artist's way

where we merrily catalog the artist's way classes & events we offer

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May 16, 2008

artist's way open studio (may)

by gl. at 2:17 pm

last night's open studio was quiet -- and quite hot! perhaps it's just as well that the studio won't be hosting any summer events, unless we include a spa/sauna package along with them. ;) it was a very small group; the other rsvps must have been enjoying the sunshine (or hiding from it!).

[moments not minutes: click the image to see all our collages]

this became a collage of the return of my imaginative and freer self during my creative hiatus, i think. i spent much more time gathering images than usual, most of which i didn't use. the text says, "no more minutes. let's count moments-- moments that wedge themselves between days and weeks and rainfalls." i imagine my life being allowed to be more organic: being outside, spending time w/ friends, being inspired by colors and shapes and light. hidden behind the monopoly money is a handwritten note found in the collage pile: "i didn't know i was ready to receive."

[creative advocate, sven's homage to the last collage night]

also, this is one of sven's collages, which he says he created in homage to me (eep!). he's photocopied & tinted some of my collages and created a transparency of me to lay on top. he says he especially likes the placement of the third eye on my forehead and how the hand in "heal" looks like it's being held to my lips.

that wraps it up for the studio events i'll be offering until after the sabbatical, though i will be teaching "creative business basics" at the iprc may29:

"Starting a business is easy! Keeping it running is harder. Whether you're struggling with your identity, finances or business planning, this workshop will help you identify the next step you need to take to make yourself legal, stable and profitable in Oregon. In addition, learn about the other people and organizations who are on your side, including inspiration and support from other DIY business owners."

and then onward through a savoury summer!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

May 9, 2008

artist's way guided intent (may)

by gl. at 6:19 pm

i think i just found my new favorite activity! thursday's guided intent event was based on the theme of "autonomy," and we created full-sized self-portraits in response, all of which were bursting with life, creativity & vitality.

[painting in the studio: click the image to see more of the process]

it's similar in setup to the blind painting activity we do. we started off with some bodywork (breathing, stretching and a guided meditation), then moved into pose practices: we did pairs of possible positions like restful/active, open/closed, spiritual/earthly. then we laid people down onto styrofoam insulation covered with a large sheet of butcher paper. to keep things moving i split them into teams of three: one person getting traced, and the other two doing the tracing. then we hung the tracings on the wall and used the insulation as walls on the side of the room that just has windows. once they got started with the brushes & the paints, there was no stopping them!

i was worried this was going to be too ambitious a project for just two hours, but they all managed to create awesome paintings and none of them seemed rushed. still, it would make for a fun 1/2 day or full day activity, i think.

my only regret is that i didn't get to participate in this activity, because it looks so fun! speaking of which, while people were arriving we noticed a guy run by with a conical party hat, throwing flour at the street at regular intervals. about 10 minutes later, a whole crowd of people also in party hats ran past, following the trail of flour spots!

this was our last guided intent of the season: like last year, I'll be taking the summer off to enjoy the sunshine and I encourage you to do the same. :) but we have one more collage night before that happens, and i'll be teaching "Creative Business Basics" at the iprc may 29:

"Starting a business is easy! Keeping it running is harder. Whether you're struggling with your identity, finances or business planning, this workshop will help you identify the next step you need to take to make yourself legal, stable and profitable in Oregon. In addition, learn about the other people and organizations who are on your side, including inspiration and support from other DIY business owners."

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

May 3, 2008

artist's way open studio (april)

by gl. at 10:45 pm

the studio was packed with other creative spirits for last month's collage night; i had to pull out a little tray table for me so that everyone would have enough room. we had three teen artists and it was delightful to meet them and see old friends. it was a quiet spring evening and we were quite focused, creating 19 collages between the lot of us.

[the poems are gone: click the image to see all our collages]

this features the poem still floating around since the edible book tea: eating poetry. it also includes a piece of the popcorn container from cirque du soleil, which i have yet to write about. i don't know what the light bulb & the pears were about, but i liked the shapes and colors.

like last month, we had an attendee from france! linda has decided to "attend" collage night from afar, using our collage momentum to inspire her own.

just two more events before my summer sabbatical!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

April 3, 2008

artist's way guided intent (april)

by gl. at 5:21 pm

i can hardly believe it's possible, but last night we managed to make some fabulous art dolls to represent self-protection in a remarkably short amount of time. thanks to the wide and delicious varieties of creative chaos, each of the dolls was rich with insight & meaning.

["inner lightness": click the image to see more dolls]

first we wrote about what we needed protecting from, or what needed protecting. during introductions i realized i might actually need -less- protecting: i have fairly solid walls between identities, and perhaps veils would serve me better than walls. so during the writing i wrote about needing to protect myself from my own sense of responsibility and a desire for lightness. so the light bulb iconography wasn't much of a stretch, but i was surprised that 3 of the 7 of us created dolls with light bulbs in them (mine is a gocco bulb!). i have surprisingly less gauzy fabric than i thought I did.

it was good to see shawn, a former artist's way client (who just found out she's been accepted to the portland open studios tour this year!), as well as several other people from previous events.

our next guided intent theme is autonomy, which we'll honour by creating your own life-sized, full-body portrait as a symbol of your artistic freedom, independence & self-reliance. we'll help you find a pose that expresses the core of your being, then we'll trace around you and let you loose with paints & brushes. i'm very much looking forward to this event: as a form of creative Self expression, it will be both unusual & uniquely relevant.

i am both excited and nervous to announce that "autonomy" will be the LAST guided intent until september: like last year, I'll be taking the summer off to enjoy the sunshine and I encourage you to do the same. :)

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

April 2, 2008

artist's way open studio (march)

by gl. at 1:02 am

we had a terrific open studio anniversary last month! to celebrate 3 years of collages, i asked anyone who had attended a prior event to bring one of their collages to display, and it was neat to see several years' worth of collages all at once. :)

i bought new teacups for the studio and they arrived just in time for this event. but i also bought two dozen delicious dots from saint cupcake to share with abandon. at the end of the night there was even singing!

[anniversary cupcakes: click the image to see all our collages]

this year it was an international celebration, too! one of our attendees was a woman from france: she came to a prior event while visiting portland and decided to "attend" collage night from afar, using our collage momentum to inspire her own.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

March 22, 2008

artist's way guided intent (march)

by gl. at 9:01 pm

for our march guided intent we explored a wide variety of dreams, as well as events both real and imagined. the studio is a flexible space: all the tables and art were whisked away, leaving a blank "canvas" to hold the stories as they were spun.

over the course of the evening I got to become a baby penguin, a rippling pond, a TV, a woman on the se artwalk, a young man saying goodbye to his mother, a judge in a courtroom drama, friends & family of a grad student, AND a seminar speaker watching her dream come true! some of the stories made us all laugh, while others made the storytellers get misty-eyed and emotional.

since i was participating in the stories that were being told, I don't have a lot of pictures this time, but we re-enacted a few to give you a taste:

[one of the scenes: click the image to see more]

playback theatre involves a storyteller telling ordinary stories and then picking people to re-enact those stories. it's much more moving and fun than that simple description sounds. this is always the hardest guided intent to run because performing arts is so scary to people, so i usually end up having to participate so that we have enough bodies.

we clear the room to make it an empty stage for the actors, but i also want to make a special space for the storyteller. so i was pleased that this time, instead of setting up a makeshift backdrop with two microphone stands and a stick, i scored a folding screen from craigslist the day before. and instead of hauling the large comfy chair over from the house, i finally found that world market carries director's chairs! i've been offering this activity for three years and that's always been my vision for it, so i'm glad that they both "set the scene" for this activity and can be reused for other studio events.

our next guided intent theme is self-protection: by embellishing a soft cloth doll to act as a warrior (or guardian), you can manifest the qualities you want to protect yourself from critics, crazymakers, or anything else that theatens your creative potential. we'll have all the 3D objects out for this and I'm quite sure we'll make a glorious mess. :)

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

March 6, 2008

artist's way open studio (february)

by gl. at 5:16 pm

yes, yes, february! as i told dayna, it's never too late to post. :)

several regulars introduced new friends to the studio and the excitement about the previous night's eclipse was still strong. we were so energetic we created 17 (!) shining collages that night.

["penumbra": click the image to see the other collages]

next week we'll celebrate our third year of open studio collage night w/ cupcakes. yay!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

February 27, 2008

artist's way creative clusters begin march 18

by gl. at 3:21 pm

i'll be hosting another round of artist's way at the studio starting march 18. i'm offering an evening cluster & a morning cluster to encourage people to make more of what they love, whether it's visual, literary or expressive art. out of all the things we do, this is my favorite activity to facilitate. :) here's the announcement i sent out:

Gain confidence, courage and compassionate companions in an Artist's Way Creative Cluster! The Artist's Way offers you an opportunity to discover or recover your creative self. If you've tried to get through The Artist's Way alone, come join us! Your facilitator, Gretchin Lair, is a creative advocate known for her "splendid mix of honesty and art" and "quiet leadership."

Two choices for Spring 2008: only $250 for 10 weeks!
(RSVP and $125 deposit due by March 11)

March 18-May 27
Tuesday mornings 10 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Tuesday evenings 6-9:30 p.m.

http://www.scarletstarstudios.com/artistsway/
artistsway@scarletstarstudios.com
503.762.6830

If a creative cluster doesn't work for you this time, we have plenty of other opportunities for art exploration & creative self-expression! Our goal is to restore hope & faith in your own abilities, to encourage you to create fearlessly & truthfully.

of course, no prior art experience or talent is required, just a desire for & commitment to creativity. i hope both clusters fill with kind, generous, courageous people!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

February 20, 2008

artist's way guided intent (february)

by gl. at 2:35 am

a couple of weeks ago we hosted the february guided intent, whose theme was "strength." so i asked them to create "life plaques," an idea i got from dayna a long time ago.

in fact, we explored 3 different ways to explore our personal strengths: a mindmap on the table, an abstract visualization of four different personal strengths, and finally a life plaque based on one or more of the visualizations.

[compassion: click the picture to see the other life plaques and visualizations]

the next guided intent is one of my favorites. we'll be exploring compassion by sharing our stories "on stage" using a technique similar to playback theatre. playback theatre is a process that combines spontaneous collaboration with gentle direction. by being both storytellers and actors, we will see each other's stories through kinder eyes. it's often touching, hilarious, sad and bold all at once.

(it's also often difficult to convince people who don't consider themselves performing artists to try this, but i want to encourage people to try new things in a safe space as a way to increase creative capacity & vocabulary no matter what their dominant art is. :)

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

February 13, 2008

love, love, love

by gl. at 1:26 am

sven's brain has been gushing essays and i'm still trying to catch up with stuff that happened two weeks ago!

for instance, on first friday we attended both "the love show" at launchpad gallery and "love bites" at bite studio.

i've never been to art shows where i've known so many people! several of my artist's way clients jumped at the chance to show together, and then those of us who didn't show came to support them. so we saw justine, emma, emily, anna, dayna, elizabeth & her niece and lynn, in addition to adrienne, bridget, romaine & alisa! i was also delighted to see art on the walls by people i knew, even if i didn't see them at the opening: shawn, consu, kristen maus, beth ann, jennifer mercede. there was lots of good art but i think my favorite piece was an anatomically-correct heart-shaped book with a niche carved out to fit a tinier heart-shaped book inside.

then sven & i stopped by to see bite's first-ever show, orchestrated by shawn (another artist's way client). she was glowing in pleasure and exhaustion, but took the time to explain to us how "biting" works: it's the process used to create an etching in a copper plate. i was also impressed with a "hard candy print" by another artist which was created by pouring hot hard candy into a mold and then pressing the etched plate into the candy and popping it off when it's solid again, leaving the impression behind.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, exhibits & events

January 18, 2008

artist's way open studio (january)

by gl. at 11:42 pm

last night i hosted a "virtual" open studio, so named because it all happens at our own homes. last year i did this because the hill outside our house was icy and i didn't want people coming here, but i also didn't want to waste the art momentum & resolutions of the new year!

i was so delighted by the wide range of people who attended and the big range of arts i wanted to do it again! plus, while i very much enjoy encouraging people to make art at the studio, i also think it's important to make art in your own space. this year the morning started off snowing, so i was very glad to have scheduled a virtual event.

one of the great things about the virtual open studio is the creative stories and support we share throughout the day. though pictures were due by 9 p.m., people checked in and sent pictures whenever they could fit it in their day, which is something i'd like to encourage people to do whenever they want to make art. no need to wait for a specific date or time; travelling to an official art-designated station is not required. just do it, wherever you are and with whatever you have!

so after dinner, sven & i decided to work on creating creatures for shelley noble's film, halfland: "The undersea door to Halfland is now open. You too are invited to craft, in anyway you'd like, a small sea creature of some kind; fish, seaweed, shellfish, starfish, anything between 1 to 4 inches long ( 25mm to 100mm), that can be used in the underwater scene (film 1; scene 2 in the outline linked below) early on in the film."

i wanted to create a little stuffed "scarlet starfish" while sven wanted to create an "svenfish" stopmo puppet:

[scarlet starfish: front]

[scarlet starfish: back]

[svenfish: those fins can be animated!]

but everyone at the virtual open studio created awesome things! only one major snafu: dreamhost snarfed 90% of my emails about this event before i could write about it, so i had to ask people to resend their pix & conversations. ouch! still, i think the virtual open studio will be an annual event. we may not always make props for friends' films, but it's nice to work in the studio together making things! and knowing other people are also out there playing with art at the same time is exciting and fun.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

January 5, 2008

artist's way guided intent (january) & artist's way open studio (december)

by gl. at 1:23 pm

this week's guided intent was a writing event. last year i used vicki lind's old photos for all the exercises, but this time i varied the images. first i used some faces i had torn out of magazines that i've been carrying around since college, then cards from edward gorey's "the helpless doorknob," then cards from "the creative whack pack," and finally we returned to vicki's photos.

most of the photos had 5-minute prompts, though vicki's photos had a series of 2-minute prompts, at which point participants could either elaborate on one of the stories they started or pick another photo and write for another 10 minutes.

also, december's open studio (which i am just now writing about) seemed the perfect place to make these gift tag collages. these were fun to make and fun to match up with the gifts.

that last one is "the angry christmas zebra." alesia asked me why the zebra was angry, and i told her this tag represents a moment in the "rocky" training montage after the zebra had been rejected from santa's sleigh team.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

December 9, 2007

artist's way guided intent (december)

by gl. at 9:33 pm

on wednesday we hosted the last guided intent of the year! the theme was "abundance" and the activity was blind painting, which combines movement, paint and writing in a very satisfying way. this is my favorite theme and one of my favorite activities! plus, this is the night i get to introduce one of the most valuable tools i learned from my artist's way teacher in san diego: three safe ways to give non-critical feedback. they are experiential rather than judgmental in nature. i described these responses when writing about this event last year.

this event went really well. i wanted to add a body awareness segment this time to get people moving sooner, and that really did help, but in general the whole thing had a great blend of structure and flow. for the feedback i was able to respond first to a piece i thought would make a good example, then ask for someone to respond to another piece, so all the pieces got at least two forms of feedback.

in general i'm keen on finding the right form of feedback for events. i believe that some forms of positive feedback only reward "pretty" art or encourage the idea that if it's not beautiful it's less valuable, which end up creating huge shadows of competition and conformity. bridget & i are still talking about ways to encourage feedback without killing creativity, feedback which explores meaning or encourages risktaking.

[joyce: bridge back to self (click to see the other paintings)]

the next guided intent will be the day after new year's: after the champagne and midnight celebrations, we'll bring "auld acquaintance" to mind by finding new ways to connect fact & fiction. we'll be writing about the imaginary lives of people from old photographs, so we'll begin the new year gently by creating kinship, commonality & contact with these characters -- and other writers!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

December 7, 2007

artist's way: session 11

by gl. at 12:38 pm

our final week is always a surprise when it arrives, even though i often warn us about its coming a month in advance because the participants are assigned a "response project" to present at the last session.

response projects are like final projects but they aren't worth 50% of your grade. (as i kept reminding them, "you can't fail artist's way!") it gives creative cluster members an opportunity to explore one of the arts we've done during our time together or to strike out on their own. because while i very much enjoy creating the opportunity for them to create art at the studio, the point of going through artist's way is to learn to create art outside the studio on your own. :) anyway, some really phenomenal pieces, including a series of images connected to the basic principles, a powerful music cd, a set of art dolls representing everyone in the cluster, a slideshow presentation, a guerilla art project with hearts in library books, a copperplate etching, a small dancing performance, and an artist's book.

after each presentation i gave everyone an specially chosen inspirational magnet and a dried scarlet runner bean from our garden. but there was a lot of gifting going on: laminated hearts, art dolls, books, and even a tiny tea set!

i am pleased to announce that given my experience with this cluster, the 10-week format works! so i'm going to try it again, timing the next artist's way creative cluster with the spring quarterly calendar in april 2008.

center (faith): soup! the studio has a kitchen; why not use it? :) since i believe creativity is not just limited to Art, on the last session we make a stone soup where each member contributes something. i provide a veggie broth base, and this year we had a stew chock full of carrots, onions, parsnips, yams & brussel sprouts. the rosemary is for remembrance. i usually add special star pastini 10 minutes before serving, but one of the particiants brought noodles, so we had starless soup. but the fried onions i got on the outing last week were a big hit!

music: k.d. lang's ingenue

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

November 29, 2007

artist's way: session 10

by gl. at 1:41 pm

this group tends to be in sync: many of the issues that come up in a week are shared among the particpants. this time it was a desire for physical exercise or motion, which doesn't surprise me. as we near the end of the artist's way, physical motion mirrors creative motion; momentum in one sphere often means momentum in the other. also, since we only have one (!) more session left, there are worries about how to maintain these practices, protect the time they've managed to carve out in the week -- and continue to make art!

ordinarily i might do a blind painting exercise at this point, but i kept hearing the group mention music, so i held my breath and opted to try something new. that failed miserably the first time i tried it, and so it took a significant amount of courage to try it again. since then i have attended a music session at creata, which gave me a better baseline for how to facilitate a music event, but i was still nervous, in part because it's an area i still feel pretty uncertain in as an artist. fortunately, it went really well this time!

this activity was possible in large part because one of the participants has a large drum collection she was kind enough to share with us. if i do this again, i need more drums. and a place to keep them. :) i actually ordered some handbells & "boomwhackers," but alas, they haven't gotten here yet. however, i was thrilled to get a chance to use the scarlet star-shaped tambourine sven got me a couple of years ago in anticipation of such an event.

center (autonomy): finding your own way amongst all the other pretty stars.

music: bobby mcferrin's "beyond words."

