Courageous Creativity with Christina Romeo

I've loved all of the artists that Amanda Mauck has interviewed for this series and I've been finding the exercises so fun. This one by Christina Romeo was so out of my comfort zone. I will definitely be doing it again. First we just scribbled in some dark areas around where eyes would be and then we roughed in the rest of the face. We used a couple colors of acrylic paint and a palette knife to fill in the head. I really love the texture and non-preciseness of the palette knife. 

Courageous Creativity with Diane Culhane

Diane Culhane took us through a fun exercise based on the work of Jasper Johns. I was disappointed that my fairly new pens weren't really up to the task, but I liked the colors and didn't want to start over. Lazy. But I loved playing with positive and negative/ foreground and background.

Throwback Thursday: Word of the Year 2020

Here was my word for this year. I feel like I've been struggling with creating the healthy life that I want and slipping into old habits that don't support that.  So my word is "choose." The white square at the bottom that you can't really see is a dictionary entry for "choose."

Courageous Creativity with Leslie Nolan

The interview I watched today was with Leslie Nolan. She is an art coach for intentional creativity which sounds really interesting. The exercise was to create an intention on around how to cohere in our lives right now then pick 3 objects at random and outline them on the journal page.

So right off the bat, I didn't do mine quite the way it was intended. I outlined each object, but from the examples that Amanda and Leslie did, it looked like you were supposed to make the outline around the group of objects. Oh well.

Next we looked at the lines to see if we could pick out figures or objects. We could add line and color to help develop the story of what we were seeing. When it felt done, we were to write an affirmation under the drawing.  We then asked 3 questions of the figure in the drawing and wrote them down with space in between.  She then had us answer the questions from the point of view of the figure.

I used a bottle of ink, a weird circular cap that was cluttering my workspace and an old paintbrush that my kids didn't rinse out.  This photo recreated because I forgot to take photos of the steps (rolls eyes).

Here's what came out of that:

So she seemed angry and defensive and she didn't have a body below the blue thing. The diamond shape immediately felt like a "yield" sign to me.  My affirmation was that maybe I didn't need this defense of not feeling anymore and I could find my way to my body.

My questions to her were:

1. How else can we feel safe?

2. What does yielding mean?

3. How to transform the anger into action?

Her answers:

1. Use art to express yourself. Set boundaries in a healthy way. Communicate your needs and intentions.

2. The yield sign is a way to communicate. You can be "right" or in relationship. Distance can be made up. You don't always have to push away.

3. Transform anger into action with your pen, with your art. Use it to know when boundaries are needed and when something needs to be said.

What a simple exercise with some pretty powerful results!

 

Throwback Thursday: Word of the Year 2019

For the past several Januarys, I've done a word/intention for the year. Actually, I started in 2017 and my sister has been instrumental in keeping the tradition going. Here was my canvas for 2019. These are about 2'x2'. My word was "release" spelled out in Scrabble tiles. I love that the word "ease" can be found in "release."

The MRI skull/brain in the upper right corner is a blockprint I made from an MRI of my own brain (done for research purposes, not for medical). 

Courageous Creativity with Lucy Morningstar

For this exercise with Lucy Morningstar, we drew self-portrait(s) for 10 minutes in INK! She suggested not using a pencil because we'd get hung up on getting it right and erasing. After we drew them, she had us tear them up to help us not identify or attach to the art or to our ideas of ourselves.  She described doing self-portraits when she was very depressed as a way to gain some distance between the feeling and the person she was as a whole. I noticed on the Courageous Creativity Facebook page that someone had glued the pieces back together for the art journal. I had drawn several quick sketches and so when I put them back together, I mixed up which pieces came from which drawings.

Recent block prints

In May, I wanted to send some thank you cards to people who donated to an online fundraiser for the Bozeman Dharma Center. Since we were under a "shelter in place" order by the governor, I used that as an excuse to do some carving. Unfortunately, I mailed all the good prints out before getting a photo. And I'm too impatient to reprint right now, so here's a not so great print. 

I've been having a lot of fun playing with background textures in the carvings. Here's an image I made for personal thank you's.