3.23.12

{little pots of color - good for the soul}

3.12.12

{a project ali and i did. we coffee stained six 8x10 canvases and then painted the backgrounds and letters. we then attached quotes to the bottom. if you look closely at the letter C you will notice that i misspelled a word in the quote. since it's all about embracing imperfection i decided to let it stay!}

3.10.12

{week one of the sermon series "the prodigal god." the community wrote their thoughts. i filled in the rest and collaged the background.}

3.5.12

{this part of an art piece i'm working on for church. it's a sermon series based on the story of the prodigal son. the book is called the prodigal god and it's blowing me away. here's a quote for the day – “you can escape god through morality and religion just as much as you can escape God through immorality and irreligion. . .”}

2.25.12

{my task was to decorate a mailbox for journey. it will be at the local great scot grocery store for the month of march to collect grocery receipts. the church will receive a percentage

for local ministry.}

2.22.12

{my friend andrea took a pottery class and dropped off this incredible little soap dish last night. it meant something beautiful on it's own but she added these words – "through your look at yourself and your spirituality i've started to allow myself to be creative and become more comfortable in my own skin and spirituality"}

2.13.12

{every year we make our own valentine cards. this is mine for ali.}

A Messy Book of Days

To begin this year of messy I'm loosely following this year-long, online art experiment called 2012 Book of Days. The woman who is doing this huge outpouring of creativity is Effy Wild and her website's tag line is "flinging glitter and taking names." Sound messy enough?! So far it has been much, much fun beginning the project with people from all over the world - and did I mention it was free??

I'm beginning to be able to put 2011 away. I realized while I was working on my Book of Days journal cover that getting the new job in August might have saved my life - at least my spiritual being. I'm feeling a little of the old creative joy returning.

Here is the cover of my new journal. {this whole are journaling thing is completely new to me, so be kind!} I took an old hymnal – how's that for symbolic – and am remaking it into something else, while still allowing the old notes to shine through.

The poem on the front is "Bluebird" by Charles Bukowski.

there's a bluebird in my heart that

wants to get out

but I'm too tough for him,

I say, stay in there, I'm not going

to let anybody see

you.

there's a bluebird in my heart that

wants to get out

but I pour whiskey on him and inhale

cigarette smoke

and the whores and the bartenders

and the grocery clerks

never know that

he's

in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that

wants to get out

but I'm too tough for him,

I say,

stay down, do you want to mess

me up?

you want to screw up the

works?

you want to blow my book sales in

Europe?

there's a bluebird in my heart that

wants to get out

but I'm too clever, I only let him out

at night sometimes

when everybody's asleep.

I say, I know that you're there,

so don't be

sad.

then I put him back,

but he's singing a little

in there, I haven't quite let him

die

and we sleep together like

that

with our

secret pact

and it's nice enough to

make a man

weep, but I don't

weep, do

you?

Everything

Haiku

{photograph taken at Riverbend Park, Findlay}

Assignment: Write a haiku based on a season. Illustrate it any way you choose.

Ordinariness

Creative Assignment: Day 7

"Today, I want you to replace any old ideas you have had or currently have about the word ‘scrapbooking’ with this one phrase… ~artistically combining words and images~"

I've never thought of myself as a "scrapbooker." I've always thought of it as cutesy and cotton-candyish. Neither of which describe me very well.

But I dove into the assignment anyway and decided to do the whole thing digitally. There were no scissors, no glitter and no glue sticks in sight!

And I loved it.

A Tree

Assignment: Draw a tree that is you. The trunk is the most important thing about who you are as a human being. All the branches radiating upward should be expressions of the trunk of your soul.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy;

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

~ St. Francis of Assisi

Scribbles

The assignment for last night was to scribble. Doodle. Close your eyes and draw.

Good Lord. I sat there staring at my paper planning how to scribble. Seriously???

There is something wrong with me. . . I'm just sayin'.

This art thing is messin' with my head. After I finally un-planned my scribbling and just did it I remembered how easy this all was when I was four. I could scribble and doodle and draw all day. It was easy and it was fun. When did I lose that? And more importantly, why did I let it go?

I painted for quite awhile last night and felt so relaxed.