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

November 24, 2007

artist's way: session 9

by gl. at 7:43 pm

a smaller group this time: two people couldn't make it. i myself barely made it: there were two people waiting outside as i flew down the sidewalk, and they helped me set up. everyone in this group, especially, feels different when they have people missing but it means they get twice as long to check in. the "touchstones" exercise in this chapter seemed pretty popular. one woman came up with a great mantra for her to move beyond her usually introspective nature: "connect, create & commit." i love that! that's very much what artist's way is all about.

one of our members will be in the "thirty" show in december and she said, "people i don't even know might buy something!" so we had a good discussion about why people who don't know you seem more valid than people who do, and talked about the ways in which people are more likely to buy art (or buy anything, really), from people they know (or think they know). so if people you know are buying your art, great! those are the people who really appreciate you and want you to succeed! i went through this when colleen bought the 4x4 version of "you don't own her" and between her, sven & the job club, i've really come to appreciate & better understand the patronage process. :)

this group has asked me to checkin more than once, but they'll get plenty of me when they transition to the "sacred circle" email list, a place for former artist's way participants to maintain their progress with a supportive group who's been through the same thing. a few of us still check in every week, while others go in waves depending on what's going on in their lives. the great thing about it is that whenever you want to get creative again, you'll always have a group to cheer you on!

this week the art activity was "authentic dance." anything with the word "dance" in it is still scary to many participants, which is why we save it till the end. even people who have adapted well to exploring visual creativity exercises find creating art with something as intimate as one's own body is a challenging experience. but i feel quite strongly about exposing people to a wide range of art in order to develop a larger creative vocabulary. and i am always gratified when i know participants would never do something like this except in a creative cluster, because it means they trust the process, they trust the space, they trust the group, they trust me.

authentic dance isn't really necessarily "dance" in the traditional sense. there's no choreography or specific movements you need to accomplish. it's not a "performance." you simply allow your body to move in the way it wants to move next. it's sort of like morning pages that way. if this means you're petrified and you can only wiggle your toes, that's fine. each person had 5 minutes to do this (though usually they have 10). you work in pairs: one of you is a dancer, the other is a witness. the witness' job is to anchor you, to beam good will at you, to watch you as if to look away would cause you to disappear. watching a dance in this way becomes active rather than passive, and allows the dancer to know that only one person is ever really watching them (in a pretty intense way, but it means all your self-consciousness can be narrowed to one person instead of diffused among four and keeps competitiveness at bay).

i know when i first tried this myself i was terrified. i almost refused to do it. understanding i had the option to not move at all gave me a way to try it without feeling (too) foolish. it was horrifying and liberating at the same time, and i never forgot it. this group, though, handled it with much more grace than i did my first time. :)

center (self-protection): each candle safe & beautiful in its own bowl of color. i usually have four bowls, but one of them is still at trillium after the holiday sale. :)

music: a selection of songs from peter gabriel's passion. i especially like "a different drum," "the feeling begins" and "with this love (choir)" for this exercise.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

November 18, 2007

artist's way open studio (november)

by gl. at 10:10 pm

on thursday we hosted our monthly collage night. novembers have previously been dubiously attended, but this month was packed w/ a long waiting list! jill finally got to come and i am pleased when people who have been on the list for a while make it out to an event for the first time, because it feels like the studio is so much cooler than i can convey through email alone!

i wasn't intending on making something thematic, but the catalog candles immediately leapt onto the page and everything else fell into place from there. i've been wanting to use these leaves for a few months now. the flames in the upper half called for shiny bits elsewhere, so i punched some dots from a scrap of gold wrapping paper.

["bountiful": click the image to see the other collages]

also, in the rush of october, i completely (!) forgot to write about the last open studio, where i made this collage:

["eating poetry": click the image to see the other collages]

one of the things i like about collage night is that i see stuff pop back up and i can use it in a different context. the "eating poetry" scraps are from the edible book tea back in march!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

November 16, 2007

artist's way: session 8

by gl. at 11:45 pm

this was a week of "uturns," for the participants, points where they wanted to slide back into old habits and despair. "what's the point?" their inner voices sneered. "why are you bothering to do that?" where "that" could be any number of artistic or expressive things. i'm happy to say that they are doing things despite that voice, relying on their inner muses and "constellation of support," but the antidote came loudly to one participant: "why not?" she told herself. why not, indeed? it doesn't have to mean anything to be fun for you. self expression is a natural human desire, and thinking it has to be profound or appreciated by anyone other than you is a surefire way to keep yourself from doing it. as long as you get something out of it, where's the harm? why not?

this week we did an activity based on "playback theatre," which is always looked upon dubiously at first, but by the end everyone is laughing and energetic and joyful. it is the gateway drug to some of the other performing arts we will be exploring in the next two weeks before the end of artist's way.

after a warmup called "find your mother like a baby penguin," we began with an exercise called "yes and/yes but," where we take turns elaborating on a simple story by saying either "yes, and!" or "yes, but..." between each segment. each phrase produces a different type of story, and you can keep the "yes, and!" stories going longer than the "yes, but..." stories.

playback theatre asks each person to tell a dream, present story or future story to the rest of the group, who re-enacts it for the storyteller as a spontaneous ensemble creation. watching a story in this way offers insight, perspective and catharis for the storyteller, as well as invoking compassion and consideration in the players. since everyone gets to be both storyteller and player, they often have very different feelings about telling the story vs. reacting to someone else's story.

because the weather was so nice, we ended with a game of "red rover" out in the driveway. because we encouraged "cheating," it became more like calvinball, until we weren't really sure who had won, and didn't care! :)

center (compassion): a river of compassion running between two bright candles. a little silver heart is nestled amongst the stones.

music: pink martini's hang on little tomato. a classic! i actually referenced this song in the weekly email i send out to creative cluster participants, and the whole album has a very theatrical feel to it.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

November 9, 2007

artist's way guided intent (november)

by gl. at 10:29 pm

on wednesday night we gathered four strands of possibility in our fingers and wove them together to create poetry. using divination tricks like coins, cards, cookies and cups of darjeeling tea, we poured our hopes and hearts onto the page. this month charles won a new journal to continue writing (and everyone went home with an exotic coin or fortune in their pocket!).

["appreciate the good will of others;" click to see the other prompts]

essentially, we spent the evening writing based on these tangible prompts. at the end, we wrote a poem based on one of the writings we did. we only shared the final poem, not any of the writings.

the first type of possibility is binary: yes or no, heads or tails. so i passed around a little bowl of various foreign coins and we asked a question with a yes or no answer. mine was "will i live to be 100?" and the answer was tails: no. so i wrote about asking the wrong question, because maybe i'll live to be 101, or 1001. 100 is like 2 more lifetimes from now for me, and it's hard to imagine even 10 years in the future. i should have asked "will i have a long, happy life?" -- but what if the answer to -that- was no?

then we picked a tarot card, and i was amazed that i picked "the star," the card i coveted so dearly when sven picked it last time. i love the star! unexpectedly, i started writing about harvesting stars like a fisherman, casting my net into the roaring dark. (i had a physics professor tell me once that if space wasn't a vaccum, we'd hear the roar of the sun all day and the chatter of stars at night). the sound of atoms in the dark, chattering waves of ions & photons riding gravity through space, creating tides & eddies. galaxies like mammoth whales slowly floating across the universe, eating starlight & breathing stardust. i hit a little bump when i wrote: "but where do the stars go after that? we harvest to eat, we harvest to consume, we harvest them for dresses that sparkle, coats so soft and flowing they make people cry as you walk by." the vision of a stardust coat was appealing, but harvesting & killing stars to do it makes me shudder. i don't know if star farms would be a very valid option, either, though stars glowing in barns would be sort of sweet.

this year i actually bought fortune cookies to use instead of using the little bag of fortunes i'm saving for an undetermined art project. cracking open a fortune cookie in an irreplacable kinesthetic experience. my fortune read "appreciate the good will of others." and i do! while writing, as i so often do, i compared it to a scientific principle, in this case e=mc²: an equal exchange of matter & energy. the more goodwill i have for others, the more i will receive in return.

finally, everyone picked a tea cup from the center of the table and i passed around a bowl of loose darjeeling tea. we poured ourselves just enough tea to dip the fortune cookie into and slowly sipped until the pattern was revealed. mine looked like land & sky, with stars or birds hovering in the air. i couldn't decide which they were, which lent itself well to the final part of the night, picking one of the writings to use as the basis of a poem:

the quantum mechanic takes tea

wet and moist with possibility
the tea leaves swell & swarm
leaving land on one side
sky on the other.
there is no tempest in this teapot
only monet or van gogh
each leaf a dab of paint
from an impressionist's paintbrush.

up close, the story is unclear:
swifts chasing a hawk
or stars gently glowing
above a fragrant field?
like a double exposure
each is true but when i choose one
the other will cease to exist.
stars
or
birds?

--*--

the next event is collage night, which is already full, but the next guided intent is one of my favorites: blind painting! and then i'll team up with bridget to teach a wordwear workshop: the strong silent type. whee!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, writing

November 7, 2007

artist's way: session 7

by gl. at 2:46 pm

yesterday was a very emotional creative cluster, as members created day of the dead altars for people they had lost. i asked each participant to bring in a photo or object of someone they had lost, which they could interpret as broadly as they felt comfortable with: the person could be lost through death, distance, misunderstanding, or time.

using anything they could find in the studio, they each built small altars who or what they had lost. these weren't shrines: there was no gluing and nobody took anything home, though i did take pictures i'll develop for them. there's an element of discovery and play to this activity, since they can wander around the studio looking in places they don't usually get a chance to see and using our huge range of materials and objects. (one woman got a bottle of lotion from the bathroom!). after they were ready, i turned down the lights while they wrote a prayer for the person and shared it with the rest of the group. many of them chose their grandmothers & mothers, but one person chose "san francisco" as something she'd lost.

this cluster is really doing well: i found out at checkin that the group had a whole conversation w/o me over email this week! this pleases me in part because the after-artist's-way transition will be smoother for them since they're already in contact with each other. one of the participants was on her way to stay in a fire lookout station, but instead of skipping today entirely she came long enough for the checkin process: "no, i have to hear everyone's checkin!," she said. we all stood on the porch and waved goodbye to her as she left at the break.

center (connection & strength): i believe words have power: each of these stones is etched with a strong word: strength, joy, peace, play, breathe, passion. one small poetry bead, chosen for this activity, simply says "live."

music: cowboy junkies' the trinity session because boy, is it sad.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

November 5, 2007

artist's way: session 6

by gl. at 11:59 pm

"abundance" is one of my favorite chapters in the artist's way, and i always enjoy it when it coincides with halloween so that we can make masks. it makes the studio into a glorious chaos! after several weeks of tidy & contained activities i get to drag out the bins of 3d objects and everyone gets to find ways to use old umbrellas and discarded light bulbs and even prozac pills i got from who-knows-where! now at the halfway point, participants are moving towards activities that require more involvement, stimulus and an awareness of space.

center (abundance): this chapter is usually one of my favorite centerpieces: a large bowl overflowing with apples, which the participants get to take home with them at the end of the evening. i even insert candles into some of the apples. but this year i didn't manage to get apples in time for the session, so i scrambled madly in the morning to find something we had an abundance of and finally remember all our huge stash of acrylics, many of which sven was using for monster month. so they formed the base of the center this week, which then was filled out with a bristling array of brushes, pens & pencils.

music: delerium's karma and poem.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

October 28, 2007

artist's way: session 5

by gl. at 11:13 pm

things are starting to get harder for the group: this was the first week where some of them said they didn't want to show up. but they DID! showing up is a huge part of the equation, and once they were here, they were heard, and they could get to making art, they relaxed. you could see the weight release from them as they focused on blind contour drawing, the art activity of the day. they breathed easier, they smiled, and their checkins at the end of the session were much calmer than they were at the beginning.

it takes courage to be the first person to admit to the group that you're having a bad week. the weeks have flown by and they've been busy bonding, but it's not unexpected to see what julia calls "creative u-turns," where the rest of their lives have not gone as smoothly as the artist's way and are beginning to interrupt and disrupt their progress. all i ask is that they keep showing up. awareness leads to progress.

blind contour drawings start by drawing an object (in this case, two objects because the group is so large: edward gorey's bah humbug & a stuffed bat michaelmas gave me). then they're ready to do self-portraits holding mirrors. then i ask them to draw each other, which means i drag out the large insulation panels to give us more "wall" where the windows are. it's always amazing to me how much insight blind contours drawings give you: when an artist's hands, heart & head are all working in harmony, you really get a chance to see what the artist sees. and when you are drawing each other, it is odd and intense for someone to look at you for an extended period of time. many of them used the word "intimate" when writing about it afterwards, but they also appreciated the opportunity to see and be seen.

center (integrity/possibility): we doubled up on chapters this week, a consequence of shortening the cluster. here we have four glass jars on a mirror, reflecting into infinity. each jar has some sort of unknowable thing in it: tiny glass beads, marbles, a red star, pens & brushes. a candle was set atop. you're seeing it here after i've just dropped something onto the center, splattering wax everywhere.

music: the piano, which worked out well last year as a dramatic "first thing you hear upon the end of media deprivation" album, but this time it just seemed fussy.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

October 20, 2007

artist's way guided intent (october) & misc book arts

by gl. at 8:38 pm

update 10.21.07: updated the planisphere link. thanks for catching that, sven!

two (!) tuesdays ago michaelmas & i went to the "vamp & tramp" trunk show at 23 sandy, which is a stunning collection of artist's books travelling around the country. michaelmas was impressed with "true to life" by julie chen. i loved a book called "read" whose pages were initially red but would turn white with exposure to heat, so while holding it and reading the primary story, another story would be revealed beneath it.

--*--

the next day, wednesday, was the october guided intent here at the studio. the rainy season prompts us to turn inward, which is a good excuse to literally try to "find yourself" by creating a lifemap. lifemaps are a way to visually explore relationships between the people, places and events that have been important to you.

in what i think is a studio first, bridget wrote about her lifemap on her blog! i've never known anyone to write about these events on their own sites when they leave, so this delighted me. it's good to know this stuff is actually happening and i'm not just making it all up, right? it's good to share the consensual hallucination. ;) plus, it's really lovely to see more insight about a piece develop over time. in addition to lifemaps, this month birch won a metallic marker to gild the edges of autumn leaves, and everyone went home with a wish token in their pocket.

[planisphere: click to see more lifemaps!]

i was obviously hugely influenced by the most recent book i've been reading: dava sobel's the planets. i almost always love astronomy books, but this is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. i found myself marking almost every page. it's poetry. it's what i want to be when i grow up.

so i created a little planisphere here: since the format is naturally meant to mark change over time, the "constellations" represent variously "ascending" art-parts of my life: theatre, poetry, computers, calligraphy & facilitation. in the center is my "solar system" at the studio. i very much like this concept; there's a lot more to explore here!

--*--

i still want to write about the open studio/collage night we hosted a couple of nights ago, but the next studio event is another guided intent: "possibility," where we'll use a variety of fortune-telling tricks as writing prompts. we'll create poetry using coins, cards, cookies & tea leaves!

then we'll host our first 2-day workshop: not just a pretty face. we hosted this as a 1-day workshop last time and decided there was so much to cover it would be better as a 2-day workshop, so you'll have plenty of time to study the masters and create rough drafts the first day, then come back refreshed and ready to dive into your final painting the next day!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, exhibits & events, printing

October 18, 2007

artist's way: session 4

by gl. at 2:09 pm

now that it's been a month, some of the initial giddiness has worn off, but at the same time, participants are working hard and really looking forward to meeting every week, rearranging their schedules & childcare to make it to sessions. the energy is almost tangible. there's still some fear about competition and comparison, but so far they've been willing to try new things and supportive of each other. this week there was a lot of talk about the portland open studios tour because participants were so excited to be exposed to new art forms, artists and studios.

this week's art activity was one where you write down every single horrible thing your critic says to you, all the reasons it tells you that you can't write, paint, dance, draw, act, metalsmith, etc. then you highlight the thing that provokes the most emotional reaction and let your hand create a movement based on that emotion. you use that movement to draw a scribble over that page of writing. then you squint & turn it around until you can create something out of it. then you pass it along and other participants contribute to that piece, adding something to it or transforming it to protect you from your critic. this sounds like sort of a silly exercise, but it's amazing to see the transformation, and being able to visibly contribute towards the protection of each other really helps bond the group. though the exercise begins somberly, by the end everyone is smiling in delight and surprise.

this is also the session we begin the ever-popular "media deprivation" exercise for a week, which is one of artist's way's most frustrating and rewarding experiences. no reading, tv, music, radio, movies or *gulp* websites/email for the rest of the week. this is meant to balance out your personal consumption versus production. julia cameron thinks you shouldn't read at all, even if you are a student or you're at work, but i don't think media deprivation is supposed to be a punishment or something that makes things worse for you. so i make exceptions for things which are absolutely essential, situations you don't control, and things that can only happen this week that you have already planned.

the goal is to be conscious. awareness leads to progress. so what this means for me is that i'll scan incoming email to see if it's something that needs to be responded to this week, and if not i'll leave it alone. it means i'll ignore the piling queue of rss feeds demanding my attention daily (though i admit to making exceptions for the blogs of personal, local friends). it means i won't read the rest of the planets this week, a book i totally fell in love with while i was traveling in england. and it means i'll try to be very good about doing more, listening to my own voices and desires instead of relying on the influences of others.

center (power): a well of light bursting through rocks like a volcano. it's surrounded by some stars i bought in england.

music: adam hurst's passages, which i bought immediately upon hearing him play at the 100th monkey opening about a year ago. he also plays on a streetcorner during last thursday on alberta. he's really, really, good.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

October 17, 2007

artist's way: session 3

by gl. at 4:06 pm

the third session of artist's way was right after i got back from england and was, in fact, one of the reasons i came back so early. if the trip would have happened later on, i might have skipped a week and stayed longer in england, but skipping the third session is too soon, since the first four sessions are primarily about developing confidence in the group and trust in the process.

the art exercise was a process i call "love letters": some people see the artist's way as confronting their demons or getting down to work in a grim sort of way. but i want participants to start from a position of strength and love and power, so i really enjoy this exercise. i took an izone photo of some part of themselves they wanted to represent as a self-portrait. then they wrote down everything they liked about themselves, then wrote a poem about it & sharing it. as each poem was shared, each person in the group wrote a 1-line response to it and passed it to the writer. then they're all collaged or decorated onto a card to post at home. it sounds a little silly, but it really works: hearing other people validate, affirm and enhance the things you like about youself is a very powerful experience.

i wish they still made izone film: mine has become very unpredictable and large blobs of undeveloped areas will appear, in addition to shifting the hue fairly red. why did you give up on us, polaroid? i may have to figure out another way to do photos; i really enjoy using them in activities, but without a fairly immediate way to print them, it's not very useful. normal polaroids are much bigger than i'd want.

center (identity): a tray full of chestnuts with one shining candle amongst them. i love chestnuts; they feel like the harbringers of fall.

music: the upbeat moby songs from play, 18 and everything is wrong. but one of the participants brought the eels' "i like birds" to play as part of her checkin and we got up & danced.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

October 2, 2007

artist's way: session 2

by gl. at 4:45 pm

i was relieved when the weather decided to be kind enough today so we could do the poetry walk, which is an exercise where i do a simple loop around the neighborhood and we write down all the nouns and verbs of the things around us (or what they make us think of). the trick is that you can't use adjectives or adverbs. afterwards, we had 20 minutes to write a poem, though it didn't have to use those words or be about the walk. i love that even though we've all been influenced by the same walk, we write dramatically different poems.

falling

with each step
we are escaping
from our boxes
of wood and metal
and fences can't keep us
from the fields
lined with grass
and fallen apples.

we are walking together
but writing alone
each rose glowing red
against its own grey sky.

