Some of my best pieces of art were built at a time when I was under the most stress. But those artworks were not a true measure of my creativity but are a measure of the frustration in my life at that time. I made a number of works under pressure in grad school, when problems from school and my personal life were teaming all around me. I had a broken car, no money, and very few trustworthy friends. Most of them were like me, balancing life with too much alcohol, too little sleep, and not enough encouragement from our instructors. Still, out of that period came some dynamic art from a part of me that was still operable.
I remember walking to my studio on torn up unmaintained sidewalks, passing speak-easy bars, and then over a set of railroad tracks that ran behind our studios. When a train came around the bend and ripped a thundering path just outside the windows where we worked, we had to hold down our art materials to keep them falling off the vibrating tables.
Walking to my studio one day, I noticed a deserted and rusted bike in the weeds by the rail road tracks. Partly out of lack of money, and partly out of a love of the found object, I wrestled the broken bike up to the tracks to see if it could be salvaged for my art, and suddenly had the notion of leaving it partly on the tracks for the train to run over when it came by. Since I walked this path every day, I figured I could reposition it over and over until the bike changed into the object I was seeking. Simply put, I thought the train could make a piece of art for me.
Over the next few months as I walked to school, I continued to adjust the bike on the tracks so the train would flatten out a new area each time it roared by. Sometimes it was several hundred feet farther from where I had put it, having been pushed along, then thrown aside by the moving train. Eventually, the bike’s entire metal frame was flattened to within an inch, well, actually within an eighth inch of its life. (I should add that it is a federal offense to leave anything on a railroad track, the danger being one could derail the train. That is not such a good idea, considering that trains are big, move fast and don’t stop easily.
What I hauled into the studio months later looked nothing like a bike anymore, but a bike that had been pressed down by the power of a locomotive. It was a new form. You could still barely recognize it as a bike but one that obviously had a complete face lift. Ridden hard and run over wet. Since I was working on my masters in printmaking, I looked at this flat object as a surface that would accept ink which could then be transferred to paper, a print process known as relief printing. In the case of my bike, when I rolled the ink across the train-flattened surface and placed paper over it, the print that came up was oddly familiar to the viewer, a sort of humorously sad sight, like spilt ice cream melting on a sidewalk.
It is probably not such a good idea to put bikes on railroad tracks. However, our creativity takes us along hidden paths we do not fully understand until we take the risk and follow our instincts, not our fears. However, if we artists give ourselves the permission to go ahead and take those first steps to create, we move down the tracks just enough to see what is hiding around the bend.