ruth stone – Mixy's Art Blog

There’s likely something telling about the inclusion of these tiny sketchy folks in this week

(this character looks like he’s sustained a cartoon style head injury – a dropped anvil or grand piano I expect)

as usual I can’t offer any explanation, this is just what falls out of my unconscious mind via my pen holding hand.

In her TED talk, Elizabeth Gilbert recalls how the poet Ruth Stone described her creative process:

“…she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia,she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, “run like hell.” And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn’t be fast enough, so she’d be running and running, and she wouldn’t get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it “for another poet.””