of human history as far as we know melanie i've just been hearing on the on the wonderful bbc radio uh a discussion about the neanderthals and they're discovering now that the neanderthals were actually quite fascinated with art and with with pattern and with creating and um and and they're finding you know examples that that they were far more advanced than people think right the sort of bad rap but but but that so those early early human beings recognized that there was something interesting in pattern yeah and of course nature is so full of patterns you know the pattern of leaves the veins and leaves the the petals of flowers that would have a blush um i think he's disconnected a little bit so um i'm gonna actually i'm sure they'll come back in and i'm gonna switch over to aaron and erin i wanted you to start by talking a little bit about your upbringing in big sur and and how you sort of experience that environment um and how you sort of created your fun and your art and then if you could tell us a little just because it's fitting for the holiday occasion the story about the um ornaments on the depend they holiday tree and then from there if you i'd just love to find out a little bit more about what what you've been experiencing during the pandemic and how you have sort of found solace in your creativity in your hands well yeah i mean childhood at big sur was so interesting because it was like everything it's like this kind of give it giveth and to take it right you've got isolation you've got road closures you've got forest fires you've got loneliness you're you know you're living somewhere very far away from any big city it's an hour drive to get a bottle of milk and um it was lonely and it was very and it was just like so pushed us inside to find the things that were within us already right because it's already there and those pressures of loneliness and isolation and and and need you know we needed things and we couldn't buy them and the way you got them was by making them so we would be sent off to play in the woods that was our big babysitter or the workshop was for the restaurant where they had hammers and nails and wood and we would just take you know all of these construction materials and build these fantasy ships that we thought we would sail away into the world on you know and just in your imagination you're you're dreaming always and acting out of these dreams in your in your hands and the restaurant was so uh embodying of making and making do um there was a woman helen who would melt down all the candles and every after every night shift nepenthe was illuminated by candlelight only and there were always these tapers at the end of the day and she'd melt them down and dip candles with her family to create new candles for lights for light because they didn't have electricity but helen's family continued that tradition with her 71 years later that is still happening in our community where her family dips candles every year for light but now for gift giving and for the ritual and for the for the beauty of that and that was the kind of person i grew up around you know people who really did those kind of things and the christmas tree and the panther initially was this um the top of a redwood tree something spindly something that was found in the woods and brought home and and the restaurant was big and cavernous and these high high ceilings and these spindly christmas trees would be placed on the middle of the restaurant and needed needed to be filled and it wasn't like there was a place you could go and get ornaments right so um the ornaments were made from beading tin can lids there were plenty of tin can lids because a lot of our recipes required number 10 cans and that's what like a big restaurant version of a kidney bean would come in or something and the kids would all beat the beat the tin can lids to within an inch of their lives with ball peen hammers right so can you imagine seeing these tin can lids that are shimmering and candlelight hanging from the sparse boughs of these redwood tree tops or whatever um from the center of this restaurant you'd walk in and you'd see just shimmer and light reflecting and a lot of space you know and i think actually they're very metaphorical for what was happening because where there was light there was a reflection you know in our lives there was like there were these people who would come and they would dance so they would do yoga or they would write poetry kaif being one of those people for me because he'd come back you know he'd come home and i was younger i was i was i'm his niece so he was always away and when he would come back he would set up a slideshow and show us where he'd been and it was just like this illumination of light that would just be like captivating for all of us and then he would go away again and he would just ignite this magic in us of possibility and the world beyond big sur and those structures within big sur of you know within our family of making do making with your hands the traditions of knitting the guys you know was the guys it wasn't the women i'm sure the women were knitting also but the story is the guys who were the chefs in the suit the cook and the you know salad chef the bartender the waiter they would come in in the winter when it was slow and dump bags of yarn on the tables and just sit there and knit sweaters together and they called them dump sweaters because they were just the dump of yarn various and sundries and those sweaters became you know beautiful objects of warmth that came out of that boredom that isolation not a lot of business and that was a way to pass the time but also to create something really beautiful so there is this um there is this kind of awareness in a childhood like that where you see how people respond to these kinds of pressures and that's a way to not only survive them but to actually create something meaningful and to create something beautiful that is going to elevate your life and take you take you forward all of those early experiences i feel are were my bridge into adulthood and discovering the life i was meant to live and so what have you been working on during the the pandemic well