Then I went to bed and had a very uncomfortable, restless dream. It was about my parents and had vivid themes of their avoidance of me, abandonment and selfishness. I woke up feeling very confused and uncertain. As I sat down, still feeling groggy, to write about what I had dreamed I realized that the themes of my dream were the same root reasons that I have ignored the drive to create – avoidance, abandonment of something I loved and selfishness.

Maybe dreams are more important than I have the tendency to give them credit for. And maybe it's all hogwash. . .

While I was painting last night and thinking about all the things I used to know as a kid and had forgotten one of my favorite Dar Williams songs came into my head. It's called "When I Was A Boy" and is such a sweet, melancholy song.

I won't forget when Peter Pan came to my house, took my hand
I said I was a boy; I'm glad he didn't check.
I learned to fly, I learned to fight
I lived a whole life in one night
We saved each other's lives out on the pirate's deck.

And I remember that night
When I'm leaving a late night with some friends
And I hear somebody tell me it's not safe,
someone should help me
I need to find a nice man to walk me home.

When I was a boy, I scared the pants off of my mom,
Climbed what I could climb upon
And I don't know how I survived,
I guess I knew the tricks that all boys knew.

And you can walk me home, but I was a boy, too.

I was a kid that you would like, just a small boy on her bike
Riding topless, yeah, I never cared who saw.
My neighbor come outside to say, "Get your shirt,"
I said "No way, it's the last time I'm not breaking any law."

And now I'm in this clothing store, and the signs say less is more
More that's tight means more to see, more for them, not more for me
That can't help me climb a tree in ten seconds flat

When I was a boy, See that picture? That was me
Grass-stained shirt and dusty knees
And I know things have gotta change,
They got pills to sell, they've got implants to put in,
they've got implants to remove

But I am not forgetting...that I was a boy too

And like the woods where I would creep, it's a secret I can keep
Except when I'm tired, 'cept when I'm being caught off guard
And I've had a lonesome awful day, the conversation finds its way
To catching fire-flies out in the backyard.

And so I tell the man I'm with about the other life I lived
And I say, "Now you're top gun, I have lost and you have won"
And he says, "Oh no, no, can't you see

When I was a girl, my mom and I we always talked
And I picked flowers everywhere that I walked.
And I could always cry, now even when I'm alone I seldom do
And I have lost some kindness
But I was a girl too.
And you were just like me, and I was just like you"

"DisasterPiece"

I woke up feeling all out of sorts this morning. Not cranky. Not overly tired. Just out of sorts. And I don't know why.

I spent last night creating for the Creativity Boot Camp: Spring Training Workshop that I'm taking online. The assignment was to get messy. To create a "DisasterPiece." There were no more instructions than that and my follow directions, do as I'm told brain kind of freaked out.

Eventually I took a black and white photo from last summer of a cemetery sculpture and painted the background with bleach. That was the only plan I had. The bleach looked like fire. I didn't know what else to do, so for the first time in my life I turned my brain off and just went for it. I crumpled up the photo and tore it into pieces. I smudged it with oil pastels and then tried to put it back together. I thought the background needed something so I destroyed pages from an old Baptist hymnal and glued them down first. Then I glued the photo back over it.

Something about a cemetery, flames and old Baptist hymns just spoke to me.

It's my disaster I guess.

I loved turning off my brain and just doing something.

But this morning I think it has me feeling off kilter. Overexposed.

I hope it fades today. I don't like feeling this way.

And, of course, there is another assignment for tonight. This one involves drawing/scribbling/doodling. And that never goes over well with a control freak who draws like a four year old and expects perfection. . .

What the hell have I gotten myself into??

To Dance

{warning. this is stream-of-consciousness writing. i've been unable to write lately so this is kind of raw. perhaps i should warn you with "danger will robinson! danger!"}

Writing. . .the antidote to self doubt and self forgetting.

That's exactly where I am right now and where I feel like I've been. And I didn't even know that I had forgotten.

The daily-ness of life took over and being on auto-pilot seemed like the only way to keep going. Sure. It was devoid of some small amounts of stress. But I guess it was also empty of the spark of interest and vitality that keep things smoldering and sprightly.

How to get back?

It seems to be the question of my ages. The question that keeps returning to me in the endless cycles that my life seems to be engaged in. I get a few areas of myself "together" and then something else seems to fall apart. I change my focus to try and heal that and something else falls out and exposes it's warts and ugly hair for the world to see.

Perhaps I spend too much time analyzing. Too much time staring at my navel and wondering if everyone is as messed up as I am.

