meandering last night

I get out of bed after having slept a couple of hours, then sit here at the computer, perusing links and reading blogs. A lot of what I read has to do with opening to new creative inspiration ... people discovering a new writing style, or a sudden yearning to draw or paint. It also has to do with opening to new psychological and philosophical insights.. wanting to learn of different spiritual paths, and delving into holism, embracing the Goddess, or Buddha, or Jesus. Many different people with myriad things bringing them forth into their lives. Then there are some elders, who've walked the path of the creative or the spiritual, and offer teachings, in their own ways, or show the results of their own learnings, through words or pictures or songs, or other forms of the creative. What a varied, yet often the same, tapestry.

It's nearly 4am. I pull up my blog on a separate window, so I can listen the music as I write. It soothes me.(Yet I've decided to remove the music, because it's getting rather repetitive, and I can 't figure out how to change/add songs!) The radiator is hissing. Not the best sound, but at least there's heat coming up. It's 16°F/-8°C; pretty cold for these parts, I'd say, but probably not for some of you Canadians out (up) there.



Time to try sleeping.

opening doors

April is here already, and for both days the weather has been as gray as can be. The cold damp just sinks into the bones, and I was up much of the night with aching knees.

Last night, over Chinese take-out, me and evie were talking about what the Creative looks like. I asked, What does the front door look like? Mine was clear glass or crystal, and ev's was a big box of Crayola crayons. I saw my door as being perfectly clear, and then I got this in my fortune cookie: "To be mature is to accept imperfections". How apropos. It made me rethink my door, and indeed my whole approach to the Creative.

Much of what holds me back from creating is a need for perfection. Needless to say, there is nothing I can create that can come anywhere near that.... So, I do get past it, but not without much angst. I am always needing to learn how to embrace the imperfections, and get on with it.

So, I'll change my door to the type of crystal filled with imperfections..... and you know what happens? All the imperfections refract the light, and send off rainbows. How perfect is that?

What does the door to your Creative look like?

words: old school

I have been keeping a journal since I can remember. Keeping implies a certain responsibility with "keeping up", and there have been times when a year could pass with the turn of a page. There were also fat pages filled with a scant number of months, so full of every day. I have filled my fair share, and then some. To me, a journal is words, and mainly words... sketches and doodles on the side, yes, and pressed flowers and movie tickets.

But today, journaling has taken on a whole new face. It is a mixed media event on every page. The movie tickets become a theatre, the sketches are the words. I know little about it, but I'm following another blogger's entry into the realm, and it has inspired me to try and create in this different way.

I don't know if I will share my new fangled pages.. So far they are as private as my more wholely worded journal entries. However creative, not always meant for revealing.
It's fun, but requires a whole slew of crafting material, so calling it "journaling" just seems crazy to me! I guess I'm just old school.

My art is not in all the things I make with my hands. These are simply diversions, sometimes even little meditations of made things. My art ultimately falls to the written word, however mundane. This is my truth, here, in the word, plain as day.

If it were in my hands to make paint lament, and make sculpture leap in dance, then so it would be. But my paint and sculpture are journies made on the way to here. They do not land of their own accord, but stay adrift, somewhat unfinished, waiting to land in the bed of my imagination, and come out on the page in a story or poem.

Ah, but even that is too much pressure for the creative psyche.. thinking in terms of one thing necessarily leading to another. Sometimes a thing is just what it is.... even if it's hanging adrift.

Photography doesn't fall into the catagory of "leading towards"... photography is a thing in itself, and encompasses that moment you click the shutter... ah, it can be so sweet. A capture in time. It makes my heart beat faster when I'm feeling it with the camera. I love it.

If art were my clothes, I'd probably be dressed in words and photographs. :)

hometown

The "Creative Every Day" theme for this month, is "Words"... and so I thought I'd begin with a bit of personal history.

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I have lived in Brooklyn all my life. Except those times when I lived somewhere else. I was born in Maimonides Hospital, which no one pronouces correctly, with the probable exception of Jews. I know how to pronouce it, but I am not Jewish.

When I was in the first grade, at Public School 169, I made my father an ashtray out of clay. I carried it home, holding it in both hands, intent on keeping if safe. I walked the two long blocks from seventh to fifth avenue. The street to the left of the sidewalk, the rock wall of Sunset Park to my right.