::oct02.2007::

center (safety): calligraphy pens forming a structure in which art can grow, with the stars shining & encouraging from above, about ready to drop in

music: tracy chapman's new beginning

(and now i'm off to england! tally ho!)

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, writing

September 26, 2007

artist's way: session 1

by gl. at 12:28 pm

it has begun! the tuesday morning clusters had a large response and it looks like a good strong group. every creative cluster is different, and in this one most of the participants are mothers. since that's not something i have any experience with, i'm looking forward to the ways they can uniquely support and encourage each other.

during the usually initially awkward "waiting for everyone to show up" period, i asked them to write down their preconceptions and fears about the creative cluster, then put them in a bowl and left them outside on the porch. it's an idea i got from vicki, who wanted artists in don't think! paint! to "park their prior knowledge of art techniques at the door."

the art activity for the first session is always a 20-minute intuitive collage. it's a deliberately short timeframe to thwart the demons of perfectionism and self-criticism. it might be more appropriate to call it an "exuberant collage" rather than an "intuitive collage" because it more accurately conveys the sense of energy and enthusiasm i see when people are engaged in this activity. afterwards we discussed my favorite form of feedback, which involves three different ways to respond to artwork without being critical about it: descriptive, emotional, and artistic. it's totally deserving of its own post.

we started a bit late so we ended a bit late, and two people really had to leave right on time, so i can see i need to be even more time conscious than usual about begin/end times. i'm usually a good timekeeper at events, so it's not a stretch, but it does mean i have to be really careful about the amount of time each person gets to speak and hold them to it, while not making them feel rushed. that's most difficult in the comments round, in part because i want to make sure people get a chance to speak even if they aren't the type to leap in immediately.

center (intro): an ostrich egg dan gave me, spilling stars onto a scarlet star cloth.

music: the amelie soundrack, which is especially suited for the 20-minute collage, but sets the tone for the whole cluster quite nicely. for this term, instead of waiting for that annoying little red cd player to randomly fail, i picked up some jbl on stage speakers to use with my ipod. i'm already happier. bonus: it comes with a remote, which means i don't have to leap up to adjust the volume between parts of the session.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

September 21, 2007

artist's way open studio (september)

by gl. at 2:02 am

i missed making collages! i didn't realize how much until i hosted the first open studio since the creative hiatus. i don't know why i don't usually make collages on my own, but that's a big reason why i created this event. :)

["heal": click the image to see the other collages]

i tried two other collages before this one, including one where i rubbed watercolor pencils over a page from a braille hymnal. but when this one came together (after i realized we only had 30 minutes left), it almost collaged itself, and i like what it has to say about my love/hate relationship with technology.

--*--

the next studio event is a guided intent, exploring the integrity of our internal geography with lifemaps. we're also offering an interesting "charcoal alchemy" workshop in the lonesome october, "transforming the dark." and then we get to do collage night again october 18!

also, i can hardly believe it, but... artist's way begins next week. eee!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

September 10, 2007

diy alert interview

by gl. at 3:12 pm

last week the lovely & amazing diane gilleland posted an interview about scarlet star studios on diyalert! she was especially kind enough to post it in time to help increase visibility for the artist's way creative clusters. thank you, diane!

the fall clusters have had a lot of momentum so far. i'm happy to announce that tuesday morning is full! there's still plenty of room on monday evening, though, and there's just enough time to decide to get support for your creative process & send in your deposit. what are you waiting for? ;)

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, links

September 6, 2007

artist's way guided intent (september)

by gl. at 11:59 pm

it's september, so this means i'm officially no longer on a creative hiatus! we had our first event of the "new creative season" wednesday night and what a fantastic re-introduction it was, focussing on our strengths rather than our weaknesses. we made "creative blocks" to help keep us motivated and powerful when we get stuck. it was great to see familiar faces again and introduce new people to the studio. everyone had such enthusiasm for getting back to art!

i've started doing prizes for people who come to guided intent: linda won a pack of tiny sharpie markers, and everyone went home with a wish token in their pocket.

[alliteration: click to see more creative blocks!]

people really did some amazing blocks, and several of them were much more sculptural than i would have ever imagined!

during these sorts of events i've often been impressed & pleased that i've been able to make art while faciliating the event. even if it doesn't come out perfectly, i can often see what it means and how it represents a fragment of my Self. but i'm baffled by this. it doesn't speak to me at all. i'm much more interested in what i wrote about it than the object i created.

before we started modifying the blocks, we wrote about our strengths & things we like about ourselves. it seemed like i had a little unfair head start after responding to shu-ju's 10 things i like about myself meme a while back. but it turns out i didn't write about any of that. instead, i wrote about how my creative block usually doesn't keep me from doing stuff, but it does keep me from feeling anything about it, especially joy. afterwards when we wrote down six words that might help us overcome our blocks, i was delighted to discover mine all began with the letter A:

• aware
• appreciate
• anticipate
• act
• awake
• alone

that's poetry waiting to happen. now that i can work with! :) so despite how i feel about my finished block, i still feel i got a lot out of the exercise. and it was great to see what everyone else made!

--*--

the next studio event is our casually creative collage night september 20 (which is already full w/ a waiting list). then we're offering a fun improvisational storytelling workshop, "generate, create, communicate" (perfect for animators -- or gamers! ;). then artist's way begins! next month the guided intent theme will be "integrity," where we'll visually explore the people, places and events that have shaped us. rsvp now!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

August 27, 2007

artist's way creative clusters fall 2007

by gl. at 4:25 pm

yesterday we went to pix for the first "artist's way ice cream social" at pix on division. it's a way to get together members from former artist's way groups with the promise of delicious & unusual ice creams. i had a delicious basil ice cream while others were seduced by the chocolate port fig. (btw, it turns out pix is doing brunch till 2 p.m. again! yay!)

which means summer is drawing to a close and it's a good time to announce the new artist's way creative clusters coming up next month! artist's way is my favorite thing to facilitate; unlike my 1-day events or the classes i host, it allows a unique chance for emotional range and growth over time. it emphasizes making creativity an integral part of of your life, rather than an occasional event. i also love that it works for all forms of creativity, not just visual arts. my goal is to encourage people to make art that is personally meaningful & truthful for them.

this time i made it a 10-week group to fit in better with the public universities' quarterly schedule. the 13-week format has always worked extremely well, but i wanted to remove any other inertias which might be keeping people from joining a creative cluster. but this will certainly keep them on their toes! 10 weeks to explore 10 different arts, 10 weeks to overcome what's keeping you from making more of what you love, 10 weeks to bond with other creative, compassionate companions. i'm really looking forward to it! and i'm thrilled that tuesday morning is already almost full: waiting is always the hardest part. :)

[abundance centerpiece]

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

July 16, 2007

stay awake

by gl. at 10:03 pm

way, way back in december, a former artist's way client asked if sven & i would sing a song for an album she was making, an album of lullabyes for her friend's young son. carol brought us a copy of the album when we hosted the edible book tea in march, and we were delighted and proud (and a little self-conscious) to listen to the CD.

we chose to sing "stay awake" from mary poppins, based on an acappella version by suzanne vega. though sven plays a spirited piano, neither of us are professional singers and it shows, but carol was a total sweetheart to work with. we sang it at least 4 or 5 times, even trying a version where sven tried to harmonize by listening to a recording of me singing alone.

and while i still find it a little embarrasing, i chose to sing and i offer it here for two reasons:

1. i want to support people who want to make things. so if someone wants me to sing, who am i to refuse? i'm thrilled carol created this album; anything to help her make music is a gift i'm happy to provide.

2. i think we should all do creative things from time to time that we feel we can't do: not in public, not where other people might see, not in front of an audience!

[unter anshel's vigele: click the image to hear "stay awake"!]

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, other art

June 28, 2007

artist's way open studio (june)

by gl. at 12:01 am

the last open studio before my creative hiatus went out with a bang! i have been RSVPing for 10 with the expectation that 7 or 8 will show up, but for this event we had 9! that makes for a packed studio with plenty of lively & creative people. :)

["summer solstice": click the image to see the other collages]

it was the solstice, which is one of my favorite seasonal markers, though it's hard to accept that we've now turned away from the light and are heading back into the dark season.

so i guess i'd better enjoy the sunlight while i can! i just have a couple of other events to wrap up (mostly write about), and then i have a whole summer waiting for me! eee!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

June 18, 2007

good google!

by gl. at 11:15 pm

google finally sees us! after over two years of languishing in obscurity as hit 257, a search for "portland artist's way" will finally take you to our artist's way offerings on the first hit -- even though i would have been happy to end up anywhere on the first page. there truly isn't a better artist's way link in portland and it was driving me crazy that we were so hard to find, even falling below a woman who simply used an artist's way quote on her page!

the change probably accounts for a few of the fall inquiries we've had lately, even though we haven't really begun to promote it yet. i am so relieved i can feel myself actually breathe differently. but it's also a little unsettling, because we haven't done anything differently and i worry we'll vanish again as quickly as we rose.

before i realized google had given us a boost, i reformated the artist's way structure this term, too: instead of 12 weeks, we're going to try for 10, beginning with the other portland colleges on the quarter system. i have previously been dead set against changing the length, because i've both taught & taken shorter creative clusters and by the time you finally develop enough trust in the process, the group & yourself, it's over! my goal is to get you to habitualize the process so it maintains some momentum after we stop meeting, and it's harder to do that when it's shorter. but a shorter term will give me a little more time to promote after the summer ends and i hope it attracts more people who find the longer class another hurdle to overcome their creative inertia.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

June 8, 2007

artist's way guided intent (june)

by gl. at 7:28 pm

the last artist's way guided intent before our creative hiatus will leave a lasting impression! masks naturally invite deep personal explorations, so it was wonderful to have such an open, willing, vulnerable group. it was fun to meet new people and encourage regulars.

[waxing & waning: click the image to see some of the other masks]

we wrote before we began making the masks and before we shared our masks w/ the group. the first prompt asked, what part of myself do i hide, or what part of my personality is a defense? i hide the part of myself that is unsure. i feel like i have to be "on" all the time. that's why i love this moon mask, as it demonstrates that one can wax & wane and still shine. i wrote, "i am not the sun: i do not consume myself and spit out flame." it has a a spray of stars wrapped around its dark side and gleaming gems embedded on its outer edge.

this was the last guided intent we'll have until september, where we'll explore our "creative blocks!" one more open studio/collage night on the solstice, and then i will try very hard to do nothing for two months. we'll see how that goes!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

May 18, 2007

artist's way open studio (may)

by gl. at 10:33 pm

a quiet, kind & prolific group this month. many new people that i very much enjoyed meeting, the kind of people where you find yourselves working together in a comfortable silence. and for the first time in a long time, we had TWO boys at an event at the same time. i like events that are age & gender balanced, and this one was both.

i try to market open studio as "our most casual event," which means that because it's free i don't have to spend time or brainspace facilitating it, even though hosting it requires some small amount of facilitation. previously, this also meant that we didn't have introductions at the beginning or sharing at the end, because sometimes they can get out of hand, but this time i wanted to try it as a way to shape the event somewhat, and i'm glad i did.

["so good night, with lullabye": click the image to see the other collages]

i didn't realize where i was going with this until after it was put together, at which point it very much made me think of nathan's mother, who just died from cancer. he's been writing these posts about her funeral and her death and i can tell the words have touched me, even though i'm thousands of miles away. the text you probably can't read next to her arm is from "a midsummer night's dream":

Come our lovely lady nigh
So good night, with lullabye

if this piece feels incomplete, it's because i had intended to fill the part above NEXT with a jumbled pile of transfer letters. i bought an obscene amount at art media because they were discontinuing them, and i tried some at collage a couple of months ago that were so smooth and elegant that i knew i had to have some. but these must not have been the same brand, because i could not get a clean transfer off any letter i tried:

i don't know if i'll leave the collage the way it is or if i'll try to think of something else. i rarely go back and do anything with art after an event (much to the chagrin of my "unfinished projects" box).

next month is our last set of events until i go on hiatus (dare i say "vacation"?) for july & august. the one i'm most excited about is an andy-goldsworthy inspired workshop at Mt. Hood that i'm facilitating (down to earth). it took me years to find the perfect location, and now it looks like i'll only get to offer it once, so i hope it's awesome! :)

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

May 3, 2007

artist's way guided intent (may)

by gl. at 10:13 pm

lynn facilitated our "safety" guided intent this month. this was the first time she's taught soulcollage but i'm really glad to give her that opportunity, because she was such a pleasure and had such gentle enthusiasm. i know lynn through the other regular artist's way group in portland, the one that's offered through the unitarian church.

one of the things i like about having other people at the studio is seeing how they use the studio differently than i do. lynn spread out the images all over the studio so that people moved around to find images, even sitting on the floor to sort through the huge pile there! then we gathered at the table to make the soulcollages, and afterwards we broke into pairs to talk about our cards, using the "i am the one who..." process. i think these kinetic landmarks really helped mark the different stages of soulcollage.

i actually made two soulcollages! the first one is still a little vague for me; i don't really know what it means yet. but the second one absolutely delights me. this is one of my favorite collages (i know, didn't i say that last time?). whenever i see it i think, "yes! that's one of my best selves!" and i really want that feeling of lightness and joy again, the kind where you close your eyes to listen to yourself hum and you've gotta dance just because the moon is shining. though you can't see it very well, the dancing fish & the water droplets are shiny.

["silence" & "inner joy": click the images to see the other soulcollages]

i'm facilitating the next guided intent in june, at which point i'll be taking the summer off, so the guided intent after that will be in september. the theme for june is "identity" and features mask-making. i've only ever done this in an artist's way creative cluster, so it will be interesting to see how it works in a more general setting. but so far, i've always been amazed at what gets made! having it as part of guided intent will also mean that i get to create one -- which i haven't done yet!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

April 20, 2007

artist's way open studio (april)

by gl. at 11:28 pm

what a lovely time last night! it was exactly what i want in a group: lively, generous, fluid conversation with plenty of art at the end. i think it helped that i tried to set a positive intent early on, and specifically asked people to be considerate of everyone: no politics or boy bashing. (i wish i had a better word than "boy bashing," though it's primarily what i want to eliminate.) instead, i asked people to talk about what they loved, or what they wanted to be doing.

i was thrilled joanne came! joanne was from one of my first artist's way groups in the studio, and she just got back from a trip to spain. she biked here on the springwater corridor trail, a route i have to remember to tell bicyclists coming from that side of town.

[flight: click the image to see the other collages]

i think this is one of my favorite collages. it's built on a card, but the hands and leg escape the borders. i couldn't bear to cut them off, so when they get put into a card they'll be folded over the edge. this would be a great time to learn some pop-up book techniques. :)

the next event is also collage, a guided soulcollage introduction may 2 that is already full. it's being led by someone i know from the unitarian artist's way group who has been trained by the creator of soulcollage, seena frost.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

April 5, 2007

artist's way guided intent (april)

by gl. at 3:31 am

i was so exicted to have dayna here tonight! dayna was in my artist's way creative clusters two years ago but she shot off like a rocket & is now leading her own groups in salem and art classes all over the state. ordinarily when i host an event for someone else, i supply the, um, supplies, but dayna brought boxes and boxes and boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff!

she also asked me to lead the initial writing segment because it's not something she ordinarily does, but is interested in doing it more. because i wasn't facilitating, the first page wasn't all about thinking about the other people and how they were doing or what needed to be done next.

but i had "play by the rules" echoing in my head, so i wrote about the tension between my healthy respect for and desire for rules/structure and my appreciation for the phrase, "it's better to beg forgiveness than seek permission." as the timer beeped, i ended with, "when i don't like the rules, i make up a new game."

["breaking the rules": click the image to see the other shrines]

this was a hard object to take a picture of! it's constructed very much like a tunnel book, so the round object in the center is about an inch away from the top of the shrine, though 3 layers of box.

this marks a whole year of events based on artist's way themes, and brings us back to the beginning: safety. for many people, the easiest & safest tool to explore art is via collage, so i'll be hosting an introduction to SoulCollage to explore how we hold a safe space for ourselves and our creativity.

and i enjoyed dayna facilitating so much that i'm looking forward to another guest facilitator! for soulcollage it will be lynn sherman, who i know from the artist's way group at the unitarian church! lynn also came to the Fabulous End-of-Summer August Art Swap, where she surprised herself by discovering she wanted to inspire & support artists via fundraising & grants.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

March 17, 2007

open studio second anniversary & edible book tea

by gl. at 9:17 pm

beware the ideas of march! the open studio second anniversary & edible book tea contained a wonderful range of "books": creative & tasty non-fiction, poetry, journals and reference materials. it's sort of an odd anniversary: we've actually had artist's way events for over 3 years, but the first open studio, where we branched out into regular events, was two years ago.

i printed excerpts of "eating poetry" by mark strand onto crepes using a gocco machine w/ chocolate sauce. i wanted to make an interactive piece so everyone could print their own crepe. gocco-ing with chocolate was one of those things i knew was theoretically possible, but i couldn't find anyone who had done it before. shu-ju mentions trying some tests for the iprc text ball, but it didn't work out.

in all i spent about 15 hours working out the details of the gocco chocolate-printing process, which i'll write about in another post. i was a little nervous, epecially when my first experiments earlier in the week were dubious. so when we printed the first crepe at the event, i was thrilled and relieved to discover it had worked!

["eating poetry" setup]

[gocco crepe print: click the image to see the other edible books!]

also, it's one thing to make a technically edible book, but to make a tasty edible book is even harder. crepes, homemade whipped cream & strawberries are delicious even without poetry. :)

our next guided intent event features dayna collins, a former artist's way creative cluster member! she's really doing great work in salem, and when i saw the matchbox shrines she made during the virtual open studio in january, i knew they would be perfect for the last theme in the guided intent series, which is faith:

"Faith is an essential component of our art. We should all have a holy reminder of our commitment to create, helping us pray for guidance & courage. So come create tiny matchbox shrines to celebrate & believe in our arts! "Faith" is the last of the Guided Intent series before we begin the cycle anew. So I am thrilled to announce our first guest facilitator for a Guided Intent: Dayna Collins, who is one of our own members!

"Dayna is a collage, assemblage, and mosaic artist and is the founder of Alley Art, an eclectic art style that incorporates collage with 3D mixed media on bowling pins! She facilitates Artist's Way groups in Salem. Dayna offers workshops on a variety of topics in Portland, Salem, and Sisters, and works part-time as a counselor at Serenity Lane. Her passion is helping others discover their own creativity and living a life filled with joy."

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, other art

March 8, 2007

artist's way guided intent (march)

by gl. at 7:34 pm

spring is in the air and art is blossoming! coordinating mind, heart & hand was the purpose of last night's blind contour drawing activity. we drew and drew and drew and drew! I can't even believe how much we drew!

each of us started with a random object and swapped with each other at the end of 10 minutes. we did that excercise four times. then we did a self-portrait; then we did portraits of each other; then we colored the enclosed spaces on one or more drawings.

