Portraits

My daily art project, 270 days in, has evolved yet again. I started making portraits of dogs, then a cat, and most recently, this human. I didn't expect, when I decided to try my hand at drawing a human face, that I'd land on this one. But this face has gripped my attention for the last two years, a face no more or less human than any other, though it's easy to lose track of that fact when emotions run high.

Jane Fonda got skewered in the media for her statements about having radical empathy for Donald Trump. No wonder. She's asking us to do a very difficult thing— extend compassion to a person who wields power in a dangerous, destructive way. She isn't asking us to condone or support his behaviors, she's asking us to see his humanity. "This is a man who was traumatized as a child by his father, who had a mother that didn’t protect him,” she said. “And the behavior is the language of the wounded.”

More Flow

This is my second posting of hand-marbelized papers. Making these is the ultimate in play: experiments and happy accidents are the name of the game. Perhaps that should be my new orientation to life.

Each are about 19" x 12.5" and available for purchase for $35. Click on them to see bigger, crisper images.

Worry is Creative

.dotstring, collage on bristol paper, 9 x 12", on view at WindhamARTS until April 23rd

I'm going to be on the radio this coming Tuesday, April 14th, on the award-winning Wayne Norman Show on WILI 1400AM, beginning at 7:15 in the morning, until 8:30 or 9. (If you miss it, or if you're not in the area, the audio will be posted later in the day here.)

I am nervous. I didn't pursue this at all. It's overwhelming to note that the splash made by my art show opening last Friday was strong enough to bring about such an opportunity.



Opportunity, according to Miriam Webster, is:
1: a favorable juncture of circumstances
2: a good chance for advancement or progress

The surface opportunity is clear: perhaps an appearance on a popular local radio show will bring a few more fans of my art, maybe a potential design client or two.

But the core opportunity lies smack-dab inside my worry. In the fact that I will be called upon to talk about myself and my work.

This is what scares me. Right now, my thoughts are like furniture fresh off the moving truck, crowded into the center of a room. I know all the pieces, but I haven't arranged them in any coherent order.

I suppose I could spin an elaborate image of myself bumbling and stumbling, trying too hard, flailing, choking. Or I could just feel the fear (yikes!) and apply my creative energy to preparation. Which is exactly what I plan to do.

What a gift a deadline is! Come Tuesday morning, I'll be able to articulate who I am, what I do, what moves me to do the work that I do. I'll know myself better. And knowing myself better is the key to BEING myself better.

So yes, I'm nervous. But I'm also looking forward to it.

The Gaping Void: Preparing for an Art Show

Today I'm taking stock of my work for a solo show I have coming up in April - counting, listing, touching up, scanning, and packaging my paintings and collages to ship off to the framer. It feels amazing, and a little frightening, to send all of these coddled babies out into the world.

But there's no better motivation to make more art, in my opinion, than to create space for it. Nothing is more energizing to the creative spirit than a great big gaping void!

And there's no better motivation to get more shows, it seems to me, than to have a body of work ready to hang at a moment's notice.

Not only that, but once you've written one show proposal, writing another will feel a lot easier.

For a lowdown on what a proposal entails (or might entail, depending on the venue), listen to Alyson Stanfield's podcast on the subject - it's less than five minutes long and brimming with information - quick and dirty.

To break it down even further, step-by-step, I highly recommend Cay Lang's inspirational and informational book Taking the Leap: Building a Career as a Visual Artist. Probably the most worthy investment I've made in this area.

The paintings on this post are all freshly scanned 17" x 14", gouache and ink on heavyweight bristol paper. Click on the images to see them bigger. If you're interested in purchasing information for any of these, email me directly. I'd love to hear from you.

Tune in for more reflections on show-prep – I'll bebringing you along for the ride.

Drop Everything - Inspiration and Juicy Links

Cheryl

Constance

Patience

Grace

Natalie

Hope

I heard a speaker say once that the way to shift the focus of your work toward the dynamic projects you yearn to find time to tackle, is to just go ahead and do it. Make those projects your top priority. The other stuff can be squeezed in around the edges, as necessary.

The point is: chores on the calendar are like gasses released into a room - they expand to fill the space allotted to them.

For instance, I have a web design client waiting for a comp, another client for whom I'm working as a web marketing consultant, also waiting for word from me. I have a show in April for which I need to get many paintings framed. I'm on track with all of it, in spite of the fact that Wednesday afternoon I dropped everything because the light was just right on the corner of my desk.

