Making Art Fun: Step 7 – Listen to Your Inner Voice

Art + Time = Happiness. This equation sums up the two-day printmaking workshop my family gifted to me. I wrote about it in my last blog. Today’s tip on making art fun is about trusting that little voice inside you. I did that when I observed how excited I was as I anticipated the workshop. Gentle flutters erupted in my stomach each time I thought about it.

At the workshop, I decided to fly without a net. My intention was to enjoy the process of learning a new printmaking technique and not worry about the product or outcome. There I was in a sea of professional, exhibiting artists, all intent on creating pieces for their next exhibit. I chose to remind myself, again and again, I was at the workshop to have fun, explore and experiment. This attitude of abandon held me in a solid place of delight the entire weekend.

Yet, as my creative process neared completion, I had to know when my artwork was complete. Decades of serious art school training and real life experiences in meditation and trusting my intuition honed me well. Sometimes my inner voice was a simple exhalation. I knew when I’d exhaled there was a rightness to the color, texture, or composition. At other times, my inner voice was soft and literally spoke in my brain whispering the word, “Done.”

Click here to view my slide show from the workshop!

Creativity and  wellness message for today: Be adventurous. Listen to your inner voice in your mind, body, and spirit. Then follow through.

Making Art Fun: Step 6 – Be Playful

Hello world! I’ve been focused on saving my beloved library for the last several weeks and haven’t had a chance to write. Phew, I’m glad to be here with you today.

On January 1, 2013, I wrote to you about how to make art fun. Today’s entry is all about the value of being playful. Don’t get me wrong there have been days, months, and sometimes years when my art experiences were anything but joyous. Especially lean economic years when I supported myself as a fine artist and graphic designer. Through it all, I’ve learned what keeps me singing in the shower is lighthearted art making.

Case in point – I’ve been  too busy to even write this blog. I’m lucky if my contact lenses are in the correct eyes and my clothes are right-side-out when I leave the house in the morning. However, I’m taking a break from the maddening crowd in a few weeks, to be puckish with art.

My husband and son gave me a living, breathing gift for Mother’s Day. It’s not a dog. It’s a two-day printmaking workshop, at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking. I’ll be immersed in clay slabs, colorful clay, printmaking paper, and a rolling-pin. I can’t wait!

By taking a fun workshop, I’m not going to worry about technique or product or performance. I’m going to wear my jaunty “It’s an ART THING You Wouldn’t Understand” artist smock. The workshop is my light at the end of the tunnel during a stressful time. It’s cheering me up and lifting my spirits. Be impish with art.

Creativity and wellness message for today: Enjoy how vivacious you feel when you commit to curiosity and whimsy.

Making Art Fun: Step 5 – Delete Your Inner Critic

For the last few months I’ve been sharing hints on how to enjoy your creative endeavors, be they art, writing, photography, or blogs. Today’s thoughts are about deleting your inner critic. We all know what that is and how following its advice can trip you up. I’m thinking a little differently today about my dear old inner critic. I’m aware that most times it shoots me in the foot. Yet there are those occasions when it may have a point. Below are some options on how to handle your own inner critic. Let me know what technique you use and how it works out.

 
a. Challenge your inner critic – Fight it, debate with it, let it know you are in charge.
b. You don’t have to silence your inner critic – find a way to work side-by-side, co-exist.
c. Consider – Is your inner critic working with you or against you?
d. Personify it – what does it look like, sound like, where does it reside in your body?
e. Choose humor – Say to your inner critic, “So what? Who cares? Big deal!”
f. Give it a new job - re-assign it responsibilities.
g. Delete it – Yep, just press the delete key.  Or I do what I do, say to yourself, “Delete, delete, delete.” It works.

Creativity and wellness message for today: Get to know that voice inside you that doesn’t think you’re good enough. Then choose to not let it run (ruin) your life.

Making Art Fun: Step 4 – Lighten Up

We can all take ourselves too seriously, in life as well as in art. One of the secrets to happily navigating both is to lighten up. Recently I had a professional opportunity that required scanning a lot of my paintings, prints, photographs, mixed media collages, and graphic design projects. Work that had been completed over several decades. Once I viewed the images on my computer I was struck by the fact that what I thought to be my best original art didn’t represent that strongly in digital form. In a quandary, with a deadline looming what was I to do? Lighten up!

I put on completely new eyes. Gave myself an attitude adjustment and became enlightened. I surveyed my work from one perspective only “What graphically shows the best.” I made selections from that sole point of view. Boy, did it simplify the creative process! No longer did I take time remembering the success of that piece or reminisced about what collector bought it. No longer was I seduced by my own feelings of yummy art memories, lightening up became practical, efficient, oddly enjoyable, and freeing.

Artworks that I would have considered not so good, showed me their strengths in digital form. I was educated anew to the value of my work, it was like a refresher course. Once the project was complete I even had fun making a video out of some of the art and design, the different viewpoint sparked more creativity.

Creativity and wellness message for today: Be surprised at the increase in your rate of production when you lighten up.