[self-portrait & microscope: click the picture to see the other photos]

i've done a much better blind self-portrait before: in fact, it's what originally made me so happy about the process. but i've discovered that if part of your brain is faciliating the event, it's difficult to approach it with the same amount of zen. :) this self-portrait looks like two portraits, each at different angles. but i think my hair is spot on. ;)

the most disappointing part of this event was the attrition rate again. this time, half of the rsvps didn't appear and never contacted me. man, that sucks. it looks like the only strategies left are to collect payment in advance or stop hosting them. i have two more guided intents i -must- host because i have guest facilitators (eee!), but it's not like i make enough money off the guided intent to be worth all this hassle, so the latter option is not out of the question.

having said that, i'm very excited about the next event, which is the edible book tea to celebrate our second anniversary! i very much enjoy celebrating creativity of all types, including culinary, and i was charmed when i attended something like this in san diego several years ago.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

February 20, 2007

artist's way open studio (february)

by gl. at 2:46 am

i don't think this collage has -any- shiny on it! :) nothing even very unusual: it's all clippings from magazines. everything simply found its way into my hands. i like the composition quite a bit. i've also hit a couple of surprising interpersonal realtionship bumps for which this image is pretty appropriate.

[release: click the image to see the other collages]

i deliberately overbooked 10 in a studio that seats 8, and so when the first person changed their RSVP, I didn't panic -- but we still ended up with 7 people, i think. i'm also still debt collecting from the last artist's way guided intent, which is one of my least favorite activities (right up there with flyering).

in general it was a lively event, though with a underlying tension and competive (!)dynamic i still need to sort through. one of the participants, especially, felt particularly overbearing, and then that just set off a couple of the others. a new boy came and i felt we weren't as inclusive of him as i would have liked. i just want people to come & make art, you know? i often feel the guided intents are more successful in part because they're so structured, so it's difficult for any one person to monopolize the group.

in fact, the next event is a guided intent featuring blind contour drawing. :) and after that, to celebrate our second year of open studio, i am very excited to host an edible book tea! i attended one of these in san diego w/ terrilynn & loved it so much!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

February 11, 2007

artist's way guided intent (february)

by gl. at 11:54 am

this was a pretty successful event! i was nervous about it because i don't do the fabric arts much at all, but part of the goal of the guided intent is to push my own boundaries, too. i was epescially worried that we wouldn't have enough time for such an ambitious event: we had two hours total, and only a little over an hour of work time when you accounted for introductions, writing & sharing.

we wrote about what needs protection and what it needs protection from. i wrote that i need protection from my mental gremlins that keep me from enjoying the present because i have so much left to do in the future.

["twilah": click the picture to see the other photos]

"i am the one who can manage it all, beautifully & unfraid, while my heart beats above and the sky beats below. i am the one who sings with the frogs in the gathering twilight." the threads represent my tasks which are neatly gathered in her arms, leaving her room for peace and emotions. you can't see it well at all, but she's covered in very small rhinestones, glittering like stars. her "hat" is a piece from the porch star lamp we retired last year.

the next guided intent is blind contour drawing: "You have a life and vitality that is yours alone. Retain your autonomy by exploring your unique vision! Blind contour drawing is often a reflection of your truest perceptions because it teaches you to draw what you really see rather than how you think something should look. You learn to rely on your senses and self: allowing your eyes to see, your mind to think, and your hand to act. Learning to draw this way will increase your artistic freedom, independence & self-reliance. Trust the process! Trust yourself!"

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

January 22, 2007

last chance to find your muse (aka artist's way)

by gl. at 11:32 pm

i can't believe i haven't posted about the next round of artist's way yet. technically, the rsvp deadline for this is tomorrow, but i'll (obviously) be extending it. :)

this is essentially what i've been promoting:

Give yourself the time & space this year to find your muse at our abundant and inspiring studio! Whether you love visual, literary or performing arts, when you commit to finding your muse you will also find confidence, courage and compassionate companions. Your facilitator, Gretchin Lair, is a creative advocate known for her "splendid mix of art and honesty" and "quiet leadership."

"Find Your Muse" is based on The Artist's Way (if you've tried to get through The Artist's Way alone, come join us!). But we go far beyond the book, actively exploring a wide range of art activities designed to encourage your muse and stretch every aspect of your creativity. After you find your muse you'll be ready to create fearlessly & truthfully!

Two choices for Spring 2007: only $260 for 13 weeks!
(RSVP and $130 deposit due by January 23)

Tuesday nights
6:30-9 p.m.
January 30-April 24

Wednesday mornings
10 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
January 31-April 25

for more about my Portland Artist's Way oppportunities, please visit:
http://www.scarletstarstudios.com/artistsway/

(If a creative cluster doesn't work for you this time, there's always our independent support option, where you can find your muse on your own schedule!)

this year i hired posterchild to do the flyering since i hate that so very much. next time i'll probably do the same but with a much longer lead time: my reach is broader than she expected. :)

i also did the usual rounds of lists, craft calendars, meetup, wweek, mercury, craigslist, etc. my perpetual agony is that google refuses to rank us within the first 500 hits for a "portland artist's way" search. why, google, why? everything else you link to links to us, but we're buried on page 10. i just discovered the unitarian church finally got their class schedule up for the first time this year, and they're right at the top of the list. how does that happen? (google also won't show scarlet star studios as a useful hit when searching for "gretchin lair," either. between that and spam filters marking our mail as spam, it's difficult to have the faith in the internet i once had.)

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

January 19, 2007

artist's way virtual open studio review

by gl. at 1:37 am

i cancelled the usual collage event because yesterday i was worried that the ice at the bottom of the hill would be unsafe. but it was our first open studio of the new year, and i didn't want to start it with NOT making art, so i decided to try a virtual open studio instead.

i am pleased to say i think it was a smashing success! we had twice as many participants as the studio can normally hold, and we reached people who are usually unable to attend studio events. i told them they didn't have to limit themselves to collage (but that they should make a collage if they wanted or if they were spending too much time thinking about what art they should be working on). it was fun to keep the momentum up the whole day. i asked them to send a picture after they were done, which most of them did. i couldn't believe the range of contributions!

[3 of hearts: click the image to see the other amazing pieces]

for instance, these are three small stuffed hearts about the size of my palm. i have no idea what sort of fabrics these are, but i've been saving them forever because they are soft & pretty. the red heart has a poetry bead sewn onto it w/ raffia: once i can start adding words to things, my kung fu will be unstoppable! bridget mentioned i could use iron-on transfers, and i'm thinking about the gocco fabric kit. yeee!

this looks small, but you have no idea how much this tickles me. toby primarily made this possible, but i was also inspired by seeing some charming felt-based hearts with rustic stitching a while back. i would never have actually tried them had it not been for my success w/ toby, though. i have discovered if i can sew with a blunt tapestry needle with a wide eye, that solves many of my prior grudges against sewing. i may never get anything delicate & elaborate out of this arrangement, but i can make cute things now, which is not something i ever expected to do. hoorah!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

January 4, 2007

artist's way guided intent (january)

by gl. at 4:58 pm

an excellent group last night at the studio, and only one person didn't show! that was such a relief! we had four writing rounds where i asked them to pick from a pile of old photos vicki lind gave me for an artistic purpose. they picked a different photo for each round:

• stream of consciousness (good intro to the morning pages style)
• write as if you're the one taking the picture
• write as if...
  • you miss them
  • they've made you angry
  • you're grateful
  • they're sick & you don't know if they'll make it
• write about the relationship between the people in the photo

sometimes i know what the theme, the date & the basic activity for a guided intent is going to be, but i don't really know how it will happen in practice. since people pay for the guided intents and i'm terrible at improv, i can't just "wing it," but sometimes it takes me a while to figure out how i'm really going to run the event.

for this event, that process worked out pretty well. i finally sat down yesterday afternoon and worked out how many writing exercises we could fit in and in what order they should occur to maximize the buildup of time, perspective & emotional investment. during the event, when i realized we had a few more minutes at the end, i tried to throw in an extra improv writing activity which didn't make much sense to people, but we worked though it to get to a better idea that i'll use the next time i run this activity ("write as if you're the one taking the picture"). incidentally, this is one of the reasons why people not showing up affects the guided intent: one less person at an event could mean as much as 15 extra minutes at the end of the night.

["diane remembers": click the picture to see the other photos]

this is one of the photos that inspired me during the last round. below is an excerpt from that writing. the girls here are cousins: the older one is named diane, the younger one is named megan.

diane is in a lonely place, simultaneously too young for her family and too old for this one. she'll remember carrying megan around carefully, around and around the living room until her arms ached. diane will remember chasing megan up and down the stairs, megan shrieking in delight. diane will remember holding megan in the bright october sunlight for what seemed like hours until everyone got the picture they were looking for. megan won't remember any of it. by the time she sees this photo in an album 30 years from now, she will have lost contact with that entire side of the family. didn't diane get into graphic design? or was she the one who became a born-again christian?

the next open studio is full & i'm slightly hopeful everyone will show up. i've taken to sending personal "don't forget!" messages a week and then a day beforehand to give people the opportunity to bow out if they're going to, still leaving me enough time to find the next person on the waiting list. i implemented a $5 first-time only fee, but i'm really uncomfortable with it and may instead switch to a confirmation request to first-timers: if i don't hear from them by a certain date, i will open their spot to another participant.

the next guided intent is one i've been waiting to announce since the Fabulous End-of-Summer August Art Swap! i'll get to use the featureless fabric dolls claudia brought for our next theme, which is self-protection. i'm feeling more confident about it after making toby!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

December 22, 2006

artist's way open studio (december)

by gl. at 2:04 am

a very lovely group tonight, including a recent artist's way grad! they were remarkably comfortable with each other. flu knocked a lot of the original attendees off the list, but a last-minute announcement filled the studio.

only one RSVP didn't show, but combined with an argumentative member who didn't attend the event he RSVPed for, i finally revised my policies concerning first-time RSVPs. that makes me sad: i certainly don't want to discourage new members, but neither do i want empty seats at the studio! at this point 80% of the first-time RSVPs from Meetup never show, which just breaks my heart because there are usually people on the waiting list who could come but i have to turn them away. so starting next month i'll require a $5 deposit to hold the space for first-time attendees at a studio event. this isn't much of an issue with people on the studio's events list, so the policy currently applies only to Meetup members.

[dare to love completely: click the image to see the other collages]

a silly story of two bunnies in love. it's meant to look a little child-like. the sun is shining, the hills are alive, birds are singing, the stars are shining even when you can't see them. the bunnies aren't embarassed to be in love with each other. faux-bows poke out the holes of the vietnamese (?) homework.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

December 8, 2006

artist's way: week 13

by gl. at 11:23 pm

our final week is always a surprise when it arrives, even though i often warn us about its coming a month in advance because the participants are assigned a "response project" to present at the last session.

response projects are like final projects but they aren't worth 50% of your grade. (as i kept reminding them, "you can't fail artist's way!") it gives creative cluster members an opportunity to explore one of the arts we've done during our time together or to strike out on their own. because while i very much enjoy creating the opportunity for them to create art at the studio, the point of going through artist's way is to learn to create art outside the studio on your own. :) anyway, some really phenomenal pieces, including a hand-carved creativity chest, a set of photocollages, a family scrapbook/memoir, a shadowbox assemblage & handmade doll clothes!

afterwards, i gave everyone a different word stone reflecting their journey through the artist's way. but i forgot to take a group photo! i got pix of response projects, but not people. :(

center (faith): soup! the studio has a kitchen; why not use it? :) on the last night we make a stone soup where each member contributes something. i provide a veggie broth base, and this year we had butternut squash, mushrooms, onions and lemon pepper chicken soup in addition to smoked mozzerella spread w/ crackers, linder chocolates and newman-o's. but i forgot to add the special star pastini 10 minutes before serving, so we had starless soup.

music: the stupid cd player decided it didn't want to play k.d. lang's ingenue until after everyone was gone, so our last session was quiet except for the gurgling of the new water fountain i just got.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

December 7, 2006

artist's way guided intent (december)

by gl. at 2:19 am

we got down & dirty at the studio tonight. in fact, we explored 3 different ways to explore our personal strengths: a mindmap, an illustration and finally a life plaque.

we met two new people, which was nice, both from new york and recent portland residents. but the biggest disappointment was that we had another full studio RSVPed, but only 4 of us ended up playing together. afterwards i had to remind people that since our events often fill quickly, an RSVP who doesn't show means a missed opportunity for someone else. i know things come up, but if their plans change, i want them to give us as much notice as possible to give another artist a chance to play. imstead, i spent time after the event in the role of debt collector, which is quite distressing.

[my life plaque: click the picture to see the other life plaques and visualizations]

there is a waiting list for the next artist's way open studio/collage night on the solstice, and boy, i hope everyone makes it. the next artist's way guided intent is next year, january 3. we'll be exploring compassion by writing imaginary stories about people in old photographs, discovering our rich capacity for tolerance, mercy & forgiveness (both for ourselves and others).

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

December 6, 2006

artist's way: week 12

by gl. at 12:21 am

we worked with clay last week. this was similar to something you'll see again tomorrow for the next guided intent, but this was more of a sensory experience. the clay exercise is often difficult for participants because unlike almost every other activity, we don't keep what we make and we don't talk about it or write about it. we make it, destroy it, and make something else, over and over again. in this case, we actually did make a tile to keep: i asked them to pick a word they felt described themselves and using my word stones kit, we stamped those words into the tiles. i wanted to see how it would work for tomorrow's guided intent activity.

(aside: the magnetic poetry people responded magnificently when i wrote them to ask if i could just order one letter stamp to replace one i had lost-- the dot above the 'i'. they offered to replace it and a couple of more letters of my choosing for free! including shipping! i think that's some of the best online service EVER!)

the night started out a little oddly, so during our usual breathing & stretching exercises i asked everyone to stand up and stomp around until they couldn't stomp anymore. later i knew we would be slapping clay down hard on boards, so stomping was a pretty good introduction and helped disperse some of the oddness.

center (autonomy): two paths to independence: the serene command "be" and the sparkling irrepressible "imagine."

music: i meant to use bobby mcfarrin's beyond words, but i forgot it over at the house, so i used norah jones' feels like home instead.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

November 27, 2006

artist's way: week 11

by gl. at 4:55 pm

we're getting near the end now, so we're moving into the messier, large scale arts. last tuesday it was blind painting, which is a little scary for students but always produces interesting work. this group took to it pretty easily.

one of my favorite parts of the blind painting exercise is using it as an opportunity to explain my favorite form of feedback, which involves three distinctly different types of responses (descriptive, emotional & artistic: i described these responses when writing about october's guided intent event). if i didn't throw so much at them at the beginning, i would do this response process several times during the cluster, because it only gets better with repetition.

center (self-protection): more with the versatile bowls. this was actually an intuitive center i created quickly for one of my independent support clients last week, but the prep for the blind painting exercise is pretty involved and i couldn't get it all done in time, so i used this one again.

music: paul simon's rhythm of the saints.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

November 17, 2006

artist's way open studio (november)

by gl. at 12:10 am

small collage group tonight. we had a waiting list till this week, when people began dropping like flies. after the dust had settled, we had 7 rsps -- but only ended up with 4 people at the event, one of whom i didn't even know was coming. argh. maybe it's seasonal: last year our november event was the smallest even though the rsvps were large. i just wish people would rsvp conscientiously. even though we have a waiting list, by the time most rsvps decide not to come, those waiting have likely already made other plans.

so, it was quiet and i was a little distracted. i collaged a new notebook to carry around, though: my previous notebook is almost done, hanging on by just a few spirals and with only 2 pages left.

[doubtless guest: click the image to see the other collages]

i'm sure you're shocked to discover this has a lot of shiny on it that you aren't seeing. the background is a satin-shine wrapping paper (shield may recognize it), and the purple stripes are also shiny. the red circle-star above is a shiny gold and the red stars in the lower corner are shiny, too. the light bluish star in the half-circle has a small jewel in its center, and the green painted paper has copper foil accents.

my biggest mistake: i knew this was for a notebook, which requires a stronger bond, but i forgot to use matte medium to glue all the pieces. i sealed it with matte medium, but it won't take long for the glue stick underneath it all to dissolve, and then there will be trouble.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

November 15, 2006

artist's way: week 10

by gl. at 8:09 pm

this was the last time the whole group will be together until the last night (which we are rapidly approaching in three weeks!). so i reshuffled some events to do the playback theatre exercise, because the more, the merrier!

i forgot to do warm ups ("yes and/yes but" and "find your mother like a baby penguin), but it was still a terrific night. this group was very dubious about this activity, but by the end we were laughing so hard we were crying. unlike when i do this activity as a stand-alone option, in a group that's been together for several weeks, the stories tend to be more emotional and the players are invested in the characters they are portraying. afterwards they said it was "cathartic" and fun and less painful and more engaging than they had imagined it would be. which is very gratifying, since my goal is to convince them that all art is less painful and more engaging than they imagine once they begin!

one of the things i'm still working on as a facilitator is about feeling inadequate and dumb whenever i feel resistance from a group. whenever i begin to feel someone in the group is set against the activity, i immediately think, "oh, no. it's going to fail! oh no! they'll know i'm a terrible facilitator!" i do this no matter how many times the activity has been sucessful before, no matter how much i know they'll like it at the end. it takes all my will not to buckle and apologize, not to give up before it's even begun.

center (compassion): i loved these bowls when i first saw and immediately imagined candles inside them. i like how this reminds me of the diagrams of how white light is created.

music: pink martini's hang on little tomato. a classic! i actually referenced this song in the weekly email i send out to creative cluster participants, and it the whole album has a very theatrical feel to it.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

November 12, 2006

artist's way: week 9

by gl. at 3:15 pm

we had a very small group last week: one was a known quantity, the others had horrible misadventures. but i was pleased they all checked in with the group and let me know before the class began. since i had planned for a large group activity, this meant i could hastily pick a different activity for the two who were left, and since it would be a pair, i ended up shuffling the authentic dance exercise into this session. one of the other reasons why i shuffled this activity forward was because on the participants who attended will not be here when i had originally planned on doing this activity, and because she had shared a story about her desire to dance, i wanted her to have this opportunity. and at the end, the other participant said, slightly surprised, "that wasn't so hard!"

authentic dance is usually an activity i save for the next-to-the-last session, after we've done a couple of other expressive art activities. it's scary for most people. but again, i feel quite strongly about exposing people to a wide range of art in order to develop a larger creative vocabulary. and i am always gratified when i know participants would never do something like this except in a creative cluster, because it means they trust the process, they trust the space, they trust the group, they trust me.

authentic dance isn't really necessarily "dance" in the traditional sense. there's no choreography or specific movements you need to accomplish. you simply allow your body to move in the way it wants to move next. it's sort of like morning pages that way. if this means you're petrified and you can only wiggle your toes, that's fine. you have 10 minutes to figure out how your body wants to move. you work in pairs: one of you being a dancer, the other being a witness. the witness' job is to anchor you, to watch you as if to look away would cause you to disappear. watching a dance in this way becomes active rather than passive, and allows the dancer to know that only one person is ever really watching them (in a pretty intense way, but it means all your self-consciousness can be narrowed to one person instead of diffused among four).

i know when i first tried this myself i was terrified. i almost refused to do it. but by that point i was beginning to trust the process, and understanding that i had the option to not move at all gave me a way to try it without feeling (too) foolish. it was horrifying and liberating at the same time, and i never forgot it.

center (strength): what says strength better than bricks? unless they also remind you to tap your inner strength and ask art everything. a simple red & white candle pattern edges them.

music: peter gabriel's passion. each wished they had gotten the music of the other, as one segment of the cd was quieter and one was more "dramatic."