the pandemic is getting pretty old melanie it's been almost you know what is it 10 months into this so initially um what i focused my energy on doing was teaching and just doing online i started a group called awaken the artist within to reach across through the internet to people who were feeling really depressed and sad and freaked out by all this and starting to do projects with them to inspire them to get creative um and and i actually stopped painting for a while and and went into knitting and i knitted up a whole bunch of stuff and i have my knitting basket here just to show you some of the colors as you can see the colors i'm working with in my knitting are mirroring the colors i'm working with in my cards that's not surprising there's always kind of this this color energy that is kind of moving underneath all of these other things that you think you're consciously doing i have been like the rest of the nation baking sourdough bread like crazy and perfecting my recipe so um that is those are some of the things and i think it was salvador dali who said we must live multi-dimensional or artists live in three-dimensional lives so all of these things um are happening and i'm going out here's the thing that's new for me the new covid the new covid um response has been going out on monday mornings and painting with four other painters and just going back to the same place and painting the same scene again and again and again and those those mondays at the beach where we're looking at water and mountains and trees and just re reapproaching and exploring so this is kind of like my new monday madness of painting and i have literally 50 of these now i think because the time has been going by but i love the rep rep the repetition i love the revisiting of an idea and just allowing myself to come back to it kind of like cave working with tumbling blocks pattern you know it's like the same pattern but he's changed the colors he's changed the move the feeling has changed so um these these things are um you know just little they are my life i shouldn't say little they are they are the life i'm living during the pandemics that moves between teaching and painting baking and most recently i've started a new program called drinking from a cold spring which is about taking all of these kind of lateral and experimental art making methodologies that are not traditional painting but really about creativity and breaking through and and breaking back into that space in yourself that's always there that is that river of joy that roomy talks about you know it's always within us so finding ways to reconnect with it and um all of those things i mean it's like a freaking circus in my brain but all of these things are keeping me sane and what i've realized is that i need all of them i i'm not good if somebody says to me spend 40 hours just working on your book or spend a whole day on this one thing i need to move around and have that multiplicity of um of creative outlets to keep me from stagnating or getting too analytical yeah so two things one is i can't find cafe in this gathering i don't know if he got sort of knocked off and is having trouble getting on so i'm sort of frantically texting people involved in the behind the scenes trying to find him so i just uh not exactly sure how to handle that but um if the behind-the-scenes people can help so kate is back online but he's not hasn't been made a co-host okay and i've been trying to find him um it's it's supposed to be yes and i was i've been while you were talking i was desperately looking for it i am and um for you okay if you can say something that would help us to find you um because i'm having a hard time as the host i think i'm the only person that can make him a co-host but i can't find him on here allie can you find him and spotlight him possibly so while i'm doing this oh okay he's back we are so happy to see you how long were you away oh forever no you've been here 10 minutes yeah yeah i've been sitting here waiting for you to tune me in but okay sorry i was having trouble negotiating at all yeah so one thing i want to talk about right now is family legacy um and because kaif and aaron you come from a family of of artists of with a lot of energy a lot of really creative people and i feel like sometimes other people will say like oh well they're talented or oh they were born into you know that type of tradition and and it almost becomes an excuse for not nourishing your own creativity because you sort of say oh i'm not talented or oh that's not what we do in our family i wish i had had a family like that and one thing i want to say to people today is that if you don't come from a family tradition of creativity of card making or knitting or painting or dancing or whatever it might be that go for it begin that family legacy be the change you want to see in the world and i feel like kayf and aaron in the teaching that i've seen that you've done and in the conversations we've had seems like that's what you're always trying to do you're always trying to say to people go for it and yet there still seems around this word of art or artist or talent they seem to have become stumbling blocks in our culture to the point where we think we're not allowed to do it or we shouldn't reveal what we make because we don't feel comfortable calling ourselves an artist um so cave i just wonder what you can say to us i mean hopefully a lot of people are working on their cards right now um but just about going for it in general well you know what i find is can you hear me yeah yeah what i find so interesting is you know when we give our workshops um i remember a woman coming up to me in the early days saying i'm just a housewife i don't know about color and i thought well darling i don't know about color either i don't know anything i'm always kind of discovering and experimenting and playing and you know um i've got some wonderful disasters put away if people want to see you know what you go through to to arrive at a harmonious beautiful color scheme you just have to keep playing and what i find i what i try to do is to reach for something extreme you know when i'm doing colorways of fabric i'm