My eye had wandered to one of a series of papier maché angels I have around the studio. I've been meaning to photograph them and put them up for adoption online.

There's no time like the present.

I made these ladies in a fit of recycle/salvage-art passion and they've been faithfully praying over me for years now. But life is good these days. My angels are ready to go out into the world and watch over someone new.

So I pinned up a backdrop and conducted an impromptu photo shoot, and today I'm taking time to share the results. (Prices include shipping, by the way.) (ps. they also make good Christmas tree toppers, since they're about ten inches tall and hollow underneath their dresses.)

Not only that, but I'm also going to share a few of my latest online discoveries. Oh there is so much inspiration to be found on the web!

• Lier at Ikat Bag made the most incredible toys for her kids. Check out the Donut Shop here (be sure to scroll all the way down - the best images are at the bottom).

• Illustrator/designer/quirk-meister: Mike Perry - worth a look.

• CraftyStylish has a great post by Diane Gillead on Weaving on a Cardboard Loom. Lots of photographs and step-by-step instructions make it look so easy, I want to try it. Add it to the list...

• Check out Another Shade of Grey for a unique eye for the delicate and extraordinary. Lots of eye candy on this blog.

• For entrepreneurial resources & inspiration from a female perspective, spend a little time with Ladies Who Launch.

Cultivating Change

(click on image for larger view)

I sold another painting through this blog last week (the middle one here), which delighted me, and got me thinking about a much darker time of my life, when I marked a few simple symbols on a pocket-sized calendar and learned some wonderful lessons.

Every evening, I entered a "+" or "-" for the day to indicate whether I'd been feeling generally up or down. I'd been doing this for several months when, after a string of three particularly trying days, I began flipping back through the calendar pages. I was sick of feeling bad and expected to see confirmation of my despair.

Though this this was the first time I'd had three bad days in a row in weeks, I was surprised to note that in the beginning, negative days were the norm and even two positive in a row was exceptional. I could not deny that something was shifting, that though I felt low right now, it was nothing compared to how I had felt weeks before. Instantly, I began to feel better. I have felt better ever since.

The lesson? That it is a powerful thing to step back from the minutia of right here and now, to take in the wider landscape. It is a discipline, with enormous creative potential for cultivating optimism, pride, confidence, and future-vision. In other words: Perspective is a tool. Use it.

In time, I added a second mark to my calendar: On days when I'd felt exceptionally industrious, tackling swaths of items on my long To Do list, making long-avoided phone calls, I added the letter "S" (for Sowing Seeds) to that day's calendar entry. And on days when it seemed that a flurry of things had fallen into my lap: receiving a letter from an old friend, a new job offer, a refund check from the IRS - I marked my calendar with a letter "R" - for Reaping Rewards.

I began to notice an amazing thing: Though the rewards did not necessarily correspond to the seeds I had planted, every "S" was followed almost exactly two weeks later by an "R." I've come to trust this process, to live by the implicit lesson. Plant all your seeds. You reap what you sow.

Letting Go

I'm not exactly in love with these two latest, but I'm happy to see myself letting them be whatever they are.

Wishing

gouache and ink on heavyweight bristol paper, 14" x 11"
SOLD



I believe in the power of wishing. Active, creative wish-making (rather than passive longing, whiny "if only"s in moments of emptiness and desperation). I don't think it helps to cling to a wish, to squeeze it, worry it, focusing exclusively on the void in your life that your unfulfilled desire occupies.

I believe, instead, in creating a detailed visualization of whatever you want to bring into being. Blow your wish into a big pink balloon. As the old New Age Creative Visualization guru, Shakti Gawain advised, let it float away into the sky. You must trust that your wish will be heard by the powers that be, and that, if a path can be forged to its realization, the way will open up before you.

Release your wishes. Allow for the present moment, where you have acknowledged an unfulfilled desire. Allow for the perhaps difficult possibility that your wish will not come true. Allow for whatever emotion comes up in its wake. And most of all, allow for mystery, subconscious process, and invisible magic behind the scenes.

