Committing to the Creative Process

Master teachers do not teach lessons;  they teach how to work.  They can 'enoble the art of practice'.  Isn't that an encouraging phrase?  As a Saturday's child, I have often felt that I work much better than I play.  I think this is largely because what I love to do most is a form of work.  I am committed to honing my skills, so my work becomes playful.  It also brings me joy, fulfillment and satisfaction, and really does not feel like work at all.

I have often said of students who want to paint and voice that desire, yet lack the commitment to practice daily, that you must work at acquiring skills and face the blank white paper often.  It is a creative tabula rasa.  By doing so, you create a rhythm in your work.  The momentum you build by working regularly creates a different kind of mental work zone where one is able to reach higher, finding a new and greater level of creativity.

Painting is like any other art form.  It takes listening and hearing, and the willingness to work at seeing more clearly.  When I have personally experienced these flashes of insight, I lovingly call them epiphanies.  Any master who can instill the desire to fulfill the art of practice in another person is truly worth their weight in gold.  Somehow, these masters find the words so that the student who is listening can hear.  When I think back on the professors who had the greatest impact on my own professional growth, I can hear their voices.  Robert Levers, saying 'You are resting on your laurels', when I wasn't doing enough to prepare.  I can still hear his voice today telling me to stop and take note, 'Less is more, less is more!'  I understand that today.  I did not at one point in time.  Peter Saul once told me, 'You are complacent, and risk nothing.  It is time to risk!'  I once had a young master teacher say, 'Be brave and be bold!  What do you have to lose?'  These words changed my life!  What, truly, do we have to lose?  Our sense of control?  Our sense of order?  Our sense of what we've been taught is truth?  Those are very false premises, and until we can let them go, we will never achieve our full potential and reach the heights of our abilities.  An ancient Zen master, Shunryu Suzuki, once said, 'There should not be any particular teaching.  Teaching is in the moment...' 

Master teachers are not infallible superheroes.  Master teachers are master teachers because they're good learners, as well as effective communicators, constantly reaching out to build the ultimate skill in another person, who has shown potential and is serious about becoming more skilled.  Master teachers construct and help build on the talent of others.  They know how to do this because they were able to apply it to their own talent and were lucky enough to have had a master somewhere along the way who showed them the path to committed work, to see the benefits of constant self-assessment and re-assessment.

Keeping an open and ever-learning mind is the key to refining and building creative skills.  Julia Cameron, in her book The Artist Way, encourages the individual to take a creative time out for an artist's date with oneself, and go to a new environment and quietly experience a different creative form.  It can be amazing how looking and exploring can open one's mind to new possibilities.  If you have never done it, I heartily recommend it.  It is a simple task and can provide amazing insight and inspire ideas to rapidly form.  On an artist's date, I once visited The Paper Place at Central Market.  I wanted to build a dream bowl.  They had several that were constructed totally of paper products, for display purposes.  I examined them closely, noting details and points of construction.  This is the dream bowl I created as a result, seen from two angles. 

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I call it my Zebra Bowl because it is so difficult to change my stripes (habits)!  The idea behind the dream bowl is to create a place, literally, to put our dreams until we can make them a reality.  I love that concept.  I loved it even more after making my own dream bowl.  I used hand-carved wooden exotic animals, beads and shells, suspended on copper wire, to further enhance the bowl's visual presentation.

A similar idea is to make a creative altar to honor and inspire the creative process that we wish to follow.  I'm sharing my own creative altar for honing my skills as a visual artist.
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There are many things present here that are near and dear to my heart.  It hangs in a place of honor above my drafting table, where I paint most of my work on paper.  It serves as a reminder of my commitment to my own creative process.

I took a similar approach to making a creative square that defined my core values as a visual artist.  It is a three-dimensional collage of paper and found objects,  A very important aspect of this square was the miniature dress form covered with words of artistic inspiration, and also a bumper sticker I found that says 'No limits!', which is my own personal mantra.
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This slogan helps remind me to work every day with an open mind, and to reduce any self-imposed limits on my abilities.  I find it very helpful to be reminded.

There are many ways to affirm our creativity once we have found it.  When we are committed to allowing our creative self to have the freedom to reign and roam freely, we add a wonderful dimension to our life.  Life and living can become richer and much more interesting as we move through our days.  When you commit to a creative life, don't be surprised if others find you more interesting and full of verve.  Who knows where creativity may take you?  It helps me, and it can help you, to remember to be open, to listen, and to keep learning.  Find a mentor who is willing to talk with you and share insights, then set about to do it...every day.  This decision could be the most important first step of the rest of your life, opening new paths of discovery, fulfillment and joy.

3 - 2 - 1...Shazam...Spring has sprung...!

