The Power of Three

Image Top: Postcard of Gauguin's Vision After the Sermon

Image Bottom: The other side of the postcard. It is a collage I created, depicting three aspects of my life: "Father" (left); "God" (center); "Mother (right).
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I call it "The Power of Three." It's an assignment I gave my university students this semester. I did the assignment along with them. First, some background: When I was an undergraduate at East Carolina University, I double-majored in art and English. When I went to Graduate School in English and then later in Creative Writing, I put away my pens, pencils, and brushes. I didn't have time to write and do artwork both.

Although I didn't do artwork for years, I remained intrigued by the idea that my two loves, art and writing, could somehow be combined. Now, after months of reading Judith Heartsong's blog and seeing the beautiful way she combines her art and her writing, I've decided I need to get back to image-making.

It's been so long now since I've done art that I feel like I'm starting all over again. And that's okay. I have no illusions about being a great artist, and "being a great artist" is not important to me, anyway. I simply want to use art as a way to make my fiction and essays deeper and richer.

Much of my creative output, whether visual or written, has been snuffed out through the years by unrealistic expectations, by what I think I should be capable of. Finally, I said, Enough! Just do something! So I did. I used the image-making as a way of "seeing" how I "see" the world.

It only took me about twenty minutes to create my image. That tells me that I probably could do one image a week. At the end of a year, I'd have about 50 images and probably a much richer connection to my own life.

"The Power of Three" showed me what I have always suspected: Doing Art can make writing better.

"The Power of Three" has several steps. There are discovery techniques used at the beginning, such as listing and webbing, to help students find aspects of their lives they want to write about. Finally, one of the last steps is to create a triptych, a visual representation of three aspects of your life. My triptych helped me to discover some surprising things about how I feel about "God," "Father," and "Mother."

I expected my images for "God" to be positive. And I expected my images for "Father" and "Mother" to be negative. But just the opposite happened. Through the prewriting assignments, I discovered the fruit imagery and ended up using an apple to represent "God."

The apple represents "The Fall." The eye and the tear (Apple of my eye) represent the pain associated with "The Fall." But there is also a golden snowflake under the eye, representing the beauty we can bring to our suffering. While "The Fall" is a painful process, it also leads to growth and transformation.

The strawberries in the left and right panels are simply a representation of how much both parents loved this fruit. My father loved eating them. My mother loved picking and preserving them. My father also loved birds and was very gentle with them. The pig represents one of my first memories of my mother, the time she helped some friends of hers load a big pig into a trailer so they could take it to the fair. I have always remembered my mother's strength and how surprised I was that she had that kind of strength. It is a memory I have held onto like a life buoy for many years. I need to explore why the memory is so precious to me.

My triptych surprised me in many ways. It surprised me because I chose unexpected images to represent the three aspects of my life that I chose to explore. It surprised me because it truly did deepen my awareness about my life, particularly in how prominent "The Fall" is in my thinking. Although leaving paradise is painful, it really does represent the beginning of our personal journey through life, our heroic quest.

I wanted to get this entry up before Thanksgiving. I have oodles of papers to grade tonight and conferences all day tomorrow. And I haven't even done my food shopping for Thanksgiving dinner yet! Have a great holiday, everyone.