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November 9, 2006

artist's way guided intent (november)

by gl. at 2:23 am

tonight we explored a wide variety of dreams, as well as events both real and imagined. the studio is a flexible space: all the tables and art were whisked away, leaving a blank "canvas" to hold the stories as they were spun, safe from the wet november night.

playback theatre is potentially vulnerable but a lot of fun, in part because you get to enjoy such a wide range of roles. during the course of the evening I became a baby penguin, a pair of scissors, a strong-willed Russian woman about to be betrothed, a groom at his wedding, a woman renting her spare room, and a chemistry teacher!

at the end, i wrote: "i forgot how much fun it was to do this. i always do. i feel energized. i feel like even though i wasn't a storyteller, i did get to tell a story. even when we would tweak the stories after feedback from the storyteller, it didn't feel like i screwed up, but rather like i had the chance to do better, to create the story that wanted to be told. i like that attitude about art: whatever i make isn't wrong, but there might simply be a better way to tell its story."

since I was participating in the stories that were being told, i didn't get any pictures to show you this time, but if you want to see the special comfy chair for our storytellers to "direct" the action, here it is, more or less in situ:

[the storytelling chair]

there is a waiting list for the next artist's way open studio/collage night on next week, but the next artist's way guided intent is december 6. we'll be making life plaques (inspired by dayna!). playing with clay will ground you during the frenzy of the holidays, and you'll carry a reminder of your best self home with you.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

November 7, 2006

artist's way: week 8

by gl. at 8:00 am

we had to move artist's way last week because it fell on halloween, so you'll see two artist's way posts closer together than normal.

we met on nov02, which is the day after day of the dead. so i asked each participant to bring in a photo or object of someone they had lost. i said they could interpret this as broadly as they felt comfortable with: the person could be lost through death, distance, misunderstanding, or time. using anything they could find in the studio, they each built small altars for the people they lost (not shrines: there was no gluing and nobody took anything home, though i did take pictures i'll develop for them). since so many of the altars used candles, i turned down the lights while they wrote a prayer for the person. then we burned the prayers, releasing them. this exercise often produces tears, even when the lost souls aren't necessarily the most emotional ones the participants could have chosen.

after the cluster ends, one of the participants wants to start her own group close into belmont, in part to cater to other mothers of young children, modifying the process to "accommodate, embrace and explore mothering as a component of the artistic process." hooray! i love it when people see far enough into the artist's way to know it is an adaptable path, suitable to a wide range of different approaches and audiences.

center (connection): i don't really know what this was about, but i liked the keys. the keys to the underworld?

music: loreena mckennitt's the visit. she's got a wonderfully haunting, lonely voice, especially on this cd.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

October 25, 2006

artist's way: week 7

by gl. at 11:24 pm

this week is my favorite chapter and i always enjoy it when it coincides with halloween so that we can make masks, which makes the studio into a glorious chaos. after several weeks of tidy & contained activities i get to drag out the bins of 3d objects and everyone gets to find ways to use discarded lamp shades and broken water faucets and even the keys to the svan that broke at mph's birthday party! now at the halfway point, this is an activity that is both invigorating and kinetic, and begins an arc that moves the participants from primarily solitary, self-reflective activities into self-expression activities w/ group dynamics. for instance, this is an activity that encourages participants to work with each other to share materials & supplies & space, yet remain focused to complete a mask in a fairly short amount of time.

center (abundance): orginally filled with 20 apples overflowing from the bowl, this is a picture after the evening was over and everyone took some apples with them. still, i love the composition, with the leaves gathered from a neighbor's yard and the selection of beads from local glass artists that twinkle in the gaps.

music: delerium's karma.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

October 20, 2006

artist's way open studio (october)

by gl. at 12:02 pm

last night's artist's way open studio was very productive! we produced 16 pieces, which we haven't done since march, which was the event where we were fueled on cupcakes because it was the first open studio-iversary.

i actually made two collages last night! i've never managed to do that before!

["something wicked this way comes"]

this one just fell into my lap, assembled itself almost instantly, and i was delighted to make one with a halloween flavour. the fuzzy picture is a donation from a collage fairy, while the text came from a lunar boy gallery postcard and the background is wrapping paper. i always decorate the envelopes when i make cards; this envelope had a large fuzzy hot pink feather stretch across the envelope flap. i am amused by fluffy hot pink evil.

["starchild"]

i have no idea where this one came from, though it's interesting to note it has the same basic layout as the one above. i was intrigued by the part of the headline that read "former human beings" and when i ran across this fuzzy collage fairy donation photo, i knew they had to go together somehow. the background is from a paper bag i got somewhere, and it wasn't quite big enough to cover that upper left corner so i slipped in a little crackle texture in the gap to imply an alienness. i always have star-punched paper lying about, and these are what fell out of the bins i was sifting through.

we tried a new table configuration this time. usually we have a 5-foot folding table paired up with a large extendable table i got years ago from an xbf's parents (the "jacob table"). that set-up provided seating for nine, though the ninth (me) got tucked in this unfortunate nook that was really awkward. i thought if we got two 6-foot tables, we'd easily have room for 10. unfortunately, that proved not to be the case, and i still can't figure out why, so i bumped the rsvp's down to 8 again until i figure out a better solution...

there was some discussion about why i don't charge for collage night, especially since meetup charges oragnizers to run groups. i wrote about this almost a year ago, but there are several reasons why collage night is free:

• i believe in the gifting economy. i want to have a range of offerings, including one for people who can't afford to join a creative cluster.

• though i think generally artists are undervalued and i want them to be paid for their time and vision, i don't like the idea that every art experience has to be commodified & paid for. i charge for artist's way creative clusters and guided intents because they are a significant investment of time & attention. but collage is something anyone should be able to do at any time. to charge for it seems incredibly counterintuitive.

• i don't provide instruction & don't plan to. i simply provide an opportunity, a catalyst. i believe art can be communal without requiring it to be collaborative.

• the artist's way open studio benefits me just as much as it benefits the other participants: it provides me with an obligation to create art, as well as the opportunity to broadcast consistent updates about the studio that are more than simply solictations for money. ideally, people who are exposed to the open studio eventually become members of a creative cluster, though there's absolutely no obligation to do so.

so i consider the meetup money to be a promotional cost because google keeps it high in the results, whereas my actual artist's way page doesn't show up until hit 250 or so. and open studio is partially subsidized by the guided intent events. i panicked initially when meetup began charging, and while i may not be happy about it, i think it's turned out well enough. we now have twice as many events per month, and one of them makes money!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

October 18, 2006

artist's way: week 6

by gl. at 1:10 am

people started off really tired today but left feeling much more energized. having done the critic transformation exercise a couple of weeks ago, in today's art activity i asked them to write love letters to themselves. writing nice things about yourself is HARD, so we did it in stages: first, i photographed them using an izone camera. they did free writing they knew wouldn't be shared, then created a poem from the writing that was shared. as each poem was shared, everyone responded by writing a couplet about the poem. the izone portraits & couplets were used to create valentines to and from themselves. it all sounds silly, but it really works.

(i'm sad to discover the izone is no longer being made. i kept thinking i should get a few more of them because it's great to have an occasional photography component. but now it's too late, and my camera is turning everything red.)

center (possibility): this is almost exactly what we have in the center of our coffee table: we grew that tiny pumpkin, the rocks came from our trip to canada, and the chestnuts are an assortment from this year & previous years. so it's less about possibility than fall, i suppose. unless you want to stretch the growing/traveling metaphor.

music: 10,000 maniacs, love among the ruins. i don't have a lot of music that sounds happy all the way through...

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

October 12, 2006

artist's way: week 5

by gl. at 4:27 pm

we're done w/ media deprivation! hooray! i had 1243 rss feeds waiting for me upon my return & i'm still crawling through them. one of the participants said, "when i don't read, i buy stuff."

the art activity this session was blind contour drawing. first i asked them to use the technique to draw the bah hum bug, a stuffed version from edward gorey's last book, the haunted tea cosy. i like using the bah hum bug because nobody's ever seen it before, so nobody has a pre-conceived notion of what one should look like, which makes you observe it more closely and derails the shortcut instinct between your eye and your brain.

i spend the exercise talking about slowing down and taking their time, but even so they finished the first round so fast i asked them to do another drawing of the bah hum bug. :) then i handed out mirrors and asked them to do self-portraits in the same style. after that i posted large newsprint sheets on the walls and had them draw each other.

then i asked them to write about the process of seeing, then to highlight the word that most appealed to them in their writing. we ended up with the words curve, profundity, burning, soul & magnificence, and i asked each person to create a sentence using all those words (or their roots). mine was "the profound curve of a burning soul is magnificent."

center (integrity): i tend to use a mirror as a center base when i do the blind contour drawing exercise. i must have been influenced by the lovecraft film festival, because i was irresitably drawn to the small bottles of cryptic fillings. i'm especially amused by the bottle of invisble ink.

music: the piano soundtrack, which the cd player only choked on twice.

one of my independent support clients had a funny story about self-encouragment and the perception of quality. as a graphic designer, co-workers would show each other designs and respond to each other, "dude, that's great!" but she would often dislike the designs, so she spent some time working through how other people might think they were great. finally recognizing that everyone values something different, eventually that led her to tell herself, whenever she made something, "that's great!" -- even if she didn't immediately think so, because someone probably would think so. she reinforced that habit so well that once, while she was at the gym, she caught herself in the mirror and automatically thought, "that's great!"

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

October 7, 2006

strike two

by gl. at 11:31 am

driving last night from class, i was changing the radio station when it suddenly hit me, almost halfway into media deprivation, that i can't listen to the radio! doh! you'd think i had never done this before! :) a car ride alone is much different without music.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

October 5, 2006

strike one

by gl. at 11:27 pm

first egregious & accidental violation of media deprivation:

after catching the end of a creative job club colleague's open house, i tried to slip into pushdot to see erika moen's piece (sven & i have been in loooooove with erika since the first stumptown comics fest a few years ago). but there was no parking to be found anywhere nearby and it was getting late, so i went to see michaelmas and suggested watching veronica mars, which we watch whenever we're together. about 10 or 15 minutes into it it suddenly dawns on me that i'm on media deprivation: "hey! i'm not supposed to be watching this!"

...especially since i'll be spending the next three days at the hollywood theatre watching the hp lovecraft film festival. :)

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

artist's way guided intent (october)

by gl. at 4:27 am

the warm, rich aroma of spiced apple cider welcomed arrivals at last night's guided intent. the streets were freshly wet and the moon was smudged behind a tattered cloud, which made it a good night to play with abundant paint and learn new ways to respond to art!

we started later than i would have liked and we were missing two people, which was a real shame because we had such a long waiting list. and when your limit is six, you really feel their absence, as opposed to when you have nine or 10.

i asked the participants to close their eyes and listen to peter gabriel's passion (specifically beginning with "a different drum"). i encouraged them to move to the music, letting the brush dangle freely in their hand until it became an extension of their movement on the page. next time i may do a brief body visualization exercise first (i don't do this for my creative clusters, but they're more comfortable with each other by the time i introduce this activity). they painted blind for 5-10 minutes, wrote for another 5 minutes, then painted more with their eyes open. unfortunately, that cd player is still giving me grief! why don't they make cute ones anymore?

afterwards they shared their pieces and i taught them my favorite form of feedback, which involves three different types of responses:

• descriptive response: the descriptive response is a technnical, non-editorial description of everything that's directly observable about the piece. you can talk about what you can see in its format, composition, color, value, texture, proportion, positioning, relationships, repetition, juxtaposition or associations. what you cannot do is assign any judgment or worth to these descriptions. you can't infer meaning or metaphor. you can't guess what the artist wants you to see. the descriptive response is an excellent first technique to use for feedback, as it helps the artist see the piece objectively, with concrete rather than abstract eyes.

• emotional response: with an emotional response, you talk about how the piece makes you feel. this is much harder for most people than it sounds. the primary issue is usually differentiating between "it feels" and "i feel." we've been conditioned to say why we like or don't like something, and many of us easily fall into analyzing the piece, trying to interpret what it means or the emotions the artist wanted to convey. but this technnique asks you to examine your emotions: what emotions are provoked when you examine this piece? do you feel scared, calm, angry, intrigued? do you feel like dancing to the moon? sometimes people have trouble if the piece is too concrete, projecting emotions onto fairy forests, campfires, chickens or pinwheels. the more important question is how do these fairy forests, campfires, chickens or pinwheels make you feel in this context? and different people have different emotional reactions to the same stimulus: a piece that feels "lively" for one person may make them feel joyful, but someone else may be feeling claustrophobic or overwhelmed. in some ways this is reflective of the checkins i ask creative cluster & independent support members to do each week, because sorting out how one feels is a difficult task -- but crucial to creating art that is fearless and truthful. and the emotional response is what allows you to return to a piece later and figure out why you respond differently to it.

• artistic response: an artistic response to art simply means you create art in response to the piece. this can span the entire range of visual, literary & expressive arts: you can write poety, you can beat out a rhythym, you can create a movement, you can draw something, you can describe the film scene playing in your head, you can build a little sculpture of bottle caps. and it's doesn't have to be a big deal: even something you create in under a minute or less can be fascinating and uniquely insightful to the artist! this is also a very powerful form of response because it moves you away from judgment or analysis and instead asks you to create something, which is, i've found, almost always the right answer. but i find it even better when combined with the previous techniques, as they can often inform and influence your artistic response.

this response process is valuable both to the artist and the viewer. each participant received all three of those responses to help them gain appreciation and associations about the piece they created, and we rotated the roles so everyone got a chance to try responding each way. learning to respond this way to art, rather than focusing on its aesthetics or even meaning, really transformed my ability to enjoy all kinds of art at all levels. it felt good to be able to give feedback that felt gentler and encouraging, or to be able to engage with art i might have initially disliked. and it was a critical component of quieting my inner (& outer!) critic, so i very much enjoy sharing this process with others.

i'm not a neat freak at events like this (i don't think you could really get into a messy event if you were afraid of getting paint on the walls and carpet), but i do lay down sheets & dropcloths, and i tape brown craft paper up on the walls. the studio is small and one wall is windows, so i thought i'd pick up some drywall to put up some temporary "walls" up to paint on. since people could paint on them directly, this would also have the advantage of being less labor to set up.

fortunately, i had a serendipitous meeting with carolyn winkler the week before this event, and i discovered she uses styrofoam insulation panels instead of drywall to create painting spaces, which are much, much easier to set up! thank you, carolyn!

[windows into wall: jen painting on one of two styrofoam insulation panels we used to create a temporary wall. click the image to see other artworks.]

we have just one (!) more spot available at the next open studio event. our free intuitive collage night is all treats and no tricks, with a delicious supply of print materials, found objects, original art scraps and pretty papers for to discover & devour like halloween candy. :)

our next guided intent, though, is going out on a limb for most of the people who are interested in our studio events. in november we will pull light from the early darkness by sharing stories with each other. influenced by the international success of playback theatre, we will find connection & catharsis by recreating theatrical vignettes of past, present & imagined narratives. a process that combines spontaneous collaboration with gentle direction, playback theatre is often touching, hilarious, sad and bold all at once.

this is a little scary for artists who primarily identify with visual or literary arts, which is almost everyone on the meetup group and on the events list. but i strongly believe that exposing yourself to a dynamic range of art forms in a supportive environment fosters creative self-expression and helps you build a richer creative vocabulary. art exploration encourages you to create more fearlessly and truthfully no matter what your dominant art is. i hope they are able to trust the process!

playback theatre has always been a wildly successful activity in the artist's way creative clusters, but it's usually a late-term activity, when the group bond has grown strong and they've experience the power & excitement of exploring mediums they haven't tried before, or activities they haven't dared try in a long while.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

October 4, 2006

artist's way: week 4

by gl. at 12:14 pm

one of the artist's way participants brought scarlet runner beans for us to open last night: lovely things to hold in the hand and rattle. i think i'll try to grow some next year.

now that it's been a month, some of the initial giddiness has worn off, but at the same time, participants are really looking forward to meeting every week. one has had a breakthrough with morning pages, after resisting them (and her art) for years. participants are finding artist dates to be frustrating if they aren't perfect, if they aren't completely inspirational. if you don't make time for art, imperfect experiences will feel like a waste of time. the only way out is through: the more you allow yourself an opportunity to experience art, the ratio will eventually balance out.

this week's art activity was one where you write down every single horrible thing your critic says to you, all the reasons it tells you that you can't write, paint, dance, draw, act, metalsmith, etc. then you highlight the thing that provokes the most emotional reaction and let your hand create a movement based on that emotion. you use that movement to draw a scribble over that page of writing. then you squint & turn it around until you can create something out of it. then you pass it along and other participants contribute to that piece, adding something to it or transforming it to protect you from your critic. this sounds like sort of a silly exercise, but it's amazing to see the transformation, and being able to visibly contribute towards the protection of each other really helps bond the group. though the exercise begins somberly, by the end everyone is smiling in delight and surprise.

this is the week we begin media deprivation: no reading, tv, music, radio or movies for the rest of the week. this is meant to balance out your consumption versus your production. julia cameron thinks you shouldn't read at all, even if you are a student or you're at work, but i don't think media deprivation is supposed to be a punishment or something that makes things worse for you. so i make exceptions for things which are absolutely essential, situations you don't control, and things that can only happen this week that you have already planned.

the goal is to be conscious. awareness leads to progress. so what this means for me is that i'll scan incoming email to see if it's something that needs to be responded to this week, and if not i'll leave it alone. it means i'll go to the hp lovecraft film festival this weekend because i plan for it all year. and otherwise i'll try to be very good about doing more.

center (power): a scarlet star-shaped tambourine overflowing with flowers donated by a cluster participant.

music: adam hurst's passages, which really is as good as i thought it would be for artist's way. but the cd player doesn't like it much: it skipped sometimes and would randomly stop. it's been doing that more often lately. does anyone else know of a small cute red cd player i could buy?

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

September 30, 2006

artist's way: week 3

by gl. at 3:14 pm

i haven't had a chance to write about last week's artist's way cluster! already this group is baring shameful and brave secrets as they are triggered by our work together. some had simply heartbreaking stories, some had funny stories, some were frustrated, some were elated. but they're all engaging in the process and sharing with each other in a very satisfying way.

the art activity this week was to create a lifemap (which we you may have read about back in july at a guided intent event). the intent is to create a visual representation of one's life or relationships as a literal map (annalandia or emmaville), or juxtaposed using another visual metaphor like a body or bus route or house. we cut it a little shorter than i would have liked because the check-in conversations were so compelling, but it's difficult for me to cut people off when there's so much more to be said.

center (identity): i forgot to take a picture, but i filled the center with old photos donated by a collage fairy and words from poety dog tags, with a small candle as its heart. each week i encourage participants to contribute something to the center that represents the theme, and photos were a common item this week. what is it about photographs which make them so treasured as a source of identity? would we have contributed portraits if we didn't have photos? there's something about the ephemeral nature of photos that links us to a particular moment, a moment we want to remember, even if it wasn't anything special. and when we see other people's photos, we are drawn to them, we want to know their stories.

music: bela fleck & the flecktones

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

September 24, 2006

art weekend!

by gl. at 11:59 pm

what a lovely weekend!

first, creata hosted a free day at the portland art museum to see the oregon biennial exhibit.

there will probably need to be a whole 'nother post about the biennial, but i was especially charmed & delighted to discover mariana tres' "Homespun Universe: The Wondrous Works of Anabella Gaposchk," a whimsical collection of "old" gelatin prints made from common baking ingredients by a fictitious home astronomer in the early 1900s. the entire thing is an elaborate & fanciful story: in addition to the fuzzy photos of baking soda constellations housed in period victorian frames, a small display case includes created & found artifacts like letters, quotes, spice canisters, egg beaters, gloves, handkerchiefs, and a tiny book of bank statements. this engaging collection from the "society of nebulous knowledge," also includes a documentary audio tour featuring music from the imaginary musical "upon the orange moon." suitable for a quaint display at the maryhill museum, the photos alone are beautiful and convincing, but every component is its own layer of fascination, and taken as a whole the subtle details and histories are like the best kind of poetry, creating an imaginary world that could have been real, should have been real, but isn't.