trying to drum up moods that are quite different from each other um and and that is a kind of stimulus you know you can find different ways to stimulate yourself uh one of the things that that i find interesting about color is when people just think about flowers and flower arrangements you know a lot of people make a beautiful flower arrangement in their house but they don't think that they're an artist or anything to do with color well that's a very artistic thing to do um i i find also people that make displays in shops you know and just lay out fruit and vegetables and things like that in an attractive way or piles of fabric or yarn or whatever um you can just tell when somebody is is having fun and expressing themselves through those colors and objects yeah but that's that's the thing is it is to just allow yourself to have fun and to try things out and you know one of the things is there's there's just no way that you can do it wrong it's just you can do it better and better um and that that's the thing is to find what you really enjoy doing and just make it so that it communicates to other people that that's the that's the key i think to being an artist is we all have dreams we all see beautiful things in the world but the artist has that leap of imagination that they look at their audience and they think what's going to speak to you what can i say about this that's going to make it vivid to you the way it's vivid to me and that's the thing you find that way you you just keep playing with it until it's it's undeniably beautiful to the person who views your artwork and we can all do it yes absolutely and i think cave taught me something very important when i was visiting him the first time and i was in my 20s telling him about a project that i was really passionate about working with kids and the artwork kids were making and i just felt there was a book there that would be celebrating these incredible and spontaneous colorful brave paintings and poems that the kids were making um during a very challenging time in big sur when the road closed for three months and these kids were just stuck you know so we were doing art up the yin yang and i said to cave what if no one cares you know when i take this project off into the world and he just opened his eyes like the biggest eyes he'd been lying in the sun basking in in the sun on the beach and he just opened his eyes and he said don't ever think that and it just shook me to my soul because i realized that so much of what gets in my way is doubting myself and pulling back from the big idea and cave really taught me trust in that feeling you have when you are turned on by this project or this this way of working or these colors go with that don't ask but do you think it's okay or you know don't pull back from that confidence and um not all projects make it into the world you know a lot of things i thought would be amazing and didn't ever happen or they were amazing in a very different way than i hoped other things you know very good what you just said don't apologize i mean what one of you know i i was in a you know workshop once um and uh i had one of my quilts hanging up the way i do here now and um i i was looking at the quilt and i was pointing out the things that were really working in the quilt and i said but there's some things that are really not working in this quilt like this little corner is not very good and this this is not very good and then i said oh by the way there was somebody that wanted to buy this quilt is she here and the the teacher in the class looked over at me and she said not anymore well i mean this is the thing it's like we're creative beings it is not if you are creative it is are you acting on that creativity so the whole idea of am i or am i not that's not the question you are that is the absolute truth that is the human gift so how are you putting it on your calendar i know cafe is incredibly organized he's on his on the work of designing from breakfast until dinner and he is a hundred percent available for his projects and i think people think somehow it's gonna happen to you like you're gonna be inspired and you're gonna go off and become the next whatever but that's not the point the point is listening to that feeling you have when you're organizing flowers or when you're working on something that gives you that joyful sense of connection and that sense of purpose that sense of pleasure we are made for that that is the thing to pay attention to whatever it is you know whether it's rolling up a ball of yarn or knitting painting a painting whatever that idea of um you know it's special for some people is just a complete crock of buoy and each one of us all right has a better happier life when we give ourselves even 10 minutes a day of doing something that is just about your creative life whether it's writing whether it's um baking you know we it all comes out of us in different ways don't you think aaron that that at the beginning sometimes it's a bit painful it's it's it's like exercising or jumping in cold water or something you know for people you know they're not used to that activity yeah but yeah i like i i go to the ponds here and i used to all through the winter i would jump in the ice cold water and it just felt absolutely fabulous afterwards you had to have the history behind you and and also the fear of not dying of a heart attack but but that thing if when you when you make something even a little doll or a little tiny eyeglass case or some sweet little thing that is just a little precious thing that you have made you put those colors together you will feel better about that afterwards and that little object will go on talking to you through history and that's wonderful why i keep i tell people keep a sketchbook and whatever little stupid sketches you do keep it in a hardbound book so that you can open it and go through it from time to time and realize oh this isn't so bad this is rather good little thing you look at it later and it is it's become a real thing as opposed to oh it's not quite right i'm looking at this subject and i'm i haven't got this the lines right don't worry about that later it will be fabulous right