I am always ready for Spring each year, and this one is no different!  All the signs of new life:  the birds chirping and gathering twigs for new nests, the grass turning a bright green and the trees budding and bursting into bloom are all harbingers of the new season.  We often get a false spring in January in central Texas, where the temperatures soar into the high 70s.  Out come the shorts and sandals, bikes and strollers, and trees, like the redbud, bloom!  All around the town are the signs:  the red and pink blossoms of the Double Take rose variety, along with California poppies, iris, pansy and pink hawthorne, and many, many other types of flowers.  We may be in a drought here, but Mother Nature is funny about Spring...she finds a way to show her colors.  The bluebonnets are not as plentiful as in years past, but they are out there, as are the buttercups, the bright yellow daisies, and the wild pale yellow mustard.  Living in central Texas is really an amazing experience.  From the colorful sunrises to the beautiful sunsets, our lives are filled with color!  Blue skies, and every color imaginable is in the landscape.  I grew up on the Gulf coast and knew the beauty of an early Spring, when the daffodils and jonquils, sweet peas, flowering quince and pink magnolias, otherwise known as tulip trees, made their presence known in February.  Winter meant rain, and that it did in Jefferson County...almost every day.  So you can imagine how glorious the Springs were!  When the camellias and azaleas made their appearance, I really didn't think it could possibly get any better.  I was shocked at the number of wildflowers in the fields of central Texas when I came here as a college student, so many years ago.

I love flowers, and cut flowers from roses to lilies are the epitome of abundance, very much like fresh raspberries.  They are fragile and don't last very long, but while they are here they provide such vivid color and bring to mind so many feelings of joy.  I received a beautiful bouquet and marvelled at the various flowers in it.  Knowing full well their days were numbered, I decided to photograph them as well as paint them in a traditional watercolor technique on Arches 140-pound CP watercolor paper.  They were a joy to gaze upon, to drink in the beauty, as well as to do my best to capture their beautiful essence.  I call this painting 3 - 2 - 1, Spring has Sprung.

Once I finished 3 - 2 - 1, Spring has Sprung, I really felt that I had to try to do justice to the Texas wildflowers, so I began an acrylic work that was painted from memory, as well as from photographs taken in the countryside along the Willow Loop, where so many varieties of flowers burst forth each Spring.  In memory painting, the details are smudged, and it is more of an impression of the flowers' essence.  I wanted to capture the dead grassy undergrowth that is still dormant in early Spring, along with the shoots of very green grass and the leaves and foliage of the various flowers.

Because it is a memory painting, the mature dandelion thistles are present among the other flowers, even though in Nature it might be weeks before they would scatter their seeds from the lacy puffs.  This, too, was painted n 22 X 30 inch Arches 140-pound CP paper, with Liquitex acrylic paint.  When I finished the painting compositionally, one thistle dominated the landscape and was literally too large.  I reduced its size by painting into the negative space around the thistle.  I was happier with the flowers overall, but felt it did not work well compositionally.  It lacked balance.

After looking at it for several days, photographing it and generally using my editor's eye, I made the decision to cut the painting in half, making two 11 X 15 paintings.  Each of these smaller paintings has a more pleasing and satisfactory design element.  Depicted here are the two finished paintings, Shazam 1 and Shazam 2.  They could be matted and hung as a grouping, but would work equally well hung individually.  These works would be considered tonal paintings.  They were painted as if it were a rainy day, or first light, or even possibly last light, when the natural light is lower and the details of the flowers are less discernable.

For individuals like me, who suffer from seasonal asthma, Spring, with all of her fragrant abundance, brings the 'gift' of awakened allergies.  Riding in my car with the top down, with the wind blowing in my face, is a luxury that I can ill afford.  I cannot take an inhaled breath of Spring's fabulous bouquet without ingesting the flowers' pollen, and sneezing for days afterward.  This year the oak pollen has been at an all-time high, covering the sidewalks, grass and cars with its old gold green catkins.  When it rains, it knocks the pollen out of the air, but the wet seed pods need to be swept away, or they will stain everything a dirty brown color.  Oak bloom, as it is lovingly called, also plays havoc with my ability to breathe, talk, and laugh without coughing at length.  So, to pay homage to the complete picture that Spring brings to me, with her blossoms of fabulous and amazing color, I have completed a traditional watercolor on Arches 140-pound CP rag paper called An Ode to Spring.

The picture plane is filled with many imagined forms of the various pollens that fill our air and torment those who have lived in our fair city for any length of time.  This painting completes my personal celebration of Spring, and captures all the facets of the flora extraordinaire...all the good and the somewhat evil characteristics.  It could be said that the pollen is Mother Nature's little irony for us mortals...a real 'gotcha!'