Art Beat: Stacking stones

Hi, my name is Jacob Mann. I cover the Art Beat for the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman.

Stories start in many different ways. This one’s all about living one day at a time.

You know that saying about how it’s not about getting to the top of the mountain, but enjoying the climb? Well, this pandemic has been teaching the reality of how important it is to enjoy the journey without fretting over making it to the destination.

I recently interviewed a local artist named Sandra Cook. She dabbles in a variety of mediums, and lately watercolors are her main focus. In fact, she has been painting original pieces, often with inspirational words at the forefront, every single day for the last 266 days. She said it started out as a 100 day plan, but the habit kept rolling and she’s decided to use this momentum to paint every day for a full 365 days.

“I decided back in May— after the pandemic shut everything down— that I needed to do something for myself. It was getting kinda depressing. So, I need a purpose I guess. I started producing these little paintings and posting them on my Facebook page,” Cooks said during our interview. “So, it’s become my art practice… It seems like the people have a little bit of a following on my Facebook page; and getting comments from people, that it’s brought them joy or they look forward to it every day.”

Cook said this daily habit has grounded her, and provided her soul with the simple soilice of creating something out of nothing. As an added bonus, her continuous posts on Facebook have garnered a fair share of attention, so the act of creating evolved into something more.

“I started doing it for me because I needed that uplifting part, and I thought maybe other people would too,” Cook said.

I asked Cook why making art is so important to her. She said it’s out of necessity.

“It seems like It’s just something that I have to do… I think it really forces you to be a problem solver. You have this image in your mind of what you want, and then you have to figure out how you’re gonna’ execute it.”

Talking to Cook about her daily practice reminded me of a plot point from one “Choke” by Chuck Palahniuk (one of my favorite authors). In the book, the main character, Vincent and his friend Denny are both addicts.

Denny begins collecting rocks of all shapes and sizes. What started out as a way of marking his sober days became something more, something simple yet so profound. In the book, Denny explains that he’s doing what he’s doing simply because it was doing something, and at the end of the day, he’d have something to show for it. He ends up making some sort of structure at the end, but he tells Vincent it was more about the act, not the final product. He wanted to have something rather than nothing.

My takeaway from all of this is that our life is filled with little moments, and it’s the formation of our habits. So, the more we pay attention to this day instead of the next, and try to stack our own daily stones, I wager we’ll be a whole lot happier for doing so. Plus, we might even have something neat to show people when it’s all said and done. Either way, the point is we tried and made something, and no one can take that away from us.

Excerpt from “Choke”:

“All these stupid rocks,” I say, “what’s your goal?”

“This isn’t about getting something done,” Denny says. “It’s about the doing, you know, the process.”

“But what are you going to do with all these rocks?”

And Denny says, “I don’t know until I collect enough.”

“But what’s enough?” I say.

“I don’t know, dude,” Denny says, “I just want the days of my life to add up to something.”

Contact Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman reporter Jacob Mann at jacob.mann@frontiersman.com