(unfortunately the art museum has very limited info about the biennial on its website, but portland modern has a pdf page about an earlier version of "homespun universe" from 2003.)

after the biennial, creata paid for our lunch at the red star tavern, which ain't cheap. i was surprised to find the red star has the best mac & cheese i've tasted at a restaurant. i should take "clients" there more often: given the name of our studio, the association is too good to pass up. :) and i'm beginning to recognize people now: even though i make it clear "i'm NOT an art therapist," i think they respect my role as a "creative advocate."

after a stop at rob's 33 1/3 birthday party (which qualifies as the best birthday concept for an audiophile), i dropped off some cardboard trays from the Fabulous End-of-Summer August Art Swap over at linda womack's: she showed me her studio, which was extra cool since i won't get to do the portland open studio tour this year.

today i had a new independent support student in the studio. i had forgotten my typical opening poem and so used keri' smith's e.e. cummings piece as an opening:

["to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."]

i'm learning that independent support sessions are more improvisational & conversational than creative clusters, which is great for individual attention, but because the sessions are shorter than clusters, it also makes it more likely we'll run out of time for the art component. so i don't know whether to make the sessions longer (because we could easily talk longer) or simply set the time more rigidly, at least to begin the art project.

the rest of the day i spent in the studio, puttering around & putting things away. i haven't done that in a very long time. i sorted through some of my poetry boxes and put things on shelves, i crossed some things off the todo.studio list. it always takes longer than i think it should, but it always feels good to do it.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, exhibits & events

September 22, 2006

artist's way open studio (september)

by gl. at 3:49 pm

happy equinox! last night i hosted the artist's way open studio. though the last day of summer arrived with with thick grey clouds and a chill in the air, the studio was warm and lively, abundant with creative energy and intuitive collage explorations.

jen couldn't come because she had a family emergency (big hug, jen!), but otherwise, the studio was full. sven always misses the nights we have another boy at the table, but how could he resist taking a job at bent image lab to build armatures? :D still, he's enough of a fixture that people asked about him.

the open studios are our least structured art opportunities, so i don't spending a lot of time or energy as a facilitator, but i'm still amazed i create a collage each night. and it's a good reminder that it's still necessary for me to host these for my own art in addition to providing opportunities for others, because i still spend vastly more time on the computer than at the studio.

[sprite: click the image to see the other collages]

"sprite" includes a fuzzy photo donation from a collage fairy, part of a baci chocolate wrapper, a fairy illustration from charles vess (i think), a piece of wrapping paper, cardboard from a tape dispenser, a piece of cigarrette package (where the heck did that come from?). i cut it too short, though, so had to add an old piece of painted paper in the upper left corner.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

September 20, 2006

artist's way: week 2

by gl. at 6:54 pm

last night's activity, motivated in part by the equinox on friday, was a poetry walk. in a poetry walk, you divide your paper into two sides: nouns & verbs. and we walk verrrrryyyy sllloowwwwlllyyy around the block, through the big field, writing down every noun & verb the we see, hear, smell, feel. the trick of it is not to write any adjectives or adverbs, and to write words as quickly as they occur to you. if you haven't written anything in a few seconds, you're thinking too hard. then you return to the studio & write a poem using some of those words:

transformation

some people bury the past
abandon it like a basketball in a field
but i open the door
bite the lock in half

i am blooming and dissolving
a lace of lights against the skyline
as the crickets sing
to the fallen apples
in the dusk

...september 19, 2006...

center (safety): a handmade stamped brick surrounded by calligraphy tools, one of which is a supportive and expansive black feather, waiting to catch you.

music: tracy chapman's new beginning

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, writing

September 15, 2006

artist's way: week 1

by gl. at 4:59 pm

this week the artist's way creative clusters began for fall! we've got a good group, and i think they'll all make it to the end! our first activity introduces particpants to intuitive collage, but with only 20 minutes to complete it, linda womack might recognize the technique as similar to her "speed collage." intuitive collage is typically what we do at the artist's way open studio, though we have two hours there. as a first exercise, collage is a fairly safe one, and giving them only 20 minutes to do it keeps their inner voices from getting too loud (in part because they don't havge time to criticize each decision, and in part because the expectations are necessarily lower). afterwards, they wrote stream-of-consciousness for 5 minutes (modeling morning pages) and then shared their work & words w/ each other.

center (intro): a large ostrich egg spilling stars onto the centerpiece. next week i'll ask participants to bring objects that represent the theme (safety), or anything they find beautiful or endearing that week.

music: the amelie soundtrack

i forgot to mention that earlier in the day i made an agreement w/ my neighbor, who was working in his back yard, to not hammer anything after 6 p.m. on tuesday nights. but after shortly after he left, his garden crew came and mowed for the first 1/2 hour of class! doh!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

September 7, 2006

artist's way guided intent (september)

by gl. at 3:39 pm

cranberry lemonade marked the return of the artist's way guided intent this month, but it was the darjeeling tea leaves that had more of an impact! in addition to other divination aids like pennies, fortune cookies & tarot cards, they formed the basis for short writing prompts that led to poems about possibility.

[tea leaves in my cup: click the photo to see a charming collection of other cups]

for the first prompt, "the most basic possibility is binary," i said, passing around pennies. "yes or no, heads or tails." when i asked the penny if this is what i'm meant to be doing with my life, it came up heads: yes. for some reason that surprised me, and by the end of 5 minutes i had concluded with a sentence about wanting a future without feeling so beholden to others (an odd thing for a facilitator, perhaps, but bear with me).

right on cue, the fortune cookie fortune i picked said, "isolating yourself from others will not prevent you from being hurt." ha! what serendipity! so i wrote for 5 more minutes about how i could achieve balance, how i can maintain both solitude and service to others.

satisfied at the progress i was making, i turned over the random tarot card i picked. the devil? what? after all that? i was angry; i hate it when someone (even a card!)thinks the worst of me because i try so hard to do the right thing. so i spent 5 minutes looking at my flaws and what i do that could cause others to demonize me. i chose to use it as an exercise in looking at my actions through the eyes of others to evoke empathy. i'm not well-acquainted with tarot meanings, so its interpretation as a card of power & desire was lost on me. (sven got the "star" card, btw. i was so envious!)

but the tea leaves were a mystery for me. in order to write about them i had to begin at the most immediate level: a descriptive response, writing simply about the visual characteristics of what i was seeing. other participants described the tea leaves as their favorite inspirational component, so while it didn't do much for me, the intent to provide different stimuli for different people worked.

after the writing prompts we had some time to write a poem based on one or more of the prompts. this is a poem about possibility, even though it doesn't sound like it:

Same time tomorrow

Desire and despair are two sides
of the same coin:
I want to be good
I want to be possessed
but I am a princess in a tower
with DSL.
Keep time from slipping through my fingers
tell me each tea leaf matters
the pattern clumps, then crumbles
a flash of birds across the sky.

september 07, 2006

sharing our works didn't go as smoothly as it does w/ visual responses, in part because when we discuss visual work i have a pretty good structure that reminds people we're not here to "fix" the art of others or judge its aesthetics, but rather our goal is to help the artist find meaning in it. so the responses got a little out of hand at the end, and because i'm still sick i don't have my authority voice (nor do i like to invoke it). we had a couple of writers who were vocally disappointed that they had come to the guided intent that featured a literary exercise when they were looking for more visual stimulus, but i feel strongly about offering a wide range of visual, literary & expressive art offerings, and all i can do is tell people not to come to the ones they think they won't like.

i can hardly believe it, but our next two events are already full! september's open studio has a waiting list, and the next guided intent in october (abundance via blind painting!) filled up the first day it was announced. also, it looks like an artist's way creative cluster will form tuesday evenings. hooray!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, writing

August 25, 2006

wishes & fishes

by gl. at 10:35 pm

on wednesday we hosted the Fabulous End-of-Summer August Art Swap! i wanted people to give & get "new" art supplies for free. i figured people would be able to find good homes for the things that no longer inspire them and discover new treasures at the same time. i had it brewing in the back of my head for a while, but finally decided that if i waited until i figured out all the details, it would never happen, so i took the opportunity of our early august canadian trip and the upcoming artist's way creative clusters to create a new, fun, unusual event for us.

anyway, it was great! the studio swelled with art supplies and generous hearts. we got some new attendees out to the studio for this event, too! there were some amazing finds representing a wide range of arts, and i tucked homegrown tomatoes from the studio garden fairies into leftover gift bags i had been hoarding for years. i also managed to pass out flyers for the artist's way creative clusters and the general events flyer. we even had pizza!

since this was the first art swap i've ever held, the timing was a little off and i could have used even more space for people to swarm the goods when the time came. but i got a couple of details really right:

1. i created little tags for people to fill out for the items that had stories attached to them or that had non-obvious functions. this gave people something to do when coming in and really made the items more personable during the swap. "what is it? why is it here?"

2. but the biggest success was born from my main concern for this event, which was "how am i going to keep people in the studio for longer than 30 minutes?" i mean, how long does it take to drop stuff off and sort through a table of odds & ends?
   
   i've been watching the TEDtalks and am inspired by the presenters who have been granted a TEDprize. more specifically, i'm fascinated by the concept of granting someone a "wish" which everyone listening promises to help make come true by donating time, resources, money, expertise, or connections to make it possible. later i realized i've probably also been influenced by wishcraft & dayna's description of wishweavers.
   
   but the TED concept is what prompted the major activity of the evening, which is choosing a wish to share with others. as artists, these are the kinds of conversations we should be having! we don't know who among us will be able to help, but someone will if we wish loudly enough & often enough. but first you have to wish so people can hear it. :) so while waiting for everyone to arrive, i asked people to create nametages that also included an "implausible wish or desire" --- and then talk with each other about them, each person having a chance to wish and listen. this turned out even better than i hoped because it gave us a reason to talk about what we want rather than the typical small talk about what we do. at 8 p.m. we paused before the swap to introduce ourselves and our wishes so that everyone would have a chance to hear them. there was so much good feedback we went longer than i expected, but it was an amazing bonding experience.

so these are some of the wishes people had. can you help make any of one of them come true?

grand & ephemeral

• L surprised herself by wanting to be a philanthropist: she wants to inspire & support artists. does anyone know of a grant that needs managing, or a way to break into fundraising or art support funds?

• A wants to ride the Orient Express! does anyone know of a way to make that happen? is there a job she could do or a contest she could win or become the guest of someone planning on taking a trip? is there an art magazine that would pay her to write an article or publish an art journal based on the trip?

• J wants to travel around in an Airstream RV. does anyone know where she could pick up one of these for $4000 or less?

• T wants abundant energy to drive her music, lit & photography passions. does anyone know of massage therapists or alternative healers that could help with this sort of thing?

places & spaces

• CH is looking for an affordable ranch house in inner SE by October. she currently lives in NE, but her husband is disabled and her daughter is in a SE language school. is anyone selling something like this, or knows of a good real estate agent who would work with them?

• i'm looking for a piece of green/wilderness property i could access to create an Andy Goldsworthy-like workshop (or a place to set up our labyrinth!). i'd consider a retreat space, but i'm wondering if anyone has a good chunk of backyard or property somewhere they'd be willing to let me borrow ocassionally.

• B is looking for a commercial/residential mixed space in SE for about $400,000. does anyone know of a space like this or a real-estate agent she could work with?

jobs & such

• Linda Womack wants to make all of her income from art (encaustics & teaching). i invited her to teach a workshop at the studio, but you can help make her wish come true by buying her art, visiting her during the Open Studios tour, or taking one of her classes at collage.

• M wants to start a center for healing & art therapy (and publish a book). she's looking for a group of dedicated people to create a board with a potential committment of 2 years. (i volunteered for this.)

• C wants to illustrate & publish a children's book. does anyone know publishers in this market, or has anyone published a children's book that could act as a mentor?

• JB is an art therapist looking for private clients. i invited her to teach a workshop at the studio, but does anyone want to try art therapy, or need a coach on the road to certification?

• B wants to quit her job at the flower shop in Salem and design webpages instead. does anyone have small, simple sites she can set up for creative people?

• and sven wants to work on Coraline at Laika. :) grace & leopoldo have done wonders so far, but is there anyone with a direct line to the armature head who can be sven's advocate?

this was a wonderful way to wrap up summer and look forward to fall. the studio can't absorb the remainders from another art swap for at least a year (though collage fairies shouldn't be shy about intermittent donations!), but i'm going to check in w/ wednesday's dreamers in three months and see what we've done to make each other's dreams come true.

while not everything was totally perfect, i really thought it went pretty well. though there are always improvments & tweaks to be made for next time, my only regret is that i didn't get that many pictures, and the ones I did get were thanks to sven (thanks, sven!). so if you want to see a few pictures, they're at the meetup site.

now to begin promotion for the artist's way creative clusters that begin sept12! (and if i had a second wish, it would be that both the tuesday night & wednesday morning clusters would have enough participants to run this term! so pass along that link to anyone you think would benefit from a dedicated creative group like this. :)

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

July 21, 2006

artist's way open studio (july)

by gl. at 3:09 pm

ah, there's the heat! despite an ample supply of cucumber lemonade, two fans, and a portable room air conditioner borrowed from a neighbor, it was still pretty warm in the studio last night.

fortunately, one of the participants also brought lemon-lime popsicles and we were feeling pretty creative with 12 collages between six people (and one of the participants made three more after the event was over!).

["summer": click the image to see the other collages
& an extra bonus shot of people at work in the studio!]

of course there's plenty of shiny in here the scan didn't capture: the top half is teal shiny & the gold bits are shiny, too. i colored the central image & gave this card to the neighbor who loaned us the air conditioner.

we'll be taking a break in august to go to sven's family reunion in canada, so there won't be a guided intent or an open studio next month. but i am hosting a "fabulous end-of-summer august art swap" august 23 for anyone who wants to clear our their studios & start fall by feasting on "new" supplies. :)

in september we'll host artist's way creative clusters and begin the guided intent events and the open studio again. so enjoy the summer, now that it seems to have been turned on full force!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

July 12, 2006

gifting

by gl. at 2:58 pm

the studio loves gifts! so i'd like to acknowledge & thank three recent ones:

first, ubatuber sent a copy of his "jenny greenteeth" woodprint, which is even more impressive in person than it is here:

then one of my artist's way independent support students brought perfectly sweet chilcotin raspberries fresh from the farmer's market. yum!

and finally today, laura gave us both evil-eye bracelets she picked up in instanbul!

of course, the collage fairies always bless us by refreshing our pool of interesting and unusual collage materials: thanks colleen, vicki, jen, chip & kathy, grace & alesia!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, miscellany, stopmo

July 8, 2006

artist's way guided intent (july)

by gl. at 9:56 am

wednesday was the most recent guided intent night, and we actually did something other than collage! *gasp* this month was lifemaps, where one creates a visual representation of one's past, present or future either as a literal map (svenlandia!), or juxtaposed using another visual metaphor like a body, or even the classic timeline approach. the trick is that it's a visual timeline, so no words or numbers can be used.

i created two quick lifemaps to work out some ideas (one was powell butte, one was a garden). i have trouble w/ pastels: they smudge everywhere and i can't get the detail i want. but i often reach for them because they are so smooth and soft-edged. the first two maps were incomplete and aren't worth sharing, but helped me create this:

["the past is finally crumbling": click the image to see the other lifemaps]

in this crumbling castle, the ghost of my mother is walking the parapet endlessly, like hamlet's father. it's overgrown with thorny vines that are tearing the castle apart. raise the flag for scarlet star studios, pointing towards the sun rising in the hills of the future. but one window is still lit: is someone still inside, or does it symbolize hope among the horror? during the writing exercise i wrote: "i see the metaphor here but feel silly explaining it. what am i, a princess locked in a tower? well, wasn't i? aren't we? all girls, in all ways, are still locked in the tower."

like the last artist's way guided intent, i may not end up thinking this is a great work of Art, but i'm happy with the imagery and could totally work more with it. art is such a fascinating process: if i had set out to create this piece w/ these meanings, i doubt i could have done it. but simply drawing what needed to be drawn next allowed the symbols to emerge on their own.

i was surprised to find that though the exercise was designed to explore drawing forms, a couple of people chose to use collage techniques. also worth mentioning, with or without a good transition: we were delighted to meet a lurking blog reader that night (hi, kori! *waves*).

since sven & i will be in canada for the next artist's way guided intent, in august i'm going to collapse both events into the "fabulous end-of-summer august art swap!" give things! get things! stay tuned for details...

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

June 15, 2006

artist's way open studio review (june)

by gl. at 11:59 pm

though still a little cool, it was otherwise perfect weather to sample homemade raspberry limeade and create several interesting intuitive collage explorations.

["free at last": click the image to see the other collages]

this wasn't intended to be a statement about paying off trixie, but after i was finished it clearly was, so hence the title. that little bird in the corner is actually the holographic logo from an old credit card. if i had to do it over again, i'd probably cut the lines of the feathers of her head more closely so the edge would be irregular rather than a smooth arc.

the next artist's way open studio is july 20. but first there will be another artist's way guided intent july 05, which celebrates independence day (& integrity) by creating lifemaps to honour past, present and future selves. i've been doing lifemaps in creative clusters for a while now, but i haven't done them as a stand-alone project before.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

June 8, 2006

poem: what do your answers mean?

by sven at 11:59 pm

collage: "What do your answers mean?" (two-page spread)

I don't think I've put any poetry up on Scarlet Letters yet... I wrote this one last night, inspired by Gretchin's Artist's Way Guided Intent event.

What do your answers mean?

Power
is the hand that writes
"the end"
at the conclusion of a film

(otherwise
the movie would just go on and on
an endless series of questions
each leading to more questions...)

