May Days in the Studio

"The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh."

-   Philip Larkin, The Trees

 There is nothing like the days of May, blowsy, mild and open like a peony bursting into blossom. I have to step around the alstromeria and creeping hyacinth growing around my studio stairs. As I walk up, I feel a giddy sense of anticipation. I'm  'beginning afresh' in the studio; larger collage works on panels (12" x 24"), letting myself loose after a series of tightly composed smaller works. The colors in the new work echo the garden colors: red fingerprints the color of cyclamen, bits of sari fabric capture the glow of alstromeria and paper strips the inimitable gold of California poppies.

All this in preparation for an upcoming exhibit as part of our town's monthly "ArtAbout", a festive occasion that takes place once a month. Local artists take over different businesses for an evening and fill them with art. Musicians congregate and the town echoes with the sounds of blues, jazz and the occasional outburst of loud rock from nearby fraternities. It all adds up to a lot of people on the sidewalks, moving from one venue to another, eager to see the night's offerings. I'll be showing my work June 11th at the USE Credit Union, which serves the local universities.   I wish you all could be here so I could meet you in person and talk of art and all things visual. In lieu of that, I'll keep you posted about more works coming out of the studio heading towards the ArtAbout.

Pictured above: Pattern Redux, © 2010, detail and Red Chrysanthemum, ©2010, detail

How To and How Not To: Setting Up a Workshop

Have you ever wondered how to set up a workshop? At the end of a recent SoulCollage® class in my studio, my students asked to extend the class. I wanted to keep my Sunday afternoons open. What to do? I remembered what Alyson Stanfield had said about collaborating and asked for suggestions. One student who worked at a cancer center suggested using a space there. What a divine idea! I thought. "And you could offer it to cancer patients and their peer navigators." she continued. 

 Discovery #1•In need of new ideas? Collaborate with others.
My friend spoke to the outreach coordinator at the cancer center and soon, I had a meeting set up to discuss the possibility. 

Discovery #2•Follow up on ideas pdq/asap/stat.
The next piece was a bit trickier. I planned to offer the class free to cancer patients and their peer navigators and charge a fee for other folks. Win-win: I would be paid and the cancer center would be able to offer a brand new service. The tricky bit: could I use their facility (which opens you to great publicity channels) and still charge a fee? 

Discovery #3 (similar to #1)• If in doubt, ask until you get an answer with which you are comfortable. I ended up calling their compliance office and discovered exactly which policy allowed me to offer the class and charge for it.  I also e-mailed all the students to find out if they were still on board. Here I met my first whoops. I'd assumed
I had enough participants so I had not done much outreach.

Discovery #4 Always do your outreach, no matter what. Seek out all possibilities for spreading your word. Even if, like me, you are an introvert who would sooner crawl under a rock than pick up the phone. So what to do now? I read Rebecca Crowell's post about an entire day spent working on upcoming classes. I flew into action, collaborating with my husband and other colleagues to make a great flyer. Ready to go? Well, almost...
At the same time that I created a flyer, I'd written an article for an on-line newsletter and now I heard from the newsletter editor telling me about an error in my dates. 

Discovery #5: Check and recheck your dates. So now here I am, flyers corrected (and recorrected), article published, word spread and grateful for all the help I've received. We'll see what next week brings, but for the moment, I'm staying with this thought from Jack Canfield:"When you are in a state of appreciation and gratitude, you are in a state of abundance. You are appreciating what you do have instead of focusing on and complaining about what you don't have. Your focus is on what you have received, and you always get more of what you focus on." (p. 357, The Success Principles) Now I'll start working on my curriculum...
Top photo courtesy of Lynn Cohen

Mother's Day at the Hospital

My department, Child Life and Creative Arts Therapies tackles holidays, planning the best way to make them celebratory for both the kids and the parents. Each holiday presents (no pun intended) its own special challenges and Mother's Day is no exception. When I think about Mother's Day in the hospital, I think about sacrifice, sacrifice that is made without thinking. As a mom myself, I spend a lot of time observing the mothers I work with. They sit all day with their child, forgoing food, sunshine, showers and the rest of the family. They often sit for so long that sometimes the rest of the family has to pull them away. How do you acknowledge the greatness of this love? We're going to try this Friday. In addition to a spread of chocolate muffins, savory croissants, and a variety of coffees and teas, the volunteers and I have created this tray of paper corsages. Each colorful twist of tissue paper, carefully layered, represents a child for whom the mother is caring. As I printed this picture, I noticed that it divided along a diagonal line into light and dark. It speaks to me of the task of motherhood, that implicit promise to stay with our children through all of the darkness, shepherding them, we hope, into the fullness of life. On this Sunday, I honor all mothers, everywhere.

Virgo Goes Back to Basics

Branding My Shoes

I decided to kick off the my week of "working for keeps" by taking a risk in my art therapy practice. Recently, I had the opportunity to work with a young patient of about 13. Her nurse came up to me in the hall and lightly catching me by the arm, said "Adelle wants to paint her tennis shoes."  "Shoes hmmm?" I always enjoy a challenge like this in the midst of hospital hustle and bustle.  "What would I need to paint some tennis shoes, Converse cotton canvas to be precise?" I thought fast.