More Daily Collages

This week, I hit that point I've been waiting for, wishing for: The I Don't Care Anymore crossroads. It's an important moment in art making, in any creative effort. It's where you decide to either plug along in boredom, making more "safe" choices, or to acknowledge your boredom and stop making altogether. But there is one other alternative: it's about staying engaged in the work, and at the same time, letting yourself off the hook. It's about daring to make a mess, messing it all up, letting go of expectation that everything you make must be genius.

Thomas Edison is famous for saying that "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."

If you decide to stay engaged in the work at the point when you've run out of inspiration, you have to stop expecting everything you make to be great. You have to be willing to sweat, to work, to start taking bigger risks, maybe even ruining the piece entirely to invest in discovery, so that you have something new to bring to the next one. The surprising thing is, the labor feels good! It's a reminder: Ah, so this is play. I forgot! It's exactly where those elusive kernels of inspiration come from.

And so, the cycle continues.

This is exactly where I find myself, four weeks into my Daily Collage practice: Alternating between getting reckless, making a mess, and finding something new. And feeling inspired to be careful and thoughtful again, too.

#24 - Storm Moving In




#25 - After the Storm




#26




#27




#28

05924

The other night I found myself sitting in front of the computer, deep in the maze of PayPal, trying to create a simple path for the buyers I imagined would one day be knocking down my door, wanting to purchase my artworks. I was tired. I was cranky and cynical and suddenly I hit a wall: Who are you kidding? I asked myself. No one's going to even SEE this blog, let alone BUY anything! I recognized that inner voice, and dismissed it easily. But still, I sat up for a moment, acknowledging that I was tired, and posed another question to myself: Is this really what I need to be doing right now?

Just then my computer alerted me to a new email. It was from someone who stumbled upon my blog and wanted to know if a certain drawing was for sale. Long story short: my first official sale is complete.

As for the question I posed to myself: I guess I'll take that email as a yes.

To today's collage, the eleventh in my daily collage series, I'll attach my first of what will be many links to make purchasing my works as easy as possible. So so so much more to come.

Charted Territory

"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable it is nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open." – Martha Graham

In keeping with my thoughts on maps and mapping, it occurs to me that calendars are maps, maps of time, and that personal calendars are sketches of the landscape of our personal days. As I built today's collage, affixing layers of transparent tissue paper over a month of my life, I struggled a little with how transparent I wanted to be with an audience of strangers with my personal landscape. How much do I want to expose of myself? Because who am I but the sum of my actions, my thoughts, priorities, feelings, sensibility? I usually strive for complete transparency, not because I'm an exhibitionist, but because I want present myself – to myself – as honestly as possible.

Which leads me to this admission: I don't think much of today's collage.

But I'm beginning to understand that if I'm unwilling to mess around in the murky area, to be transparently awkward and risk falling on my face, I'll never break through to anything truly new.

I believe we all must stand smack in the middle of the no-man's-land between future possibility and "been there, done that" – in other words, be present with our limitations – before we can find our growing edge and push against it.

I ask myself now: should I have pushed this collage until it became something I'm proud of? Am I abandoning it midstream? Is this lazy? Is this a cop-out?

I'll answer with a question: Who am I to judge?

Maybe Martha Graham is right when she says it is not the individual's business to assess their own creative expression. Or maybe the edge I'm pushing against right now is simply the "stop worrying about it" edge. Maybe I have to trust that nothing will collapse if I make a boring collage. Maybe I have to take that risk before I can move into uncharted self-discovery, into new artistic growth, before I can move – unselfconsciously – off the map.

Rainy Morning

I'm less than a week into this project and I'm already being told repeatedly that I'm not asking enough for these daily collages. I've raised the price once, from $20 to $45, and still, I hear the same thing.

I take it as a complement, of course, but I am also giving this criticism serious thought, considering the time it takes to complete each work, materials, my long- and short-term goals. I've consulted Cay Lang. I've browsed ArtBusiness.com. I'm researching what other artists are asking –and getting– for comparable work.

This is what I know so far:

I want to make collages. One every day for at least the next two months. I want to learn something from the process – about myself, about art, about myself making art. I'm already learning. For instance: I've learned that I need to do some critical thinking about how I price my work!

This project is effecting everything in my life. I go to bed curious, wake up excited. Right now, in this moment, I'm already eager to see tomorrow's collage. I have no idea what it will be.