Making Art Fun: Step 3 – Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

It’s a perfect shape, with a basic use — to keeping things rolling, that’s the wheel.

In art as well as in life, I strive to follow rule #3. As you recall on New Year’s Day I wrote about how to make art fun. A few weeks later I shared the secret of keeping things simple and, then, how to artistically use what you have on hand.

Today I’m talking about the wheel, and not reinventing it. A few months ago I was asked to create a writing workshop that would be included in a “Beyond the Book Club” program series. The theme for February was Literature: Louisa May Alcott. After a brief brainstorming session with the program director, the flash of inspiration sparked. Influential Women Who Shape and Inspire Our Lives and Our Writing was born.

Over the course of several weeks each time I got a snippet of an idea for the workshop, either while I was doing dishes late at night, or sipping my morning coffee, I wrote it down on a scrap of paper. I’ve written and presented hundreds of classes and programs. I know the format and formula that fits with my style of teaching and what benefits my participants. Eventually I knew those separate pieces would grow into the entire workshop. All I would have to do was open my manilla folder, organize them, type up the workshop outline and I’d be good to go. I didn’t reinvent the wheel, I allowed my spontaneous ideas to bubble up over a period of time.

Creativity and wellness message for today: Enjoy the freedom you feel when you use the back burner approach.

Making Art Fun: Step 2 – Use What You Have on Hand

If you stay in the art business long enough you start to see patterns. I’ve been an exhibiting professional artist for decades and I enjoy tracking the methods of my artistic madness. In my last blog about making art fun I wrote about keeping it simple. Today I’ll share Step 2: Use What You Have on Hand.

Several years ago I was asked by the gallery owner of Bell Gallery, one of my, then, premier exhibition spaces, to create a work of art for herself and her boyfriend. They made a tipi to travel with and camp in during the summer. They planned to stitch the gallery artists’ paintings to their nomadic abode. Having very little time to focus on the task I used what was on hand. In my studio I found what I considered to be a scrap, a test cloth of photo-sensitized fabric. I quickly glued and sewed it onto a square of un-primed canvas, and drew directional lines to blend the borders. I then stamped fun symbols and wrote a short spontaneous sentiment with rubber letter stamps encircling the central image. Voilà! A work of art that was not premeditated, not drafted out, not sweated over. A work of art that seized what was on hand and let that momentum build the creative expression.

Darryl Norem, the gallery owner and Guenther Riess loved the painting. They were so happy with it that it never made it onto the tipi. They rigged it on two standing poles that flanked the door opening to their temporary home every time they put it up. Their actions surprised me at the time, because I thought I just threw the mixed-media artwork together. I was honored that they put my art in a place of recognition, yet I couldn’t see the value of it as much as they did. Looking back on the piece years later I now see the spunk and liveliness of the canvas. I appreciate what they saw then, a work of art with creativity, heart and soul. Something that delights and intrigues the viewer. This was a lesson for me. What I thought was just a quick creation was actually something of far greater worth than I realized.

Fast forward to 2012 and 2013, when I had fun with art and participated in the world tour of artists’ sketchbooks called The Sketchbook Project. In both years I followed Step #2, had a ball and completed the projects on deadline. The pattern is that when pressed for time, what I create right out of the gate by using what’s at hand, without my ego getting in the way, makes the best art.

Creativity and wellness message for today: Cage your inner critic and use something on hand to ignite your creative spark.

Making Art Fun: Step 1 – Keep it Simple

Recently, I wrote about completing my Sketchbook Project 2013. In that How to Make Art Fun blog I promised to elaborate on my list throughout the year.

Here’s Step 1: Keep it simple.

An example of this happened just the other day, as I prepared to submit my artwork to a juried exhibition. The show’s theme was “From Inside Out.” The gallery wanted work that explored the artist’s experiences, either personal, artistic or global with circumstances requiring changes from inside out. Because I followed Step 1, I didn’t create a new piece. I quickly went into my mental Pendaflex folder of past artwork. I remembered a collage, with French postage stamps of a seated nude woman hiding her head behind her arms. My own watercolors and the words, “Friends Lost” completed the artwork. It fit the theme of the show.

Last weekend, I ventured into my musty basement to find that framed piece, but on the way I immediately discovered a totally different image. The other mixed media collage was from the same time period, but was titled, “Good*Bye.” It was a photo-sensitized fabric collage of a picture of one of my old boyfriends sitting on a beach. Along with simple watercolor symbols, I had Presstyped the words “good*bye” beneath his photo. I had forgotten all about the collage! I loved it! In the composition, he was really small on the left side of the fabric, on a large field of tiny arrows pointing off the picture. It was like I was symbolically moving him out of the picture. As my relationship with the above mentioned boyfriend unraveled, I did some soul-searching. I realized I was the one who needed to say goodbye first.

Part of the magic of making art fun is all about understanding the subtleties of time. If we are present, with no anticipation of what is to come, we open ourselves to the mysteries of something better than we imagined.

Creativity and wellness message for today: The beauty of keeping it simple is that you don’t get lost in the details. You stay in the wonder of the creative moment.