Sisters, let me tell ya, it has been QUITE the week here. I love summer break, don’t get me wrong. But being home all the time forces me to deal with all the stuff I escaped by going to work. The grand experiment this week is to see what effect creativity has on my ability to deal. And what […]
Healing a pesky sub-personality
The art version of kale and spinach
Sometimes color makes me sick. It makes my throat tighten in the same why it tightens when I think about Cinnabon. Sickly, overstimulated, fake, cheap even. When this happens, it is hard to make art. My friend’s 8 year old daughter had the solution. “Sometimes I just pick one color, just one colored pencil and I draw a peace […]
Why learning how to box made me a better artist
There you are, remote in hand, the kids driving you nuts, trying to read the mood of your significant other, feeling defensive and/or pouty. Out of the corner of your eye, you see the table, piled with clutter, where, if you weren’t so “lazy” and “untalented,” you would be creating. But the thought of creating is so blah, who cares? […]
Art and Shame
“You shouldn’t be making art like that!” This was said to me once. It stunned me. At the time, I had just started making art again after a long dry spell. The person who said it to me was an artist who did watercolor still lifes. She let me and my young son come to her studio. My son would […]
The sacred adventure of intuitive painting
Author, painter and activist Aviva Gold describes her approach to painting as “painting from the source.” She explains how the “source” goes by many different names depending on viewpoint and culture and she likes to think of the source as a combination of all of them: Great Spirit, the divine, Prana, the unconscious, psyche, consciousness, soul, God, Goddess. Michele Cassou […]