Nolan takes her art one day at a time for a year in her life

Megan James, Contributor, Jakarta

When she first started experimenting with art in the early 1990s, Canadian Deborah J. Nolan would slip her works into drawers or cupboards to hide them from her flatmates in Vancouver.

"I always thought, it's so personal, it's not finished, what will people think? It took ages before I could even show my work to trusted friends," said Nolan.

Her current exhibition, after more than eight years living in Indonesia and at the age of 32, shows she has been able to overcome that reticence to great advantage.

Project 365 breaks with artistic convention, because instead of showing art's finished product (be it comforting or confronting), Nolan also reveals the times when she struggled to create.

The show is literally a piece of work for every day of the year 2002. They figure as a personal journal of the highs and lows of her year, but more importantly to Nolan, the 365 works on A4 paper explore the concept of "process".

While that sounds dry, her work is not. It's full of poetry and whimsy, humor and frustration, all brought to life with a fine sense of color, line, texture and composition.

"I wanted to show that 'process' is the essential tool of creativity and to do that I had to let go the need to make art to 'show'. Behind every finished perfect masterpiece there were probably lots of attempts that didn't turn out."

At first Nolan seems an unlikely candidate for the mission of revealing the failings and foibles of artists. She's sunny, and relaxed, with fine features, honey-colored hair and matching mellifluous voice.

As her ideas unfold, there is the realization that her girl- next-door demeanor fits her message well. Artists have bad days too. But by pushing through, they end up somewhere creatively new.

"I'd sit with a piece of paper and even if I didn't have an idea, I'd start playing around, even scribbling and adding a bit of color," she said.

"I'd start to dig deep into myself, filter through experiences and thoughts get involved in the process. Usually an idea, or emotion or something that I had seen that day, kind of came out and got onto paper."

And yes, she resisted the temptation to cheat by skipping a day or two and catching up on the weekend. She did a work each day, even if only at midnight for 10 minutes in bed.

"You can tell the ones where I'm really tired," she said.

She readily admits that certain periods demonstrate that artists dig through mounds of artistic "dirt" before hitting buried creative "substance".

Art was not part of Deborah's school life in the town of Pickering, just outside Toronto, nor much of her university years. Her degree is in kinesiology, the study of the principles of mechanics and anatomy in human movement, and her knowledge of physiology shows in her figurative work.

In the final year of her degree, she also took some fine art courses, followed by more part-time courses.

Just as art entered her life, so did Indonesia. At 22 she spent six months in eastern Flores on a Canadian youth exchange program, after which she knew she would return to the country.

She did, in 1997, intending to travel on through Asia. But in Surakarta she found an art and language program and somehow never left. It was in the country that her life as an artist really began, with the first of many exhibitions in THE Central Java city in 1999, accompanying performance and installation works.

But when she began a job full-time in Jakarta in community development, tiring 10-hour days meant little energy or time for art. A year into the job, she made a commitment to get back to art by doing a piece a day.

"I hoped I'd be able to keep it up for a couple of months, but it kept going and I was enjoying the process. As it got to October and November and I thought maybe I could show this for people to see the process of creativity. So the name Project 365 came at the end."

She chose to work on A4 paper not only so she could carry it when traveling for her job. Nolan also believes imposing limits allowed her work to grow within, to be more spontaneous and explore new media.

"If you sit in front of a big blank canvas, you often are paralyzed. By doing it on quite small paper and doing it every day, you're not worried about the outcome, it really is about process."

Even though she doesn't want viewers to concentrate on individual pieces, there are plenty of gems you may want for your wall. But they're not for sale. Some have inspired bigger works already, and the rest she may give to friends.

Is she still doing a work a day?

"No, and it's a bit of a relief. In fact, when I was putting the exhibition together I thought I'd lost January 2002, maybe in the February floods, and I wondered how I'd ever make myself do one last month. Luckily it turned up."

She's hoping the exhibition's location, in the Ministry of Education, might influence those who write national curriculums to resist the worldwide trend to education dominated by the sciences.

And, of course, she wants to inspire others.

"If you just spend a little bit of time every day doing what you really love, it's good for your soul."