don't get when you're when you don't can marry your sketchbooks i have my sketchbooks going back to when i was six years old eight years old and sometimes it's crap and sometimes it's amazing and pages change back and forth between competency and not competency and it's so fascinating just seeing that development and evolution and of painting drawing and also writing and lists of things that i was doing that day it's like oh wow i didn't know i was interested in that then but now i look back and see that i was you know and i think that one thing i learned while i was writing my book making a life was that the sketching the drawing the doodling can also be sort of an avenue just into yourself a way of grounding yourself and a way of getting in touch with your your gut or your soul and then it's not some people say oh well i don't like to draw or i'm not good at it or i don't doodle but like having a sketchbook it doesn't mean that you have to be preparing to be a painter just like you know you can knit or your quilt or so you can doodle as a just as a as a way of taking yourself on a journey that goes beyond words that uses you know another part of your brain exactly i think that's why people really like doing those adult coloring books so much it's like it's obviously not about you know being the next picasso but it is incredibly satisfying to have the space within which to color right just to play with color and to take all of these layers and layers of expectation off of the act and let it be simply that joyful connection with your hands with your heart and that feeling space that feeling space is where you need to be guided and not on top of it with constant is it good enough it's like who cares the more you do the thing you love the better you get at it you're going to have hits and misses along the way but it's that pleasure that keeps pulling you in and that surprise that delight and then there's a moment when you don't care what anybody thinks because you know what you think which is this is great i'm really loving this you know so i think that's a really powerful place to get to and and it's right there i mean really you can find it on a dime it can be right there in the card that you're making at this very moment just to be really present and not judgmental of it during the process i mean i am definitely one of someone who needs to let my projects whether it's a doodle or a knitted hat or anything else it has to sit sometimes for months or a year before i can actually see it and appreciate it and i just in the last year started keeping a sketchbook and i was just looking at it last night and looking at pages where when i was doing it i thought oh i'm ripping this page out i don't want any memory of this page and and then i looked at it last night and i thought oh i this is actually kind of nice i might actually i might build on that and do something else with it um that's great yeah i wanted to just segue for a moment um because i want to also talk about intention and the intention that you put into your work and and the the care the love the emotion that you put into it um and i know that there is a tradition in big sur that i believe began at nepenthe or began um with holly your sister cave about um blankets for babies can you can you tell us about that and if you tell us about your information in it my sister holly came to art quite late in her life and she just ate it alive she loved she painted and painted and painted but she also was a fabulous dinner and she was the most enthusiastic fan of my books on knitting and she would take them and and play with the patterns and then absolutely went off on our own doing wonderful wonderful knits in fact she she became a i forget what they call it but a major knitter plaster knitter a master knitter exactly and so um but she so so she started this thing of of getting everybody in the family involved everybody that could possibly knit uh or she would even teach them how and they would knit a simple little square just a square one color was fine so that everybody in the family would contribute to a little patchwork blanket uh for the new baby because uh our family is very fertile we have family babies coming along every five minutes and so there's always a chance to make another wonderful blanket uh that all the family gets involved with it's the most lovely thing and you crochet these different squares together and that's a little memory for the child that was hot that was holly's task i mean she would take every one of those squares and and and and crochet the border and then put them all together and she's actually here right now um to we could ask her more questions but hello hi kate happy birthday tomorrow oh lovely oh i'm gonna fly home and eat that bird sugar cake how wonderful yeah another tradition in our family is that holly makes birthday cakes for everybody's birthday and it's oh it's the one that they love the most like cake too hey holly hi brandon happy birthday it's also our anniversary uh 30 years ago today we met wow make a wish blow out the candle and make it okay if i made a cake for you too i didn't get the candle yes i have matches here and this is the pumpkin spice cake from from the the pente from the restaurant and when i recipe yes the recipe from your niece nani's book yeah i don't know with all the technology but i think nani is here as well and i know about the pumpkin spice cake because when i was in big sur with you to celebrate the publication of your autobiography we were eating lunch and i was deciding if i would have dessert and you said oh you have to you have to have it you have to have the pumpkin spice cake it's so good and then i learned that it was in nani's book and um so i learned to make it and so i just want to wish you a happy birthday and thank you for introducing me to this cake into your world and to just everything that you do and uh i know we were trying to find oh there she is can you unmute oh cute mute he's muted i know and i'm trying to find her to unmute her but until i think ally might be able to figure out how to do that but i will tell everyone that after the event i send out a newsletter that has a