There are underground shifts in my creative life as well. In the week since I began this project, a long-anticipated much-avoided series of shadow box assemblage pieces has finally seen the light of day. For years I've been collecting materials, in turns feeling urgently and forgetting entirely how much I want to make them. And suddenly, in the last two days, four pieces have emerged. Plus, yesterday I submitted one of my short stories to the first of what I'm sure will be a string of literary magazines.

These may seem like baby steps, but to me, they are huge, and just the beginning.

Years ago, I put on a one-woman show: music, video, slides, spoken word, and a gallery show of my art - all of which I had to price. My goal at that point was to pay off the last of my college debt and to free myself of a stockpile of artwork that discouraged me from making anything new. But I worried that selling beloved pieces too cheap might also dampen my enthusiasm. As I agonized over pricing a favorite collage, an artist friend waved off my worry like a stray mosquito. "Just sell it and make another one," he said. "There's no mystery. It's not magic. Just let it go. And make another one."

I struggled for a long time, trying on numbers like high heel shoes - going as high as I dared, which is actually quite low (and true to the metaphor - I never wear heels). In one night, I sold just about everything. People were literally running to claim their purchases before someone else got to them. It was chaos, and such a rush! Between admission to the show and sales of my art, I netted exactly the outstanding balance on my college loans. Maybe I priced too low, but I felt great. And the new pieces I whipped out to restock for the next show were some of my best works of that time.

Yes, I'd like to sell these collages, but not for so little that it hurts to send them off. Twenty dollars, I realize now, isn't enough. Forty-five feels better. Sixty-five would probably feel good, too. It's more in keeping with what I make as a graphic designer, though on the low end of my hourly spectrum – in other words, still humble. But humble feels right. I'm just getting started at this, after all...

I'm clearly not finished thinking about this, nor have I done enough comparison shopping to have an idea what is truly appropriate to the market. Leave room for your star to rise, Lang suggests, and so I will: No price changes today. Forty-five dollars is it.

The humble truth is that I'm having fun making these daily collages. The process is valuable to me even if I don't sell a one, and I'll keep at it as long as this is true. Also, the thought of a growing stack doesn't bother me. It's a body of work, and that, in and of itself, is a valuable thing. I'd love to see a long row of them, all decked out in mats and frames on a nice clean wall. I want a show, is what I'm saying. At that show, after I've breathed a good deep breath surveying my day-after-day labors, make no mistake about it, the not-humble truth is that I'd like to sell every one of them, for enough money to keep the wind in my sails.

After all, the more I sell, the more I'll have to make another one.

MA: Loosening Up

Color, line, boldness, hallelujah! Compare this to yesterday and – not to say one is better than the other – but clearly there is change afoot, and a potential new theme emerging in my emerging collage-a-day practice.

I've been saying this for months: I'm interested in exploring and exposing figurative and literal spaces, dreamscapes, the emotional landscapes we feel we inhabit alone, when in fact the terrain is familiar to us all.

So no wonder I'm drawn to playing with maps in my collages. And no surprise I was brought up short in front of a Paula Scher map of Manhattan in my latest perusals of New York galleries. And of course it resonates with me when Julia Cameron suggests (in Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance) that we be honest with ourselves about where we're at, specific about where we're struggling, where we're stuck. "Think of it as putting out your coordinates," she advises. "You want the Universe to help you, and, in order to help you, it needs an accurate account of where you are."

The truth is, I've been stockpiling maps compulsively, with the unspoken hopeful expectation that one day these pages would find their way into my work. "Someday," I am realizing, if I'm willing to take a risk or two, can very easily translate to right now.

Maintenance Schedule

I'm trying it on, this collage-a-day project, and I'm finding it has lessons to teach me. Like, for instance - how am I going to squeeze this into my day? And also: can I let go of the stiff and familiar, to risk making something, god forbid, ugly, or even worse, boring, or worst yet – to use the dreaded art school term – unsuccessful?

Today's collage seems to embody these questions, present these challenges. It tells me: Yes, Amy, this exercise will be good for you. Do it. Practice loosening up. Start putting yourself out there. This will help you quit worrying if your work is good or not, if it's worthy. It'll help you take risks, to follow those giddy impulses – to slop ink all over everything, to introduce ridiculous purple or flashy hot pink – into your typically sober palette. Remember that this project, that this blog– that everything – is for fun, for discovery, that this is what life (and play) is all about.

It'll be interesting to see where this takes me, what my collages will look like two weeks, three months, a year from now. How far can I go with this? Guess I'll buckle in and find out.