Welcome to Your Life

  I was thinking today about how I have given away most of my life in various ways and I have less of it left than what’s behind me now probably. 
  
    First and foremost, I was a caregiver for 22 yrs.  and because of that situation and the absenteeism it created in my jobs, I was always trying to make sure that I was a valuable employee despite this drawback.  I can’t tell you how many times, after averaging 55+ hr. weeks, I was told to choose between my job, my child or do better – as if I could suddenly wave a magic wand and make my daughter be well, (if only that had been true) or as if I would choose a stupid job over my child.  What a position to be put in every employee review…it was cruel, to say the least, but I bit my tongue.
   Once my days as a caregiver were over I volunteered for a non-profit like crazy. People started expecting me to give my life away like it was theirs to decide what to do with. I didn’t notice for a long time that this was happening. Of course I was looking to fill my time differently, not really knowing what to do with myself because I had been a caregiver since I was 20 yrs. old.  Once I realized the situation for what it was, I bit my tongue.

   My life changed again when I finally realized that this life is mine. Yup. All mine. Mine to waste, use, explore, discover, live, or dance away as I see fit and I can no longer bite my tongue.

  It isn’t often that I find others as present in their lives but when I do, I notice them. I always learn from them and find great value in their being or their passion for whatever their passion is applied to. That liveliness is worthy to witness.
If you haven’t seen “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch, then you are really missing one of those things that will move your being into another place worth being. Go to YouTube and search for “The Last Lecture”. It’s a long video but worth every darn second if you want to enrich your soul. Usually enriching your soul takes a trial by fire like near death or loss of a truly loved one, etc. This one takes about 45 min. and unless your heart is dead, you can’t fail to gain from it.
     Another great thing to check out is the 29 Gifts Challenge at www.29gifts.org. Leap and the net will appear! It’s a “pay it forward” kind of thing and really cool. It’s a real opportunity to get into a giving mind. I have on the desktop of my computer an electronic sticky note that says: Give without asking and attract everything you need.

A new measuring stick: WWRPD? (What Would Randy Pausch Do?)

Creativity, Blocks and Free Cool Stuff to Overcome the Difficult

  All of  us artistic types experience “dry” times when the ideas don’t seem to flow and everything feels like slogging through mud.   So the question I pose when I hear about someone kicking themselves for not getting into the studio to do some work is this: 

  Can you work every minute of every day? Do you know anyone that can work every minute of every day?

  Think about that.  As an artist, that’s what you’re doing whether you know it or not. Your mind is always churning, looking at color combinations or shapes, putting things together in a pleasing fashion or processing through some artistic challenge all the time.  Other people go home after work and transition their focus to their life at home.  Artists often go home after work and start thinking about their art or how they’re not doing their art.  Seems to me it’s a lot to ask an artist to be “producing” tangible work all the time they aren’t at the day job – even if you don’t have a day job!  Especially when that artist mind is always in overdrive whether you’re conscious of it or not.

  I say let your mind percolate; sift through thoughts, ideas, juxtapositions or whatever.  Don’t hassle it.  Let it go.  When the time is right you won’t be able to keep yourself from going into the studio or your work area and put your hand to making something.  Especially when it hits you that your “real life” is when you’re making your art!  Get your mind around that thought.  Real life = making my art.  NOT “real life” first, making my art, later.

 Check this out: http://blogs.personallifemedia.com/creative/  These are free podcasts from Eric Maisel about creative obstacles.  It’s worth the 8 minutes of your time to listen to an episode.  There are a number of episodes on creative obstacles that are easy to listen to while you work, walk, drive, or wake up to the day.

  Remember that being a creative personality is a rich experience and not one to be diminished by some wierdly imposed standard that we apply only to ourselves, (maybe so that we can stay disappointed in ourselves and thereby avoid what we really need to do – make art).  We have so much going on in our heads, our feelings and how best to express ourselves that the actual time we spend putting a brush to canvas or pen to paper is the smaller percentage of our time.  I know the feeling of wishing to be working in my studio more than anything else but not being able to get myself in there.  As a group we are susceptible to putting our desire to make art on hold but do not forget that the play we do in our heads is just as important as playing with our materials.

  At the same time it’s important for us to know that making art is a worthy, WORTHY goal when that is what you’re meant to do.  Enjoy the process whether it’s in your head or you’re bringing it out into the world.  It’s ALL good.

Art Supply Storage Ideas

  Okay, I’m an organizing junkie and I admit it.  It’s one of the few areas that I *think* I can control. Of course that is self delusional since I have more stuff than I’ll probably ever use in my life time.  Like most artists, I can’t help loving my tools and materials!

  So here are some more ideas for art supply storage:   

 

Magazine storage file

Specialty papers stored in magazine files -  I have papers I’ve made, collected and procured stored in cardboard magazine files.  They’re kept vertical this way and are easier to get at then if I had them stacked in some drawer.  I just leaf through the top corners and grab what I want.  This also saves drawer space since I have them stored on a book shelf, (the cardboard ones are pretty inexpensive, too).