I would need:
•some acrylic paint thinned slightly in a variety of colors
•2 (at least) emesis basins (those kidney shaped bowls that are standard hospital issue.)
•several toothbrushes. Raid the supply room.
•What to do about the floor? Grab a plastic isolation gown and some medical tape. Spread it out like a tarp, and tape the arms and bottom firmly to the linoleum floor.

Adelle and I hunkered down on the floor and I experimented with my flick and spray techniques. She didn't have much experience in this area, but caught on quickly, expertly flicking the first layer of yellow drops on her orange shoes. A shy tween, she was hesitant at first, especially because our activity attracted the interest of the residents and the nurses who came in and out of her room and couldn't resist asking the obvious "What are you doing?" She smiled and flicked her toothbrush, spraying flecks of yellow. I was impressed. The shoes were looking great and with an additional layer of red and cerulean blue, they appeared as if a professional had created them. Which got me to thinking. Most likely Adelle (not her real name) had a lot more experience with Internet shopping than I and more than likely, Converse was marketing just such a shoe. I went home and checked it out on my laptop. Sure enough, there was an option to "make" your own shoe". I spent a bit of time changing the colors and patterns on my virtual shoe, but in the end, concluded that doing it in the flesh was  better.  I searched around the house, looking for a pair of my daughter's old Converse tennies to spray. Too late, I remembered that they'd gone to Goodwill in a paper sack. What to do? The answer came to me this morning from my friend and coworker Janelle (her real name) while we were sitting together. She stared down at my worn Dansko clogs (standard hospital wear) and noted the multiple flecks of white paint on one of them. "You ought to collage those" she said "you know, create your own brand." "A beautifully painted pair of clogs", definitely a keeper of an idea. I'll be painting, collaging and posting. Care to join me anyone?

Back to Basics

Have you ever had that experience where you try to sort out what part of your art is driven by the desire to "show and sell"--and what part is just you, pure and simple? (As if one could easily separate those parts.) I'm at that point in my collage work. Just for right now, I want to strip my work down to basics. I want to remove the glaze of "made for exhibition." In order to figure out a plan, I spent an hour in conversation with my friend Beth Rommel. Beth lives in Florida and we met in Alyson Stanfield's Artbiz Blastoff course where we discovered we had the right mix of things in common; two twenty something children, a certain whimsical bent in our artwork, and the same intense commitment to art that we brought to raising children. Beth, always the mistress of new ideas, came up with one that I'm going to give a trial run."How about just painting something you want to keep?" she asked. As she said this, I saw myself at eleven, crouched down on a creek bank in back of our house, digging out clay and discovering that earth clings to itself and can be shaped into vessels. It's that purity of discovery that I plan to pursue. Stay posted. Literally.

Generating Ideas

How do we come up with ideas? Where do they come from? Today our assignment in the Blog Triage class is to come up with at least 20 ideas about which we can blog. In the spirit of sharing that is the hallmark of social networking I decided to write them down here, in my blog, and share them with all of you. I have only one proviso: if you want to write about any of them yourselves, PLEASE GO AHEAD! These are ideas that I am curious about and either want to tackle, or, just as much, read someone else's take on them. And if you think about it, no two people are going to write about the same subject the same way.

So here goes. Top of my list this morning:
•1) The Middle Age Brain and Art. I just listened to Terry Gross interview Barbara Strauch on "The Surprising Strengths of the Middle Aged Brain. How does this affect art making? How many of us can relate to this?
•2) Taking an artist's retreat for a day
•3) Creating an artist's retreat for a group of like minded artists
•4) Going to an artists' retreats in the Western United States (can you sense a theme developing here?)
•5) Working green: finding and using sustainably made art supplies.
•6) Taking a tour through a local artist's studio and writing about it.
•7) Interviewing my artist friends (you know who you are!)
•8) Asking one of these same friends to interview me (I would love this because I love questions.)
•9)  Interviewing a local art therapist in private practice and looking at what an art therapist can offer an artist.
•10) How to turn your ideas for classes into a reality privately or very publicly. (Working on the latter!)
•11) Creating art programs for underserved populations.
•12) Choosing a medium I love and arranging to tour an artists' studio who works in this medium. I would love to tour a mosaic artist's space and a jeweler's (Lynn and Tracey, are you listening?).
•13) Blogging about our local open studio tour.
•14) Blogging about an exhibition in the making--I've already got mine picked: an art quilters exhibit that will open in 2011. I haven't started on my pieces yet so this makes perfect grist for the mill.
•15) My transformation this summer into a still life painter for an upcoming exhibit.
•16) What do you do when you know you need to go in a new direction, but you're not sure how to get going?
•17) New ways to incorporate art making into the fabric of your life.
•18) How to create a portable studio anywhere you go.
•19) How to incorporate my computer into my artwork without it staging a hostile takeover.
•20) How to fit art making into smaller blocks of time.
That's me in the picture above trying to figure all of this out!