link to the recording and it will also have a link to a pdf download of the recipe for this cake which is in nani's book my nepenthe so that will be a nice surprise and maybe become part of your family tradition um i'm not sure if i think what we should do now is we should switch to caitlyn who's been collecting questions that people have and caitlyn can um ask kaif and aaron those questions and then in the meantime we're going to try to figure out i'm going to try to unmute nani so that she can say hi oh okay so say hi hi donnie i love to everyone and it's an honor to be a part and i just want to give my little 30 seconds with kate when i was younger in my 20s also went to to his house and the mino panthers you know it's about our family story and my my creative process through food but really we've all been so inspired by the way we grew up and with kate but um when i was in my 20s and i went there and got to be in his kitchen which is still my favorite place in the world and i got to be there last year for one night um but just going to the market with cafe and him pulling out these gorgeous cabbages and looking at all this beautiful food visuals that he had but then his kitchen is just filled with color and it was such an inspiration back then to cook in that space and i remember dreaming i think i used to say the cape when you want to make a book with food and color and cookbooks and you know ultimately minor penthe came out of that um kind of those early ideas and sitting in his space and a lot of inspiration from his books so um you know i think yes minopenthi's we had a re-uh we reissued it last year so it has a new cover vibrant blue and it's case fabrics and lots of visuals from our family story and our life and lots of recipes and 70 years of history and it's at the bookstore yeah and um caitlyn i didn't wish caitlyn has signed uh signed bookplate so if you do order today through through nepenthe you will get a signed book plate for the book as well thank you it's so good to see you thanks for joining us thank you for having me so caitlyn um do you want to start the q a we're going to do this probably we're going to end at 2 15. well 2 15 in new york the math if you're somewhere else so that's there'll be about 19 minutes of uh q a and then we're gonna have a slideshow and be sure can we ask to have holly say goodbye to cave before yes you start because she has to go okay yes okay goodbye kate i hope you have a wonderful birthday love you thanks brandon for the code word yeah good good all right okay so first of all i do want to say two with the book plates we have a limited number so when we run out of book plates we'll be out of book plates but we're super happy that we can offer that so huge thanks to you nani for putting that together i have more i'll send you more caitlyn okay okay good you're all good everybody and um so i got a lot of really really good questions i'm gonna kind of meld a few of them together um that i feel are related to each other so i have about three questions for you guys which will probably take us through our 20 minutes and um the first one was really beautiful a woman wrote in and said that her teenage daughter has decided to dedicate her life to art she's going to be a ballet dancer and she doesn't necessarily come from a family of artists you know which is something we already talked about today which i thought was great but um she wanted to know what advice do you have for people who are choosing to devote their life to art is there like one kind of piece that you can offer up to help guide them on their journey well my my advice would be just keep doing it whatever it is you want to do uh keep yourself fit in that in that activity uh and keep coming back to it that's the hardest thing is sticking to it um we all get discouraged i mean i've had days where i thought i wasn't anywhere near being an artist i was just pathetic and um somehow i kept going um with a little encouragement from friends and things so and that's another thing is get friends that that encourage you to keep at it uh get rid of the friends that discourage you and say oh you know uh all work and no play makes jack a dull boy forget that you want to keep work and playing with it and i love the idea of being a dancer i wanted to be a dancer myself when i started yeah and i would say uh just from my perspective coming at it slightly differently as a mom and the mother of two kids who are both incredible artists and working in other jobs along the way before dedicating my life to painting i was a writer from childhood from the first time i could write i was i knew that was my identity and i wrote plays and i wrote novels and i wrote poetry and and then it shifted into other things and i was very resistant at first because i felt like no i had to be really you know strict about just this thing but now looking back i'm 57 so i'm looking back on my whole life of art making and writing creativity and i think gosh i kind of did myself in a little bit because i i had this very um brain-centered sense of self that did include being being creative but i didn't see the artistic the visual as as my path i was very committed to writing and what i wish that i could say to myself earlier on is be more open-minded i knew that that creativity was going to be my path in some way but i became very attached to it being a certain way yeah and although i don't regret a minute of the discipline of that you know i spent 10 solid years writing four to six hours every minute a day or every minute between other things you know that discipline that dedication that carving out the time i remember nursing my child stirring a pot of boiling water and throwing in spaghetti and having an envelope on the on the mantel where i was jotting down poems right i mean doing it all at the same time because when you're a mom you have to there's no other way and that is absolutely true that is what you do when you know this is what you're supposed to do now it may not be that i ended up being a poet although i've written poetry but it's important to listen to that inner voice to carve out discipline and also to be painful with it and and adapt as