Month: December 2009

Things can go slow when trying to birth a new idea. The problem with art shows is you have to come up with a new idea that is fresh but not too fresh and to too much like you did before. This morning has been a few hours of whiting out what I have been working on for a week. I do not like it enough; I have to white it out. It is time to let it sit and stew for awhile. Every year I swear that I am going to have the show done before January and here it is Christmas almost, and I have nothing good. I have a name but that is all. I am trying every trick in the book to get something going and it is still not working. So I am going to do nothing for awhile and stew a bit and find my air. Air is what I call being able to have flow where I am not aware of myself. I am not in any air yet so I will look for some. Maybe some fresh air outside will help.

photo by slworking2

People often say they cant draw a stick man to show how uncreative they are. I always think good. You probably are thinking drawing realistically has something to do with creativity. Well it doesn’t. In fact I would say that drawing in a distorted way is wonderful and inspiring. The only thing you have to do different is to not get all stressed out when things go different than what you are looking at. We are all unique and I think we should enjoy that fact. NObody will ever draw just the way you do and that is your gift to everyone else. Egon Scheil is a good example of that. He did a new thing. We should all do new things that only we can do. I wish I had a group of people that were not artists and had them do a show.I think they would be amazed how wonderful it would be and they certainly would change their minds about how creative they are.

art by Denise Carbonell

Skin gets dry in winter because there is no moisture in the air. You have to apply lots of cream to keep your face from freezing into a stiff mask.

Your whole life is like the weather. When you have dry spells of creativity and inspiration you have to think of ways to get everything moist again. There are several ways to do this but I think by far the fastest is to look at old work. Look at where you came from and see the evolution of your output.

Dry spells are chased away when we get a new perspective of where we are going. Sometimes you can use old idea and tweek them a little and they seem new and one thing leads to another. You only need a little bit of a push in the idea department to get a whole new line of thinking going. I read interior design magazines to look for little things that set me off. A color combination and a line that is gorgeous.

Writing makes you access your logical side of the brain so writing down what your abstractly thinking helps make it more concrete so you can do it.

Dreams and writing make reality possible.

Photo by Ruby Blossom

The second we get up in the morning we have a plan in mind of how the day should go. As soon as that plan gets thwarted by one thing going wrong, we get in a state of mind that is anxious. There is a reason things go wrong and that is we are not in control as much as we think we are. Walls are just places for doors to be put. Without a wall to support it a door falls down. So walls are good because they are the end of ourselves and the doorway to something better. Not ourself. Not ourself is better than ourself because it draws on what we do not yet know. Mistakes are always doors to something better. Even when taking a test mistakes show is the door we need to find a new way to learn what we are trying to learn.

Usually our first instinct is to get upset.

You can train yourself to have an entirely different reaction. You can be calm and immediately look for the door in the wall to walk through. We are not our own.

photo by dedalus

Working on a project with no end in sight can quickly become discouraging and tedious and horrible.
It seems like nothing will ever change and then one thing changes and it opens up anew road that was not there before. You just never know when you are only one inch away from the answer because until then we are looking in a glass darkly.

Merry Christmas