As I stepped off the curb, I studied my hands holding the ashtray, and in that split moment it fell to the street, and broke in too many pieces to ever be put back together again. That's what happens when you study your hands.


My mother would pick me up for lunch every day. We would go to Meyer's or Holstein's. Real Ice Cream Parlours. I ate tuna on light white toast, and a bowl of cream of chicken soup. Every day. Sometimes mom would make the tuna sandwiches, and we'd sit in Sunset Park, across from the school.
The park went from 5th avenue to 7th ave, and from 44th street to 42nd street. Diagonally to the park, on the 5th avenue side, was Sunset Bakery. My mom and dad's bakery.
Mom was brilliant with her full red lips, and vibrant laughter. Sometimes she'd have a box with my Young People's Book Club selections... bringing it along because she knew how hard I'd wait for them. My mother is 81 now... ever brilliant, though her full lips are a more demure shade of frosted pink. Her laugh is still full of life... despite all odds.

dances with wolves

In the creation of characters, I sometimes first think of a name, or a purpose.

Like "Agri"... this is a name that came to me once, and it turned out to mean "fire", I believe. I'll have to check that. I had been doing a meditation on my guardian angel, and that's the name that came to me. Her purpose (odd that I should give this angel a feminine persona, when Fire is so male) is to keep watch over me, of course.

Her hair is a molton gold, her eyes are firey blue. She is shaped like a flame, a wisp. She is ephemeral. Perhaps too ephemeral to bring to life.

Sometimes parts of a story nag at you. Could be the story behind a character doll, and then there's a particular type of foot that wants to be made now, with big fat toes, belonging to a pleasant troll who has many friends. I have only made one troll, but in my mind there is a whole lineage following that one, and many others, who have gone beyond the bridges, and are living in forest lands. Few of them steal your gold, though they have been known to do that. Sometimes they just take what you don't need. Anyway... I've seen their feet, and their nose and hands. I've seen what's in their pockets and bags. The wait for my hands to bring them to life... to open their eyes.

It is sort of like shamanism... where one finds their power animal and brings it into one's heart... then gives it life by "dancing the animal".

not waiting for snow

Nearly 2am, and I'm awake, having fallen out too early last night.

Word has it that snow is on the way, and I always seem to be awake on nights when snow is expected. I'm usually waiting for it, but not tonight. Tonight I'm just awake.

I did a figurative sculpture of a woman a few days ago. Unfortunately, I had already decided that she wasn't a particularly good piece by the time I got to the hands and feet, so I just slopped my way through that. Ends up I like her pretty much, except for her deliberately rushed extremities.

It was my patience that got the better of me while I was sculpting her. I didn't have it in me to focus on the fine details necessary, and I had already convinced myself that it wasn't going to turn out well, overall.

The critic is a nasty thing when it comes to creating, and mine has a very loud voice.
What do you do to silence the critic?

light

 

The truth of dreams and visions comes through like light peeking out from under a doorway. It is good to heed these things.

So it is that each day I must find more light, and become lighter myself.
Sometimes it's necessary to slough off the opinions of others, and see them as just that... opinions. I won't be lessened by these things. Little by little, I let go of my attachment to approval. Hard for anyone, I suppose... but hand in hand goes the attachment to disapproval, and I don't need anyone's stinkin' disapproval! I will not be lessened. Such is my lesson, :~).

I work on the creative a bit more every day. Adding pieces to a figurative sculpture, or starting one anew, making small decorative items or jewelry, reading, writing, rearranging my environment, taking mind pictures until I get my digital camera... of course I'll continue taking mind pictures even then.

Photography is among the most "present" of the visual arts. It requires that the vision be seen before it is created. Sometimes the photographer has time. The sun, quite appropriately, will often be the indicator of just how much time she has, or how much time she needs... before the shadows are just right, when she clicks the shutter.

It's necessary to look at everything with new eyes. The subtle changes in the sun everyday, and the spot where it sets, the clouds that join it... and then there are rain drenched streets at midnight... the trails of a truck's tail lights, when the truck is already gone, the reflection of lamplights and neon signs. The light is everything.

the rusted bed spring

I am itchy to create something.

I go to the rusted bed spring, thinking surely there is something in this swirling steel that will transform itself into a sculpture. I've already worked on this piece with incense sticks woven in and out the curves... then, seeing the fragility of that, I took off the incense, and studied it bare again. In part, it is a mermaid swirling up in the way mermaids swirl. In part, it is a dragon, or a child's toy. Of course, it is a rusted bed spring, and may well look its best beneath a little mattress. It may just remain a spring... the unfathomable piece that must bounce me in other directions.