you need to adapt adapt to what your interview is telling you i mean what if he had stuck with being one thing he never would have become a textile artist you know and what a gift he's given the world through his creation of these incredible fabrics and incredible ideas i mean he he explored so many avenues on his way to becoming the artist he is today um so i would say that is all all good all good stuff that's wonderful [Music] people are wondering if they're gonna have a chance to show their cards too oh yeah we definitely um wonderful um i'm gonna ask a couple more questions though if we have time is that okay yeah yeah okay so the other question that was kind of asked again different people different versions that i liked is um they wanted to know more about like do you guys sketch out and plan your art really well ahead of time or you just kind of jump in and get creating and how do you you know select those colors and select what you're doing is it more intuitive or is it more structured or is it a combination of both for you guys i i would say for me it's very intuitive but i'll have a sort of rough idea like with this quilt behind me this one um i was thinking um we're going to be uh in italy we're going to photograph in this beautiful village that's right on the sea and it'll be that beautiful blue and green mediterranean water and so i made this quilt to echo that water and uh that's that's the way uh i would start with an idea like that and then the whole form of it just kind of follows you play around with forms and these diamonds seemed a good idea so it is it is getting a rough idea and then jumping in uh you know what i worked with a filmmaker once who told us the story of my life and she came to my studio and she said i give the bbc uh a definite script this is what i'm going to do but on day one i jump in and swim for my life and that's that's my my attitude you know we just do what we can based on the roughest idea yeah i would reiterate that i i believe you need to follow the energy so i'll often have an idea and i'll follow it and go with it but then something will shift and i have to shift with it because if i keep hitting the same idea on the head it just dies but if i can say well where is the energy where is the energy moving that's why i move from painting to knitting to needle point to other things because moving around in all of these different creative ways and then when i really don't have ideas at all i just immerse myself i mean going back into nature going for a walk is like going to the doctor for an artist for anybody but when you get out of your house and you're in the world and you're in sunlight and and seeing the way the world is operating so magically it's like there's art everywhere the first time cave took me for a while i took k for a walk when we were living in burlington vermont on a snowy snowy day in winter obviously and we had walked this walk many times and it was keith and me and my little boy chai who was like three years old or it's just this little kid and kate i was looking down making sure cave didn't or chai didn't fall into a ditch and cave looked up and he said oh my god look at that pink and i was like god singing you know with the angels and i i couldn't believe he saw something in all the snowy waste land of that town that was singing to him but it was it was this beautiful pink wall that i had never noticed and that moment has stuck with me for my whole life of their the beauty is there to find and and when you're stuck creatively to go out into nature go out into the world and receive what there is to be received i wanted to add something to that um one thing i've really been focusing on recently is how i feel at a particular moment like there's so even now with the pandemic and so many things stopped i feel like i've been incredibly busy and so i'm often physically doing one thing while my brain is thinking about other things so i might be walking the dog and thinking about my work i might be sending an email and thinking about that email and then the next email i need to be sending or i might be in the shower and and thinking about you know something else i need to do in the house and i feel like just if i want the times when i just stop and i just try to be present so if i'm in the shower i feel the water hitting me if i'm walking the dog i see the way the dog's paws are hitting the ground or i see the nature around me and that everything is more enjoyable when i'm present in the moment and when i like when i was cooking baking this cake for a cave i was like okay i have a lot of things to do but i'm just going to be here just going to bake this cake i'm just gonna mix up the ingredients i remember what nani told me about adding extra spice but i remember you know how i tasted this cake for the first time and i was able to block out everything else and just be present and i think that what we do creatively when we're knitting or painting or writing is a way of becoming present you know i think that's a gift that it gives but we can also and it seems like okay if you have like you're really tuned into this we can also just be present like when we're doing doing ordinary things yeah you know melanie i have a very good example of that i used to paint these big still lives of lots and lots of pots all arranged on my table in in london and one day i absolutely lost the pot i i looked at it and it just looked boring i thought what am i doing i i can't go on with this painting and it's so labor intensive and i have to do so much to make it come alive and i couldn't couldn't get past that moment and i just stopped put my brush down and stood and stared at that still life until it came alive and what happened was i entered the moment and i i was able to suddenly see it like it was a huge cityscape all of these pots lined up on this table became like this monumental structure that was like a fabulous sculpture garden or something and i thought if i can just get that onto the canvas the emotion and i'm feeling from looking at that i'm going to be there and it was absolutely entering the moment but as you say you know you're painting and you're thinking of what