Perhaps it's all my illusions of control. The world has been spinning for millions of years without my help and will continue to spin long after I am gone. Surrendering myself into the great unknown of that creativeness and life sustaining-ness calls to me. But the process of letting go seems so novel and strange.

My brain longs for order in the chaos. Neatness in the mess. A plan in the empty slate of the day. That's the way I've spent my life. And it has worked for me. Perhaps the reason I can't just plunge myself into the chaos of creation is that deep down I'm afraid that it just can't work. That if I empty myself of my "plans" and my "control" I will lose.

Lose what??

{Seems crazy when I write it, but there has to be a core of truth in there.}

Planning has worked. I'm "successful" if mostly broke. I have a house, a car, a job, a partner, three dogs, a cat. People who don't plan don't have those things. Do they?

Surrender means what? to cease resistance to an opponent and submit to their authority

But, if I surrender my fears isn't that different? Right now my fears are the opponent. Right now I already submit to their authority. They win. I lose. They shape my decisions and my future.

{fear is a thief. it takes and never gives. how many times have i preached that sermon?}

Tired. Of. It.

I want to paint. To create. To write. To think. To sing. Maybe even to dance.

But I can't do those things when my brain screams YOU MUST HAVE A PLAN. CREATION IS MESSY. YOU ARE UGLY AND STUPID. WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE ANYWAY? YOU ARE NOTHING. NO ONE LIKES YOU. YOU AREN'T GOOD.

And so far, no amount of wishing, pretending, gratitude list-making has made any of those voices any quieter.

So maybe it's time to surrender. To make a mess of things. To lay down the fear of doing something wrong and having someone laugh at me. To tell my brain to shut the fuck up about how no one likes me.

We started the ball rolling yesterday.

And perhaps today I will take one more tentative step towards a dance.

Liberation

{original artwork created at my kitchen table with watercolor pencils; scanned and text added digitally; a prayer i often pray}

Find Your Light

This is a picture I took a couple of months ago. The original file is here. I've been fooling around with textures and color and am quickly falling in love with this new adventure.

I'm not one who can create art from nothing. I have to have a starting point and photography seems to be my calling. I hesitate to call this art, but it's as close as I have come so far.

It is speaking to my spirit and right now, that's plenty good enough. I'm thinking a framed print might look really good on the wall in our kitchen. . .

Holy Ground

{the original photo is here}

Making Art

I hesitate to call anything that I do art. For me, there is such baggage associated with that word. I'm taken immediately to 7th grade art class where everyone was busy drawing something original and interesting and I was desperately sweating, blank page in front of me, with a baffled brain devoid of any inspiration. I hopelessly was trying to catch a glimpse of what the person next to me was drawing and it turned out to be a page full of mushrooms with fingerprints turned into little mice.

I shamelessly copied that drawing. Right down to the curly mouse tails and red spots on the mushrooms.

I got a D-. And I came to believe that I couldn't "make art."

I can't draw to save my life and painting is too scary to even contemplate. To me – sewing, knitting, writing, photography and cooking have always fallen under the category of "craft." I can't be an artist – all I can do is play with words, push a camera shutter release or turn yarn into fabric.

But what if my definitions of art and craft need further exploration?

I have traditionally thought of craft as having instructions and art as something that came directly out of one's imagination. If there was a prompt, an inspiration or a challenge to create it must have been a craft because it wasn't something that came "naturally."

Maybe that needs some more thought.

Here's what I'm wrestling with now:

Maybe what distinguishes art from craft is the need to create beauty based on what you are as a human being. If I make a bowl because I need a drink and make a purely functional bowl, that's an example of a craft. If I make a bowl and carve flowers in it with a design and paint it by hand with scene from childhood, that is art.

If I take words and record them without a sense of poetry or image it might be craft. If I wrestle with words until they arrange themselves into a beautiful representation of who I am as a person, all the things I see and feel and a likeness of the world in an exact moment of time, perhaps that is art.

And perhaps what truly differentiates craft from art may be need – the need to express myself, to put images to my experiences and ideas with words. Perhaps that could be a definition of art after all.

How about you? What's your definition of art?

Knitting Again

{I've been knitting again. A return to a peaceful rhythm of creation and balance.}

Winter neckwarmer, 100% cashmere. Decadent. Can't wait to wear it!