I may soon get the sewing machine from my sister, since neither her nor my mom want it. It needs repair, but once that's done, it'll be mine to try my hand on again. I can't remember the last time I used that machine. My hands will remember how to thread the bobbin, I'm sure.

I used to make a few things... skirts and blazers, I remember. A dress here and there. I would like to try my hand at making raggy frocks for trolls, and dainty outfits for a fairy.... an old fashioned long coat for Santa, and curly toed boots for the elves. Of course, Fabri-Tac may be easier!

Here are 3 pendants I made one morning, not too long ago. Sort of an faux aged bone (or at least it's supposed to be) with etchings. Someone likened the look to bacillus and cocci under a microscope, and I have to agree with that. The round black one has slices of a poinsettia cane (millefiori) on it. Thanks to claychicks, at etsy, for the canes.

first ladies

The first lady (from around 1999-2000) I made sits behind me on a piece of chapparel. Her head is as big as her boobs, and there's a raw freedom in her disproportion and fingernail markings. A swift creation, taking no more than an hour, she looks right at you, in anticipation of the Ladies who will follow.

The second lady, my Muse.

I was about to take a writing workshop with Emily Hanlon.  Things to bring included something to represent the internal critic, and something to represent the muse.  For my Muse I chose this lady (the one in background).... the same rough qualities of the first, she concentrates her gaze upon her hands and her crystal.  I sit her beside me now, so that I remember what means to have new eyes, unphased by imperfection.... indeed, embracing it, and letting in the real freedom of the creative.

the malady of the quotidian

Some days are distinctly more real, coming in like a shock of turmoil, or joy. Six of one.

But...

The creative heart rises above the quotidian veil, and transmutes it.

Even when life calls; be it grocery shopping, or despair, the creative keeps an eye out. That scene with all the congested traffic, growling beneath scattered trees, near and far, fading from green, waving in yellow, drifting dry and swift and oaken brown beneath the walkers and the wheels. Ultimately, nature incases us. Count your blessing and treat her well.

There has been tons of land digging going on around here. I don't know if it's the electric company or what, but they are constantly blocking off cross-streets and corners. Inside the barriers lines are deep holes in the ground; hard hats down there doing who knows what.

There's all kinds of stuff laying around, though.... pieces of mesh and wire, and what was it I saw today?...... a metal spring of sorts; heavy, thick. Reminded me of the steel spring I'm planning to work with at home.

There's a lot of ideas in the scattering of junk. Whether it is tangible junk of metal and glass and clay and pigments, or everyday junk, or junk in your closet junk in your mind junk in your relationship junk in ...JUNK; junk in your huge collection of rationalizations and excuses and but he said she said I did you didn't... JUNK.... Even the touchy feely infactuation surrender to love, has junk... lots of old rose colored glasses ...JUNK

And what is the creatives job? the creatives purpose? To transmute the quotidian. And in doing that, comes the transformation of your own life... made to wake you up, in gifted intervals, to what it's like to give your junk away, to let it go to a higher cause.... Make something, sing something, dance it away. For a moment you know what being alive is like, where you are centered; right exactly where you are.

I have lived a long enough life now, to have collected a heapin' load a junk, inner and outter. Enough to create new worlds. The creative creates new worlds.

This is just me, myth maker, rambling.

dolls at dawn

Today I'm up early; not so unusual. I started working on my doll again. She's a wild art doll, and one of my first real diversions away from all polymer clay. I've been working on her bit by bit, trying to get an idea of who she is, and what she needs to portray her self. She appears to be a healing doll, and the one I made before her seemed to be a healing doll, as well. Both are very different. The first, smaller one, is primarily black and gold (on a filled muslin body form w/paint, beads, polymer clay face). The one I'm working on now is copper and blue and gold and pink and lavender and purple and red ... well you get the picture; a much more diverse play of color. The various beads down her center are a mix of representations... chakra, tan tien, energy centers. She is very light and very female in nature. She is fun and healing.

There is always a long way to go with any art form. A never-ending process of learning. If I'm not seeing something with new eyes each time I look at it, then I'm not seeing it at all.

There are faces, and faux stones, and sculpted bodies curing in the oven.