you're going to shop for and who's coming to dinner and you know all these things are going through your head and and if you can just stop and look at that still life or look at what you're doing look at stirring that lovely cake and make it the you know important as if it's as if it's a beautiful modern dance you're doing by stirring that cake you know ordinary water right i mean it's the zen idea of being present for every moment things there are certain things that catapult you into presence you know being terrified of something you know you're making a cake you've never made before and you're really paying attention to every detail because you're terrified you're gonna blow it you know that can really focus the mind and and drop you in and i think we're also more more receptive creatively when we decide consciously you know throughout the day every day i consciously remind myself of this quote um from pia tiara de chardin who was a catholic mystic um you probably have heard this quote before it's so beautiful we are all spiritual beings having a having a human experience and whenever i'm in stress throughout the day which might be in conversation with a difficult person or having to make a difficult decision or driving or interactions of any kind i just bring myself back to that and in the beginning of my day i think about that that i am a spiritual being having a human experience so all these human challenges that get thrown at me my mother always says it's a school they're there to teach you and so whatever's happening i just kind of come back into myself as as a spiritual being how do i want to experience this moment and receive it and not be under under undermined by it or overwhelmed by it and it helps me a lot recently that idea yeah so how what's the best way i think if people want to hold up their cards if people if you go to view in the top right corner and you click on gallery then and you hold up your card and then if you want to see other people's cards you'll see about halfway down on the screen there's like a little uh arrow that points to the right on my screen and it's mine says one of 35 because there's 35 screens so you can click through and you can see people's work i love it love it oh these are great wonderful i love that beautiful that's beautiful beautiful oh i love it so it looks like we're getting somebody's spotlight fantastic wendy susan caroline [Music] oh i love that i wish my mom were here to see susan's that would be totally neuron oh beautiful gorgeous colors texture oh that's more jazzy matisse so um marine great wow caitlyn is there one more question that you want to ask to finish things yes yes i think it's a great question to end on although i'm so dazzled by all of the beautiful art i just saw um one thing you know that came up a lot in different ways was this question around fear you know there's the fear of letting go some of your art or letting go some of your supplies to make room for the new and there was um there was fear about you know being intimidated around getting started as a beginner and there was fear around being okay with making mistakes and i think a lot of people would love to be able to hear is just how do you two as artists deal with those feelings of fear and how do you work through them you know how do you embrace them and make them part of the process i think fear is everything i mean hi brandon you know if you have somebody in your life who's like brandon it's a really good idea to have somebody in your life who's really keeps you feeling loved and valued as i have with tom i mean it's really nice to have another person who thinks you're pretty great um but fear is the constant i would say i mean you're always working through fear it doesn't go away you don't stop being afraid so you just begin to develop a muscle toward you know starting really small i mean if you don't think you're an artist and you don't think you're that great but you kind of want to do something making like a little card right it's not intimidating no one expects you to put your christmas card on the wall of a museum or anything and then you realize oh i took a lot of risks because every art piece you make is a series of decisions you're making and every decision you could make a mistake and you can feel afraid i mean i just admitting this i'm knitting something right now i'm like oh i should rip it out because i made these mistakes that are the colors aren't that great i'm like keep going because then it becomes part of the process and i can look back at it and say oh look it got a little muted there now i jazzed it up and those little decisions add up to a must a muscular approach to fear you know it's there you know you can survive it you go through it and on the other side is ecstasy joy and exhilaration and you can't wait to do it again and you will be afraid again but you just get used to it it's like oh yeah i know that feeling it's my feeling is that you should you should make things and if you if you think it's awful and it hasn't come off uh somebody out there is going to like it you know somebody's going to walk in and say that's my favorite thing ever made and i want to buy it so so remember that that's always possible can i add something kate told me at the very beginning you might not like what you've achieved but guarantee somebody else will yeah also remember mistakes leave room for opportunities i mean also this is also speaking to perfectionism and this is what is perfectionism perfectionism is your attachment to your ego that you're someone who can't make a mistake and you're afraid you're going to let your ego down by making a mistake and then you don't even bother trying because you don't want your ego to feel like a failure well get your ego out of the story because the ego is just like wrecking things you know and it's like you're trying what's the point we're gathering together today to remind each other that at the essence of our humanness is creativity and that when we access it we find joy even during a pandemic even with the world going to hell in a hand basket which is what it feels like it's like how can we be happy we can we can because it lives