Ink Pads- I store rubber stamp ink pads in old plastic cassette tape boxes that I found at Storables for cheap.  Who wants to play cassette tapes anymore?  These are perfect for storing ink pads! 
  There are fins inside the boxes to keep the cassette tapes in place and once in awhile I’ve had to cut a fin out to get one more ink pad in.  It’s simple to do that with an Xacto knife.  Now I have all of my favorite line of inks in one flip-top box that is great for taking with me to the beach, my backyard or to play with friends.  I have a couple of these boxes and marked which brands are in each box using a Krylon copper pen for quick identification.

Jewelry Findings, Beads, and Sequins -  I finally figured out a better way after a disaster on my Spring teaching tour with my whole collection of precious sequins.  I was using a ‘Craftables Locking Caddy’ to store my various colors of sequins in one nifty container…but I didn’t think about how my stuff would get bumped around when traveling to the East coast and back.  Boy, was I sad to find 20 colors of sequins splashed around the bottom of my Navigator, (nicknamed “Killer” because of how heavy it gets for me when I’m on these teaching tours).  Anyway, Killer had sequins everywhere. Being the kook that I am for color, it’s important to me that my sequins are stored by color so I don’t have to hunt for what I want. Otherwise a color “salad” might be okay – for someone else. Not me.  I about wrecked my hand sorting them all back out into their colors.
  That’s when I decided that a better solution to storing small things like this was required. I turned to WhimBead (www.whimbeads.com) for their lovely plastic boxes filled with flip-top boxes. I figured the extra protection of an outer box holding the individual sequin boxes would be a good thing.
   I’m not a genius – I use these same boxes to store all of my seed beads by color because again, I just want what I want, when I want it. I don’t have time to hunt through a salad of stuff to find what I want and when I’m working with seed beads, I work right out of the containers because I don’t have time to do it any other way.
   Now the brilliant part was applying this same solution to all of my jewelry findings! Ho ho! At last, a solution that makes sense for every application. I have marked the little flip-top boxes for plated gold, silver, sterling, and nickle jump rings, etc. so I can grab what I need immediately. When I pull out the plastic box holding all of the findings I know that everything I need is in there and don’t have to go digging around for crimp tubes or a different type of earring wire. It saves me time and makes making things so much simpler to do.

     Can you see the handprint on my forehead? Maybe I should have one tattooed there. =)

The Artistry of Color and Monet

Beijing Brush Seller

  As a mixed media artist, my primary areas of focus are color, form, design and a wide library of materials to use.  Color really floats my boat.  It catches my eye and sets my mind on fire.  Color combinations stick with me like persistent visions and when I’m intrigued by a color combination, I start playing with it in every way that I can with a variety of different materials.  The materials themselves translate color differently by how they bounce light.  For example, colors I found in combination in a glass work (a translucent medium) are translated differently when I apply that same combination but in fabric and embroidery or paint.

  In the early 1800’s Chevruel wrote about painting an open square of yellow next to an open square of a darker color.  When you compare the white of the paper/canvas in the center of each, the white inside the darker colored square looks “whiter” than the white in the yellow square.  This is a good illustration of how our eyes interpret contrast.  Contrast is often a neglected topic in the vocabulary of color and how we see.  If you’ve never done this with the squares, try it and see what happens with different colors, comparing the white of the page inside of each.  It’s an interesting exercise and teaches a lot about how contrast works.  Logically you know that the background is the same everywhere you’ve painted a square but your eyes don’t see it that way.

  How we see comes into play in any given situation whether we’re painting a picture or looking at an issue.   Politics just popped into my head as I wrote this… wow. There’s a good one, eh?  Not what I intended to write about but here’s a thought:  both political parties have the same picture as their background (what’s going on in our country) and yet the view is so different between the two in some ways.  I just have to wonder who’s inside square is whiter or cleaner? Maybe nobody’s is.   So perhaps the questions we should be asking ourselves is who is it that thinks they are talking FOR the American people and who is it that is listening to the American people?   Who is on the attack? Is that the best way to present oneself as the premier representative of our nation?  Do you, American people, wish to be perceived as on the attack?

  Appearing weak and being weak are two separate things.

 So back to color…  Monet moved to Giverny in 1839 when he was 46.  He worked to convey the impression of his surroundings rather than just record them in a documentary fashion. Later in life, he suffered from cataracts and you can see how his vision changed through his painting.  There were colors that he couldn’t perceive through his diminishing vision so the colors he used were brighter.  The element of contrast was diminshing in his vision with the veil of cataracts and so his paintings reflect that later, too.

  Knowing this about Monet changes how you view his work from earlier years to the later days.  It also teaches us how we see in different situations and contexts. Not only did Monet perceive the world differently once afflicted with cataracts but we perceive his work differently knowing about this affliction.  Each dynamic teaches us about vision and color which in turn teaches us about our worlds, both inside and outside.