Trust yourself

Stretching

I take a workshop and try to paint large

This week I got to be a student. In class with Lisa Daria Kennedy, I learned again the lessons I teach over and over. Trust the process. Trust yourself. Don’t overwork it. Stop before your done.

Embrace Value

Start by doing less. Color seduces. Leave it out. On paper you don’t care about, ask yourself. Where are the lights? Where are the darkest darks? When there’s glitter, there must be shadow. Find it. Find the mid-tones. Study the shapes. This process loosens you up, and familiarizes you with the questions ahead.

block it in

The first layer is just bones. Good work helps but don’t fuss it. Most of this will disappear as you work. “You are not responsible for what happens now.” Capture what you can. Take a break.

You will change things. It will change. This is why we make art.

Learn from others

Taking a class means you get to watch other people’s solutions evolve. The same challenge, such different responses.Keep your eyes open. Listen for when they feel stuck. Notice how graceful their work looks to you. Accept their compliments. Be amazed by how different the final work is.

Can you spot mine? Top row, #3 and 4. Both still works in progress. The group shot amazed us all.

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Holiday time

The holidays are coming. Join me. Make something personal, unique, to share.

Tiny houses and bird ornaments. Arlington Center for the Arts December 7, 1-3.Wonderful creations from a tiny stash you bring.

Register here.

Holiday cards, Thanksgiving weekend, the Beautiful Stuff Project, Somerville. All supplies provided. Perfect afternoon for adults and kids.

Register here.

Visit me in Studio 305 Holiday Open Studios.

My paintings and ornaments are available throughout December at the Loading Dock Gallery. Stop in before December 15, and get a chance to win two of my small paintings.

Keep Making Art.

Border or Threshold?

Ask the question

then ask again

Choice. Creativity. Focus. The perfect may be the enemy of the good, but the imagined can also be the enemy of the real. Sometimes creativity is the enemy of accomplishment.

Do you feel this way? Your brain is popping with ideas, but it is so d**d hard to work. Surrounded by supplies, do you also realize you are not working at all? Because working on one thing means not-working on so much else. How to choose?

Ask yourself:

What’s in my way?

What feels like too much?

What one thing will I do NOW?

Now, clear space and create air. This weekend, I gave away stuff:

• Donated most of my dye supplies to a young textile artist. She was over the moon. The laces, the colors, now will be used instead waiting waiting waiting….

• Handed my paper clay, bought in a fit of enthusiasm, to a friend who sculpts.

• Used Freecycle to give glassware and china from my mother’s estate. The stuff had been in our basement over 10 years. Now it’s in happy homes. I feel lighter.

Those supplies were projects in my mind only. But they kept me from working. Now they no longer breathe down my neck.

Make a habit of creativity. Once the rhythm is there, the work comes. You develop creative muscles. You work when even when you “want” to. You bump against questions, then prod til you find answers. You create. Among my new questions: how to extend that habit beyond the daily hour, past teaching commitments and into my day. The answer? Anne Lamott: “Butt in chair. Just do it… You are going to feel like hell if you never [make] the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart…That is really all you have to offer us, and it’s why you were born.”

Rustle of Leaves - Daily Painting #79

I have (re)discovered that one commitment produces daily questions to follow and ideas to try. I dream about color and composition. Some days I feel surrounded by an enticing song of colors. This single door - daily painting - leads to more possibilities. I am wondering:

• How to move from small to larger?

• How to stop sooner? To recognize and respect that more abstract energy?

• What about layers, especially collage?

• What of acrylics carries over into my watercolor teaching? When a student says “I don’t know what I’m doing,” I now look them in the eye to say, “That’s how painting feels.”

Special thanks to Alice Sheridan’s Interview with coach Judith Morgan. They discuss how Alice has grown her art practice in their years together.

In the Evening - Daily Painting

I’d love to hear how you choose among the ideas that bubble up inside of you. We need to help each other move forward. Life is precious. We are lucky to make art.

Letting go is part of growth

56 Intention

These are the first notes I took during a class with Page Pearson last spring. “Each of us is a work in progress.” This month, my daily painting practice has helped me let go. It sets a rhythm to the days. Let go of the news. Let go of cluttered expectations. Just make tea. Paint. Wrestle with the rest later.

Unlike most to-do’s, for me painting brings calm. It creates time to listen. It is about pauses as much as it is about action.

This past week a student of mine died. Painting was a path out of depression for her, a light that renewed her spirit. Her friendship reminds me again to let go of fear, to reach out to others, to do what feels right.

Each opportunity to create is a blessing. Pick something you like and do it. Leave what gets in the way behind.

The time has come
To stop allowing the clutter
To clutter my mind
Like dirty snow,
Shove it off and find
Clear time, clear water.

from “New Year Resolve” by May Sarton, from Collected Poems 1930-1993. © W.W. Norton & Co., 1993.

A Colorful Question

I discovered the work of Ellen Heck. Her series Colorwheels makes me feel like beginner again. Look at the way she combines structure, color, and abstraction. She pushes the possibilities of limitations. What can we learn from her?

Pink Angels Rotated 90 Degrees Counterclockwise, Ellen Heck

• Work within a structure.

• Limit your color palette.

• Establish a theme, then vary it.

• Use repetition to pull the viewer’s eye.

• Create structure, then push the possibilities.

• Go deep into your idea. Then go deeper.

When you pick colors to work with, ask yourself what possibilities lies among them. Whether you work with paint or collage, how can you mix, veil, intensify?

Welcome. 6x6” acrylic. #33 of my daily paintings.

Painting inherently involves mixing colors. Collage works with pre-toned materials. Either way, you’ll help yourself if you curate your materials before you start. Choose a palette. Focus. Then explore the range of lights and darks, still areas and texture, your colors can create. Create hard edges with contrast, soft edges with similar values.

These past weeks I’ve been painting daily with a palette of 8 colors: a warm and a cool each of yellow, red, and blue, plus magenta and white. Perhaps it is time to limit myself even further. What would flowers look like, painted in neutrals? How to express luminosity with out pure yellow or pink?

Just show up

A first sunflower, after Lisa Daria Kennedy’s class, Daily Practice

“Butt in chair,” writes Ann Lamott about creating. “Just do it…You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves in your heart.” Painting has tugged at my sleeves for decades. Last month, back-to-back classes took me across the threshold. I am painting each morning. An hour’s practice before breakfast. A peaceful kind of work, once I settle in. The world is so quiet before 6AM.

It is said someone asked Ted Williams how he learned to play ball. “Practice. Practice. Practice. Trial and error. Trial and error. Trial and error.” Surprise: my mom was right. Practice works.

Each morning has frustration and discovery. I am learning about the possibilities of a brush, the effect of water, the usefulness of fingertips. I’ve learned to stop at 30 minutes and walk away. At 60 minutes comes that internal voice: “Just fix this one last thing.” and I’ve learned it’s the sign to stop. Most of all I’m learning to not worry. Painting feels good. There will be another painting tomorrow.

“You were made and set here for this, to give voice to your astonishment,” writes Annie Dillard. It is a gift to focus on the astonishing miracle of color and light.

Here is a week in sunflowers. If you’d like to see the series, stop by Studio 305 this Saturday, during Open Studios at Western Avenue Studios in Lowell. I’ll be there noon to 5, and I’ll have these pieces to share. Roses coming along nicely, now, too.