within us and it's our birthright to create so to to work through fear and to get to that juicy happy joyful connecting place is the point so melanie may have been afraid to pull off this birthday party holiday gathering in london people all over the world but she did it anyway because she knew that fundamentally it was a really really beautiful gift to all of us right and if she had been like i'm not gonna i'm gonna make mistakes i'm not gonna be perfect i'm not gonna do it we would have all lost right we would have all lost so if you can come into contact with the depth of intention of this beautiful offering yes we're going to make mistakes along the way so what picasso said every child is an artist so remember we were all artists at one point and then we sort of got too grown up and everything else for it but some of us stay being a child like this one uh you know he's to get do needlepoint uh draw everything of just by sitting around the studio and playing things and having a go and with my encouragement you know he took off and made a career out of it and and i think being around generous people is really important because i started doing a lot of these things that i do that give me so much joy with a generous teacher you know my my uncle cave um said here here's a needle point go draw something and stitch or here let's get some neat knitting going or okay this is a still life let's paint it and if he had been criticizing every effort i made and saying oh that's not good enough or you didn't tidy up your ends or whatever he was just like go for it you'll enjoy it have at it and that freedom and encouragement it's so important for young people to have that it's so important for old people to have that for all people to have that you're around people who just want to tear you down all the time in the interest of making you better you're around the wrong people bottom line so maybe you need to switch that out but you know it you feel it it's like get rid of all the other voices that shut you down and listen to that inner voice that says you were born to do this yeah so do you want to add something else cave well no just i mean what what a lovely chance this was and i'm sorry that i went blank in the middle of it but um i mean i i hope you know if there's knitters out there and they're making swatches of things they can make the blankets that i'm making you know put them all together in a wonderful and also isn't fashion full of patchwork right now so make yourself wonderful patchwork jackets and things like that you know you guys can be the creative uh people that'll be right in fashion now yeah well i think that um i wanted to say about fear um yes i thought about canceling this event i thought about never even starting this whole series because i was afraid um what i'm trying to learn when the fear creeps up is just to sort of say yep that's my fear like i i hear you i see you i feel you but i'm still going forward and so i think for all of us um you know going into this holiday season and going into this new year which hopefully is going to be soon healthier for everyone um that you know we just have to learn to just sort of greet our fear and it will always be there and we need to sort of look understand that we have a creative pilot light you know cape was referring to picasso's statement about we're all born as artists i i really believe that we're all born with the creative pilot light and society sometimes dims it for us a little bit for some reason hopefully it doesn't get completely squashed out but that it's meant to be lit and it doesn't just being present for the process of whatever your creative expression is is the natural way to be the instinct to make the ordinary extraordinary is very very natural much more natural than spending your day scrolling on a phone or typing on a computer so whether it's you know you're lucky enough to be able to devote whole days to it or an hour or five minutes whatever it is it has value and it will be that time that you spend present and uh in the creative flow for however long it is is nourishment that will serve you well throughout that moment throughout your day and throughout your life so um you know here's to 2021 or and to all sorts of goodness that can be born within ourselves because the answer to all this is not certainly there is the health issues that are going on there's a lot going on out in the world but the answer in terms of our ability to cope and our ability to flourish is actually within ourselves and in the introduction to my book the it has a title it's keep looking at your hands and i think i've gotten into the habit of ending these events by saying keep looking at your hands and just like dorothy and the wizard of oz had the power all along to go home i think within our own hands we have the power the magic to find our true selves and to find goodness and happiness so that is my wish for everyone i want to thank you all for being here and obviously a big thank you to kaif and aaron and brandon and ally and joan and caitlin and nani all the people in holly who helped to sort of pull off our surprise happy anniversary kate and brandon happy birthday cave happy holidays to everyone we're going to end with a slideshow that is shows spreads from nani's book my nepenthe it spreads from cape's newest book quilts of burano chose pages from color duets the book that kaif and aaron did together and it has pages from making a life the book that i wrote if there are books on your holiday gift list i hope that you'll consider purchasing them from the phoenix shop because that is a family-owned independent store that has been sort of treasuring and nurturing creativity for more than 50 years and those are the kind of places we want to continue to exist so thank you everyone thank you melanie thank you melanie so are we allowed to ooh in awe yes go for it it's really hard not to uh when you're looking at these well these are such beautiful books all of them yes

Channel: Making a Life / Melanie Falick

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Id: nXBBkqiJsnA

Length: 85min 13sec (5113 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 06 2020