Power
is the definitive answer that
concludes your quest to know
it is the inky dot that stops a sentence

we all turn to this endpoint
like pilgrims on our way to Mecca
Who are you?
What do you want to be?
open your mouth to reply and it's
a decision to take your own life

oh, there's pleasure and pride
in predestination
in holding the pen
making a mark on the map filled with dragons
and arriving at the place you set out for
the execution of a plan with a grand flourish
for everyone to remember

...But I think that I like
not knowing where I'm going

I want to break from the Eastward road
and run headlong into a dark forest
looking only the next few steps ahead
going in this direction
only because I know it makes me happy

maybe I am no one
just emptiness erasing itself
if I'm without ambition to pick the bronze statue
for my headstone

diving into the thick fog of unknowns
where all I can see is my own feet
full of questions
I have no name, only a direction

it thrills me

to live
to Live
is to embrace the unbeing
of becoming


June 7, 2006

posted by sven | permalink | categories: artist's way, writing

June 7, 2006

artist's way guided intent (june)

by gl. at 11:59 pm

that was a very successful evening! the first deliberate artist's way guided intent event went well -- and i can tell because i have so much i want to talk about and so many ideas for next time. :)

i feel like i hit a plateau (the good kind, the kind where you can stop & look around & breathe) about how to handle studio events like this. i hated theatre management unless i was directing, but i get excited about other art management stuff. (does anyone remember the ephemera exhibit)?

the overall structure has always been good, but i finally nailed some details:

• instead of forgetting, er, remembering to bring over CDs, i tuned into the mhcc jazz station (though i prefer it when they play big band). no advertisements and few words meant i could leave the music on the whole time, and it set the tone without being too frenetic about it.
• i set up the table with half-sized flyers describing all the studio offerings (inspired by the end of this post). to keep them from blowing away when the windows were open, i weighted them each down w/ a seashell, which i realized would be a lovely tradition to start: offer a small seasonal gift (seashells or raspberries in the summer, apples or chestnuts in fall, etc.) to participants each month. (the snafu: though i had my stuff at a seat, i wasn't at it when someone decided to sit there, which meant i had to take a different seat -- and the unique shell i had intended for sven went to her instead. she loved it, but i'm still a little sad. :)
• we began in the kitchen: i've learned that if i still have tasks to do in the kitchen when people arrive, that's where people gather -- and it makes the experience more convivial when it begins like that than if we're all sitting at the table, waiting for everyone to show up.
• though speaking of which, we also began pretty much on time, even though two participants hadn't arrived yet. starting late means we get out late, and some people have miles to go before they sleep.
• i have a fairly decent introduction strategy: i ask participants to answer who they are, why they're here, what art they're doing and what art they've always wanted to do. i even have a special bonus bonus question: what would you do if you knew you could not fail? (in my case, it's act.)
• one of the unexpected benefits of the guided intent structure is that it limits a fair amount of anxious chit chat. due to the intro and the collection, reflection & feedback components, there's only about 1/2 an hour to talk with each other while we create.
• i got a new insight about how to introduce myself & simplify what i do. i'm too tired at the moment to do it justice, but it goes something like this: "i'm a creative advocate: i like to encourage people to make art."
• and last but not least, finally setting the white balance correctly on the camera saved me so much pain and frustration this time 'round. the pictures look better and took less time to post than the two prior months. that's a huge relief, because what's the point of taking pix if they're all going to come out terribly?
• oh... AND i have a fabulous idea for the august open studio (the august guided intent is unlikely to happen because sven & i will be in canada). stay tuned for details!

a few more things i still need to tweak:

• how to collect money in an unobtrusive & nonchalant way
• how to relieve people who are stressed about the amount of time to create the collage
• clarifying the closing ritual

yes, but what about the art? oh, okay....

["leaving my mark": click to see the other pieces ]

compositionally, this isn't one of my favorites, but as a visual image to represent power, especially how i felt about my struggles working for the void of csusm, it's very intriguing. the words beneath the star are german. in the reflection component i wrote: "what compels me to move past the point of exhaustion, into bloody feet and a desert of sand?" it's taking me almost an entire page to slip out of my facilitator role enough to actually engage with my piece, so i feel like there's more to be explored here.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

June 1, 2006

artist's way guided intent

by gl. at 8:42 pm

i created another monthly artist's way event when i realized we had two groups of people at the studio: first, we had people who wanted a reason to get together and make art (and heck, that was one of the main reasons i created the artist's way open studio); second, we had people who wanted a chance to explore what art meant to them or who wanted to be more involved in the artist's way and wanted the chance to engage with the art they were making, something we weren't doing in the artist's way open studio.

so i took the format i had been experimenting with for the last couple of months in the artist's way open studio and created the artist's way guided intent, which explores a theme from an artist's way chapter with a guided art activity and a structured feedback component. though i intend to include other mediums and activities like i do in the artist's way creative clusters, this month will be collage, in part to limit the number of variable for people who are used to the other format. though we will explore many mediums, guided intents will NOT be skill-based; no prior experience with the medium will be necessary and i won't be teaching technique because it's about the process, not the product. it's a chance to experience our emphasis on art exploration and creative self-expression when we aren't enrolling for a creative cluster.

so that means the artist's way open studio reverts to its intuitive, casual form: no theme, no feedback; just a bunch of creative people getting together to make art. :) and though you don't have to know about the artist's way to come to either event, both events are artist's way friendly, a place to meet past, present & future artist's way students and talk about morning pages, artist dates, or the book.

having two events a month has the benefit of giving more people a chance to come without being put on a waiting list, and having them at intervals means two chances every month to maintain creative momentum. plus, this means if i don't end up making art at the guided intent, i'll still have an opportunity at the open studio.

so just to clarify, these are all the artist's way offerings at portland's scarlet star studios:

• Artist's Way Open Studio (free monthly collage night; third thursday of the month)
• Artist's Way Guided Intent (monthly guided art activities w/ a sliding-scale facilitation fee; first wednesday of the month)
• Artist's Way Independent Support (individualized creative advocacy; scheduled by appointment, 7-session minimum)
• Artist's Way Creative Clusters (structured & committed 13-week groups; offered fall and spring)

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

May 19, 2006

artist's way open studio review (may)

by gl. at 5:32 pm

it was hot last night but not as hot as it had been the day before, so i am grateful. it was plenty hot enough in the studio, though, which prompted me to break out the fan and make lavendar lemonade. i gotta figure out how to get people moving during the events; most people don't get up to drink, snack, or play with other materials. forgot to put out the tea bags & the "please come in" sign. doh!

we tried another guided intent: "identity," and i managed the format a little better this time. and though i had a hard time personally with the writing this time (i just couldn't get my brain to shut up and focus), i got a good title from it:

["i choose the moon": click the image for the other collages]

this is a neat piece because it's so monochromatic: the only color comes from the reddish stars. of course this piece has a lot of shiny detail: the moon is a swirl from one of those silver paint pens, the stars are a unique faceted print, and the round thing on her heart is a small nut with a little moving gear attached to it -- i love its dimensionality and its interactive quality as the gear spins. (sven found that for me one day on the springwater corridor trail.)

in addition to the collages, sven & jen (a salem participant we met at last month's event) created a collaborative collage animation in under 20 minutes! (from conception to copying the file to celeste to be uploaded):

"the more we look": click on image to play clip (512 KB)

amazing!

i'm finding it more difficult to finish a collage during a facilitated event. very little of my piece was glued down before i had to talk about it. that actually worked out okay: the little gear nut was a piece i added afterwards instead of a larger rusty metal bracket-thing i had been planning to use.

so the big news is that i'm breaking collage night into two events: the guided intent event i've tried for the last couple of months will move to the first wednesday of the month. this event will have the potential for various mediums & a facilitation fee. but i'll keep the free collage night on the third thursday of the month and it will return to its casual roots. a little something for everyone! plus, our waitlists have been getting longer and so i'd like to give people some more options.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

April 25, 2006

workin' out

by gl. at 10:36 pm

who knew water aerobics was going to be a place for networking? i am pretty shy when i'm not actually facilitating and even more so when i'm in a swimsuit (or not in a swimsuit in the locker room). but i skipped a water aerobics class thursday to host the artist's way open studio and several people commented on me being gone.

when i hesitantly told them about the studio, they were very excited. an artist! that probably explained a lot about me, including my funny car. ;) so i was a little self-conscious because we were all trying to dry off and get dressed, but i did feel like i suddenly existed -- there were introductions and asking about classes and the handing out of cards.

several women were disparaging about their own talents, of course, and i wish i had a better set of responses for them. my approach to art & artist's way focuses on art exploration and creative self-expression: i don't care how good you are, i only care that you want to create something that means something to you. the skill will come as you allow yourself to work with the art, but most people get too discouraged too soon and don't give themselves a chance. you'd never learn to talk if you expected entirely elegant sentences to form the first time, you know?

unrelated but important to mention: i got my commission check from collage for the 4x4 show today! hooray!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, exhibits & events

April 21, 2006

artist's way open studio review (april)

by gl. at 2:19 am

lots of travelers tonight from elsewheres this month: 3 from salem, one from beaverton! we had two dropouts at the last minute but i was able to fill one of the slots and it really was just enough people, anyway.

i tried a "theme" this month that was based on the first artist's way chapter (safety), but really it was more of an intent, a way to focus the piece while still applying intuitive collage techniques. i was pretty happy with the results; i felt like everyone got a chance to see the pieces and respond to each other, something that had been missing because everyone finished at different times and there was just enough time to take a picture before they went home. but this format makes it much more like an unpaid session of artist's way, and i had forgotten that was one of the reasons i chose the casual format, since i'd like to keep collage night free.

["it can't be denied i have quills inside": click the image for the other collages]

this piece actually uses sharp porcupine quills around the star & moon. certainly not my cuddliest piece ever, but i know i've got them and ocassionally still use them, though less than i used to. the background is a photocopy of one of the amazing moonprints. on the left side you can see a small dab of gold leaf. the title appeared fully formed from the 3-minute writing we did before we showed the pieces we had made, and i found that to be very helpful to grapple with the language of the piece before having to talk about it with others. by the way, the silver square is from an elephant's deli easter jellybean package. :)

one issue: i wish progressive women who are otherwise kind, generous and compassionate would forgo the unfortunate tendency to boy-bash. it's especially disheartening when there's an actual boy in the room (like, oh, say, sven). i know if i was the only girl in a room of boys who were talking disparagingly about the things that "women always...." do, i'd feel compelled to object (and then leave if they continued), but good pro-feminist boys just have to take it. the same thing happens at the job club for creatives and i don't know how to address it directly. i simply change the subject or scowl until someone else does. as a facilitator i want to do better.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

April 8, 2006

artist's way independent support

by gl. at 2:26 pm

today i used an exercise for one of my independent support students i probably wouldn't do in a group. it's a perception & concentration exercise, simple but effective: you simply write the differences between two objects for 5 minutes. in this case, i gave her a glass bottle w/ scarlet ink & a small glass pyramid. after 5 minutes, you do it for another 5 minutes, and then ANOTHER five minutes. so you write for 15 minutes total about the differences between these fairly simple objects, and each time, much to your surprise, you're able to see a little bit more. by the end of 15 minutes your perception has notably shifted and your brain becomes focused -- great for days you might begin scattered or think you have no new ideas. i got this idea from corita kent's learning by heart.

oh, and this was the centerpiece i forgot to write about last week. it's spring!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

March 16, 2006

artist's way open studio review (march)

by gl. at 11:59 pm

wow. what a night! lots of creative chaos and connections, a perfect way to celebrate the first anniversary of intuitive collage at scarlet star studios! the studio was perfectly packed and we made more collages than ever (21!) with an abundance of cupcakes. some classic faces and new additions, all with generous hearts. we even got a visit & a dvd from the woman who made a brief film of us for her documentary film class last time!

["i contain multitudes": click the image to see the other collages]

i was almost too busy to make a collage tonight! the largest circle is actually a CD that sticks out a little past the right of the card and the topmost circle is a typewriter key that says "shift lock" and will look better when the glue has completely dried. it definitely has that "worlds within worlds" or "all potential futures" sort of vibe.

the title of this piece is from walt whitman's "song of myself":

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

next month i'm changing the format a little: instead of just straight intuitive collage, i'll be including a theme based on an artist's way chapter (april=strength). i might throw in a writing exercise, too, or simply a more coherent show&tell option at the end of the night.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

March 15, 2006

unitarian artist's way: week 8

by gl. at 11:40 pm

i can't believe i haven't checked in about the unitarian artist's way lately, and tonight was our last night. we were to share some of the art we've been doing, so someone brought a guitar, someone brought a banjo, someone brought a bright fabric-patterned cloth, someone brought a chapter from a novel, someone brought a book she'd made for her grandmother & some sculptural driftwood pieces. someone even brought us gifts: stones she had painted with the word "zhong dao" (balance) and a chop which represents longevity.

i brought a weathergram i made at psc monday night and the printmaking pieces i made last month:

(these look so much better in trees, but we don't have any! harumph.)

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, calligraphy

March 10, 2006

creata: self-care for therapists

by gl. at 11:41 pm

this is the eighth in a series of posts about workshops sponsored by CREATA during Creative Arts Therapy week. just three more to go! session date mar09.

i went to this session in part because i figured some of it would be adaptable to artist's way participants, as one of the artist's way goals is learning how to treat yourself well. checkov says, "if you want to work on your art, work on your life," and i say that if you want to explore creative self expression, first you need a self to express. but i also went because i know the presenter and after recovering from a major surgery, i was glad to see her up & around again.

many places have a culture of competitive deprivation: who's working hardest? who's staying latest? who's too busy to take sick leave or vacation? certainly i did my share of that at csusm before i fled san diego. what would happen if we competed for self-care? apparently one of the other participants had a 3-month focus at her workplace: everyone got charts & stars & rewards, along with breaks for yoga and access to massage. i'm alternately amused and appalled that while i treat myself better than i did when i was in academic technology, i'm still incredibly busy, working from deadline to deadline, rarely stopping to rest or dream (or, um, exercise). blogging is a form of self-care for me: not only does it help keep my creativity newtonian, but it forces me to acknowledge everything i've done so far, giving myself credit for what i have done instead focusing on what i haven't done.

i like the way this was worded: consider setbacks a form of feedback rather than failure. and i smiled today when i realized that if i was going to attend a workshop w/ plenty of glue sticks & neatly-labeled supplies, this would be the place.

the experiential exercise was creating a "permission slip" for us to use when we needed it. instead, i created several cards that could be tucked away into my daily file or for sven to set gently atop celeste: "can gretchin come out to play?" "get out of jail free," "breathe," "powell butte misses you," "stop and smell the roses." i could see creating a pack (31?) of these to make sure i do something each day. they're really kind of cute, sort of like oblique permissions.

1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

melanie, you would have really liked this session because the presenter brought all her art journals to share and they were very good. one of them was a journal inspired by lynda barry's one! hundred! demons!. she also recommended twyla tharp's the creative habit which has been on my wishlist for a while now, and visual journaling: going deeper than words, which is the first visual journal book i had seen and my artist's way facilitator pamela used. also: what is art for?, art is a way of knowing and creativity: flow and the psychology of discovery and invention.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, classes & workshops

March 8, 2006

creata: writing to health

by gl. at 9:59 pm

this is the fifth in a series of posts about workshops sponsored by CREATA during Creative Arts Therapy week. session date mar07.

the most dynamic and interesting presentation so far was from the well arts institute, which talked about a project called "performing wellness," developed from a artists repertory theatre outreach project. essentially, members of a targeted population (e.g., cancer survivors) learn to write plays about their stories, at which point, with the input of the author, they are professionally cast, directed & publically staged, providing an opportunity for catharsis and witnessing.

one of the primary tools they use is something they call "wild child writing," which is very similar to the morning page exercise i just did w/ rob's class). wild-child writing is topic-directed, stream-of-consciousness writing. the goal is to write right past the barriers their internal censors try to erect, to write despite their self-criticism, to learn how to recognize their own voices. at that point, they can begin to work on their plays. there is no critiquing of the work done in this project, nor can a participant use words they may have already written about the event.

during the workshop, we tried the wild-child writing three times: once with the prompt "right now i am feeling," then with the prompt "i am water" and finally with the prompt "i am earth." then we highlighted three words and three phrases in each writing and using only those combined words, created a poem:

i am earth

i make breath and dreams
creatures you have yet to meet
i keep you from the sky and you resent that
but i have no quarrel with the sky
my mountains pin me to her
because she has no hands to hold me.

wait. this quake grows slow, thunderous.
what is this language i speak?
it is the rising and falling of breathing
heaving like birth
the taste of sour and salt.
blood, moon, heart.

one of the things the presenter wanted to make clear was that while "performing wellness" is therapeutic, it is not therapy (have you heard that somewhere before?) and they had a great document i may need to adapt for my own therapy vs therapeutic statement:

the creative process vs therapy
differentiating performing wellness from therapy

• we approach each person as a writer or an artist, not a client or patient.
• the focus is on creating something, not what it means or even what it says.
• the facilitator has no expectation on outcome and is there as an artistic leader.
• the artist can be the audience to his/her story (vs. the focus of the story)
• the stories extend beyond the [individual] to the public. it is shared by a community.

as someone with a theatre degree that's just sitting around gathering dust, this presentation made me realize that what i've been waiting for in theatre is a culture of compassion rather than competition. there is something amazingly powerful in acting and telling someone else's story, and egos just get in the way.

in artist's way we do an exercise inspired by playback theatre, and it's always an unexpected delight for the players & the teller to work together. it's a late-stage exercise after participants have developed trust in each other, so there's a fair amount of empathy & benevolence instead of pride & prejudice (ha! please forgive me the pun), which creates a very satisfying experience for all involved.

i was so impressed with this presentation i offered to volunteer for the well arts institute: i gave the presenter my card and she wants me to send her a resume. wish me luck!

(also recommended by one of the very nice people i connected with at the conference (hi, alecia!): what i want my words to do to you, a film about a similar program for women inmates.)

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, classes & workshops, writing

March 7, 2006

creata: children's graphic development

by gl. at 9:49 am

this is the second in a series of posts about workshops sponsored by CREATA during Creative Arts Therapy week. session date mar06.

this was a much better presentation -- the woman who presented it really knew & loved her stuff. this is the same woman fror whom i dropped off my flyers for the information table when her dog bit me, and the first thing she wanted to do was check out my hand, which is doing pretty well by this point. the irony here is that by this time i had discovered the flyers weren't on the information table, so it was a good thing i had brought more with me! :D

there was an interesting bit about choosing different types of mediums for different intents, or "prescriptive materials," and it's things like this that are the reason why i attend CAT week. on a continuum of controlled to expressive/fluid, different activities & mediums & colors & positions & tools evoke different emotions for participants and choosing the rights ones is a big part of your job. also, there's a difference between "uncovering" and "building" activities and what sorts of themes they tend to evoke. i knew this intuitively, but it was nice to see it all laid out.

i knew many of the best practices for children could be adopted or adapted for adults, including this excerpt from "conditions for creative growth," which i feel very much guide the ways in which i've tried to use the studio for artist's way:

• appropriate & maintained materials
• appropriate & welcoming space
• predictable times & ritual
• order, consistency & privacy in space & supplies
• physical safety (non-toxic materials & sturdy furniture) & emotional safety
• respect for & interest in each person's individual creative process & art (no "rescuing")
• encouraging expression rather than performance: "convey that you believe pleasure [in art] is possible and powerful."

the experiential part of the program had us approximate the drawing style of a particular age group. this is where pix would come in handy, because some of the stuff i made is awesome, but we didn't have enough time to do all the stages so we just did three. :)

1. 1-2 years: disordered scribble, no motor control. children are just learning how to hold the pen and make marks. though naming & storytelling don't begin to happen till 2.5-3 years, i think this looks like a monster with a banner flying behind it. :)

2. 2-3.5 years: the first shape we learn how to make is a circle, and we do it over and over and over again (very ringu, eh?). we learn lines, then boxes and triangles last. we develop "tadpole" people, round blobs with legs. in this stage we rarely cross the lines and consistent paper orientation doesn't matter.

3. 6-9 years: representational figures & baseline appear; objects move discreetly from left to right.

drawing earlier than these stages doesn't mean your child's a genius, and in fact, given too much praise, your child may begin to view art as a performance rather than a source of creative self-expression.

at some point, the presenter was talking about "accessing information available in your non-dominant hand" and then caught my eye and surprised me by saying, "right, gretchin? gretchin teaches an artist's way class and she has some flyers available on the table." *blush*

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, classes & workshops

March 3, 2006

no rest for the wicked

by gl. at 12:38 am

lots of art activities today:

• we drove to salem to see the shrine exhibit at mary lou zeek gallery, but she took a big chunk of it down early, so we only saw about half the pieces -- but one of them was immediately recognizable from claudine hellmuth, whose collage discovery workshop we have beneath the coffee table, waiting for its turn to be read and then packed off to the studio library for others to borrow.

• we ate lunch w/ dayna, a previous artist's way creative cluster member who just got back from a workshop with julia cameron herself, and she gifted me w/ a julia-autographed copy of the writer's life ("to gretchin, for your heart" -- heart is underlined three times) and a copy of the art magazine artella, which has poetry & hidden things in addition to collaged art pieces. thanks, thanks, thanks, dayna!

• we dropped by mary anne radmacher's word garden and she gave us some "tuckers" for free, little packages of word art squares presumably to be tucked into lunches and pillows and notebooks...

• we drove home and then took arwen to the vet & had pizza w/ michaelmas, and though that's not really an art activity, it led to...

• doug's reading from his recently published book, last week's apocalypse, though we really had to push to get him to read more. i've already got a copy & sent one to my dad, so doug signed copies for michaelmas & sven.

• since this is first thursday, sven & i then went to an exhibit i wanted to go to simply because of its title: "moon babies"! it turned out to be a decent exhibit: 12-15 black & white paintings on cabinet doors w/ a narrative that we accidentally began at the end and worked our way to the beginning. it was like a comic book but w/o any words & there were about 2-3 panels per piece.

• when we got out of the unfortunately smokey bar that held the exhibit, i smelled donuts & realized we were near to voodoo doughnut, so we stopped by and i got a bleeding voodoo doll donut and sven got some sort of monstrous peanut-butter-chocolate-chip-sugar-crust fritter.

• and then finally (!) home. still to look forward to this week & next: the se portland artwalk & the creative arts therapy week!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, exhibits & events, miscellany

February 27, 2006

the head of the class

by gl. at 6:26 pm

rob invited me to be a guest lecturer at his english composition class at clark college today. i spoke about "the benefits of a daily writing practice," aka morning pages. it went pretty well! it was a small class but there were actual questions at the end (including an insightful one about whether morning pages are intended to be meditational: yes!). we actually did one page in a morning-pages like style (stream of consciousness, no stoppping) and they blazed through it -- i thought i'd need to prompt more about needing to keep moving. someone even knew newton's first law of motion, adding to my "creativity is newtonian" concept.

i added a twist to the standard morning pages routine: i've often said if you could combine julia cameron with david allen, you'd have an even more productive flavour of artist's way (julia allen? ;). julia talks a lot about how you can expect god/the universe to help you, but adding a getting things done component would place the artist's way in a more "god helps those who help themselves" camp.

at any rate, morning pages are not something you typically return to; in fact, if you let them sit a while, you often can't return to them because if you're doing them "right" (i.e., quickly) your handwriting is probably illegible. :) so i asked them, after they were done writing, to review their page and pick out "actionable items" or ideas they'd like to keep track of. their morning pages revealed job interviews to call back on, reminders to talk to their children, and buying new journals. i think this practical step really enables you to act on what you say you want, reinforcing the hopes & dreams that inevitably surface during morning pages.

i also passed out copies of "notes on making art" because they work just as well for writing, too. at the end, one of the students told rob, "you should have her speak earlier in the semester. i wish i had known about this sooner!"

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, miscellany

February 20, 2006

unitarian artist's way: week 3

by gl. at 2:42 pm

we created critic & ally cards last week: on one side was an image that represented our artistic critic, and on the other was an image that represented our artistic ally. we placed them on small pieces of matteboard:

critic: ally:

when i'm at my most self-critical i feel like the man in the box, trapped & small without a future. the blank space around the image is intentional: if i was animating it, it would shrink more and more until it disappeared completely. adopting the oppposite as my ally, the box becomes a window open wide and smiling into unknown blue. these are actually both the same size, but they're different orientations.

then i ended up making another one, which i like even better:

critic: ally:

you can't beat these for quick personal imagery. the fish packed close together correlate pretty closely to a similar "lost in the crowd" metaphor i used in the last collage we made and bears, for whatever reason, have often found their way into my poems and images. the butterflies around the bear are symbolic of an event that happened to me on the way to my first burning man.

earlier in the evening, we also wrote letters to our "addictions," the things we love to be distracted by rather than doing art. we read them aloud; here's mine:

my very dearest interweb:

oh, i use your affectionate nickname because that's what all the cool kids do, and i so want to be a cool kid. they're so smart and witty and passionately geeky and very, very attractive -- of course you would want to hang out with them. i must tell you my heart flutters, dear internet, when i hear the chime that announces new email, and then my stomach sinks when i find just spam and random listserv mail.

i'm sure you know by now how interesting and fascinating and absorbing you are -- there's always something new to discover with you. and you know what a curious person i am: i can ask you dozens of questions at any time of the day or night and you never seem bored or irritated. in fact, you encourage me to ask more! you have no idea how rare and wonderful that is.

of course, you never ask questions of me, and when i try to talk about myself, you never listen. over 10,000 sent-mails and 3 regular blogs and it's like i've been talking to myself this whole time. c'mon, internet! isn't this supposed to be a 2-way relationship? or is it always going to be all about you? you know i love you, but something has to change.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

February 17, 2006

artist's way open studio (february)

by gl. at 1:13 am

overbooking worked: we set up for 10 but ended up with 7.5 -- the .5 being the 5-year old who outcollaged all of us put together! it was active but didn't feel frantic or constricted. met some very nice people i hope to see again, and someone even dropped in to film us for her documentary film class! sven did a great job helping me set up and entertaining monica's daughter by teaching her about zombies and butoh dancing.

["web": click the image to see the other collages]

i'm fond of this piece: i did a citrisolve transfer of a star map over the spiderweb raindrops, and though this is a simple collage, i find its colors, composition & juxtaposition to be very effective.

next month marks the one-year anniversary of hosting artist's way open studio. hooray! i can't believe it's been so long, and yet it feels like i've been doing this forEVER. i've sure gotten a lot of cards out of it!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

February 9, 2006

unitarian artist's way: reading deprivation

by gl. at 4:34 pm

so the little unitarian group has reached chapter 4, and you know what that means! yes, it's time for reading deprivation! yes, we can still read the artist's way, but other forms of reading (books, newspapers, email, web, the backs of cereal boxes) are off-limits. in my creative clusters we actually go to full-on media deprivation: no reading, radio or tv for a week, which includes music. at that point, i call it "media fasting" because it sounds so much more virtuous. ;) at any rate, reading/media deprivation is designed to let you find out what you make when you're not spending all your time filling yourself with what other people have made.

good timing, too: i have several art deadlines coming up. i am still communicating via email w/ people i know or to accomplish tasks that need to be acted on this week, but otherwise i am ruthless with the delete key on listservs, let the rss feeds pile up, and don't use the interweb as a reference resource. see you in a week!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

February 7, 2006

artist's way status

by gl. at 3:56 pm

neither of the artist's way creative clusters formed this time around, so it looks like i'll have more flexibility to schedule artist's way independent study participants.

i don't think i've mentioned i'm in an artist's way class right now, an 8-week one at the unitarian church downtown. the first night we introduced each other (not ourselves); for a class that is about discovering & recovering your creative self, letting someone else tell your story is like playing a game of telephone, leaving everyone with an impression you did not mean to make. we also filled out worksheets ("soft as a ____").

last week we created a collage (and it reinforced my rule that if you're hosting an art activity, then you should have extra gluesticks on hand!).

[click the picture to see larger]

most people didn't have time to finish their collages, much less talk about them, but this one was mostly finished when someone came over and pointed to the woman in the chair: "are you sad?" "yes," i said. she pointed to the chinese bicycling crowd: "are you feeling lost in the crowd?" "yes," i said. she pointed at the ice-climber: "are you feeling cold?" "actually, no," i said, "that feels like it's about the enormous impossibility and futility of everything."

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

January 28, 2006

mhcc calligraphy: class 3 (and artist's way prep)

by gl. at 12:18 am

shhhhh! i skipped calligraphy class today! i was on the way there and turned around about stark and came back home. well, actually i stopped at fred meyer first for some curtain rods for the curtains i bought at craft warehouse that i want to hang in the studio -- except it turns out that i just bought giant fabric, not curtains at all. heh.

i have the first artist's way independent study student of the new year coming over tomorrow, which means the studio had to get a shakedown today. we do pretty well keeping the studio clean when we run classes and host events, but if it sits too long between guests we pile things up and don't dust, so when classes begin again i have to mop & wipe the counters & clean the sinks (ink in sinks!) & dust, etc. etc. earlier in the week sven rented a steam cleaner so all the carpets are clean.

each time i run the artist's way creative clusters or host an event, we tend to make improvements to the studio. for instance, for the first cluster in this studio sven made the flat files and hung the star lamps in the living room. for the fall clusters we added a scarlet star lamp on the porch and a small red cd player, along with clearly labeled, consolidated & organized art supplies in the kitchen. this time the spring clusters will get pretty, colorful pots on the steps and a "scarlet star studios" sign below the window, as well as a large "pocket" curtain holding an array of small treasures & delights. the kitchen now holds colorful glasses, mugs, plates & special tea.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, calligraphy, studio space

January 19, 2006

artist's way open studio (january)

by gl. at 11:59 am

another evening where we began with a full studio and ended up with half a studio. we had a nice time -- it was a comfortable, familiar group -- but i'm frustrated because we had four people on a waiting list who could have come if three others hadn't flaked out at the very last minute.

["this is important": click the image to see the other collages]

i've tried appealing to fairness and responsbility. next month i'm going to attempt overbooking the studio for 8 participants and if that doesn't work, the free collage night will no longer be free.

also: tonight i could not get iphoto to export a photo less than 80k -- even for photos i have already successfully exported at 40k! to get "this is important" up i had to run it through preview first. any ideas about how to export smaller file sizes in iphoto? now that i have celeste, i'm really looking forward to have a smaller, happier workflow.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

January 12, 2006

mission accomplished

by gl. at 11:59 am

154 artist's way flyers are up in portland now, exceeding this term's goal of 150 -- which was more than double the 70 i got up last time. whoo and hoo! i even attended an open house for the person who got me into dinnergrrls & i spread the saint cupcake love, bringing 6 delectable tiny cupcakes to share w/ her suitemates (with several artist's way infocards tucked into the box, of course! :). i am SO relieved to make this goal. everything else is just sweet, sweet gravy!

this post has been brought to you by the central library, art media (again), the IPRC lobby, reading frenzy & powell's.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

January 10, 2006

how to have an opinion about art

by gl. at 4:13 pm

one of the hardest things about being an artist's way facilitator is having an opinion about art. i used to be incredibly critical & cynical, but one of the great things artist's way gave me was kinder eyes towards the art of others. as rob has said, "'bad' art is often a preliminary stage, larval -- even embryonic -- for the good stuff. We can help to guide it along, give it sunlight and water and sing to it, or we can crush it, piss on it, darken hopes and souls." i'm very much of the opinion that artist's way is less about Art and more about living a more creative life, and part of that involves a certain amount of forgiveness and generosity, both for yourself & others. it's like being able to taste the love in a homemade pumpkin pie, even if it has too much dark molasses in it.

when facilitating, i don't have an opinion at all about the art that gets made because artist's way is about the process, not the result. but i also believe there are legitmate uses for criticism, and i was really conflicted about how to legitimately like or dislike a piece of art w/o betraying my neutrality as a facilitator or the tenets of artist's way.

on thursday i think i finally figured it out. i went for an artwalk on first thursday with a group that was initially enthusiastic but became discouraged pretty quickly, rolling their eyes and raising their eyebrows & crossing their arms, moving to a bar to complain about the state of the art world. i have to admit, a lot of art gallery art doesn't usually appeal to me, but it often inspires me to make my own, and i like to immerse myself in all the influences. but the stumbling block for the group was hildur bjarnadóttir's "overlap" and its neighbor, victoria haven's "the lucky ones," both understated, abstract & geometrical, with distinct flavours of portland grunge. the group felt these pieces were lazy and obvious and incomprehensible as Art. i didn't really like them, either, but i didn't as actively dislike them and the strongly negative group reaction disturbed me. i didn't feel like i wanted to have to defend a show i didn't feel strongly about. can you dislike something and still be glad it exists?

later that night i discovered the key is to give yourself a chance to engage with the art before deciding whether you like or dislike it. after you've applied some form of response to it (like, say, the phenomenological/aesthetic/artistic responses i introduce in the creative clusters :), then you can hate it. but to hate it on a purely visual level means you're viewing it as entertainment, not art. we often say a piece doesn't "speak" to us, but often we don't try to talk to it; we just look at it and move on. if you view art as a form of creative self-expression, you have an obligation to try to engage with it, to ask questions, to look for the story. this is where viewer/artist collaboration can happen, and it should be the artist's obligation to help with that process (unfortunately, most artist statements distance the viewer even further). if after attempting to respond to the piece it still doesn't work for you, then fine! but now you have more to base your opinion on than whether your 4-year-old niece could make something better.

the other part of the solution, which came a couple of days later, was finally settling into a workable distinction between creation, craft & art. st. francis of assisi wrote, "he who works with his hands is a laborer. he who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. he who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist."

aha! so if the mystery ingredient for art is heart, an intention of creative self expression, then i can appreciate pieces that don't move me for their craft, or even dislike them if i find myself unable to find their heart. this is a huge relief: not being able to have an opinion about art has made me feel hypocritical and a little schizophrenic. bless you, father; i shall go forth & sin no more.

(btw, my favorite pieces from first thursday were from james jack's "ink" series, a beautiful exploration of calligraphic forms and sink marbling. these pix don't do it justice.)

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, exhibits & events, writing

January 4, 2006

and now for a word from our sponsors...

by gl. at 11:53 pm

i've procrastinated promotional work for the february artist's way creative clusters long enough: i meant to begin in december, but it vanished in the holiday haze and *poof!* and here it is january already.

though i had small creative clusters in fall, because my conversion rate for them was pretty high, vickie recommended i try simply extendeding my reach this time. so my goal is to distribute flyers or business cards to 150 different individuals & sites, doubling the 70 i had in fall. this requires a much more structured distribution strategy, which is both tiring and tedious. however, it does give me the opportunity to explore more of portland; it's amazing how one can become accustomed to what one already knows.

sven has been pounding the se pavement while i've been working on nw & ne. we've discovered hollywood is very unfriendly towards flyers (a woman at sweet indulgence even lied to me!), whereas alberta & fremont are welcoming of them. sven said burnside was a tough street, too. sven can consistently distribute 27 flyers in a 4-hour time period, but it takes me 5.5 hours to do 21. at that rate, the cost per flyer is relatively high, even at minimum wage (now $7.25/hour in oregon, so that makes each flyer worth about $1.50 each in labour alone).

before working the lists we began with 30-40 sites and as of today, we are up to 128 sites. i'm pretty confident we'll reach 150 pretty quickly now: i still have some nw to finish and sw to begin, but i also have a slew of networking events lined up this month. my weakest point is north (like the mississippi area) and gresham/clackamas sites.

oh! but i got my first registration today! and it's not at all related to any of the promotion i've just written about! oh, the irony!

completely unrelated:
reason 3,015 why i love portland: the museum of modern materialism, which i discovered across the street from cinema 21 yesterday while trying to juggle flyers, an umbrella and an ipod nano. the museum is a big red vending machine which dispenses a colorful plastic ball w/ trinkets inside for 50 cents (very much like my beloved poetry gumballs). my art piece included a small handful of tiny napoleon-style army men (too bad they're too tiny for mph's mensies; maybe i'll give them to grace weston); a 6-sided die; a simple sticker w/ the words "stay awake!" printed below an alien head; a piece of translucent holographic plastic w/ an embedded honeycomb pattern; and scraps from a language workbook, perhaps, that say things like "say these words in alphabetical order: flute, trumpet, oboe, clarinet."

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, exhibits & events

December 15, 2005

artist's way open studio (december)

by gl. at 11:59 pm

so the proposed "rsvp fee" has been delayed a month, as we had a full house tonight except for one person who emailed me because she was sick. sven was in vancouver at a home-buyer education class which depressed him because he's almost due for a new morning pages journal and would have prefered to have been at collage night tonight instead. it was subdued but productive, with one nice new person & a few rough edges. nobody drank the egg nog, though.

the collage below has shiny red stars and a gold piece underneath "a forest." i wish i had a good way of capturing shine when scanning. also, the flower petals extend past the border of the piece and even a little further than you see here.

["a winter's night": click the image to see the other collages]

i'm up late and i'll be up even later because my mhcc final project is due tomorrow. i thought i was further along on it than i am because whenever i get good text the graphical element isn't right, and whenever the graphical element is cool, the text isn't. the problem letter this time 'round is "o," especially with a soda pop pen.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

December 14, 2005

purty pictures

by gl. at 11:43 am

i've added pictures to all our non-blog pages and modified some content, especially the portland artist's way page and the studio page. that's been a long time a'comin'.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: administrivia, artist's way

December 7, 2005

artist's way: week 13

by gl. at 11:10 pm

as the final meeting of the fall creative clusters, we were treated to fantastic omega projects, delicious bowls of stone soup, and tearful goodbyes.

i love the stone soup exercise because the artist's way secret is not really about Art at all: it's about living a creative life, even for seemingly mundane things like soup. each cluster creates a unique soup that's symbolic of their contribution & synergy. the tuesday group created a sausage soup (and two people brought carrots, so we had a lot of carrots!), while the wednesday group brought so many types of veggies we couldn't fit them all in the pot! the wednesday cluster also brought dakota bread & a soft, sour brie cheese to accompany the soup, and we finished off w/ homemade guiness brownies. it was a feast, and an appropriate end to the 3-month journey we've traveled together.

the omega projects are like final projects but they aren't worth 50% of your grade. (as i kept reminding them, "you can't fail artist's way!") it gives cluster members an opportunity to explore one of the arts we've done during a creative cluster or to strike out on their own. because while i very much enjoy creating the opportunity for them to create art at the studio, the point of going through artist's way is to learn to create art outside the studio on your own. :) anyway, some really phenomenal pieces, including a beautifully packaged homemade tangram set & a set of collaged bowling pins!

i passed out comment cards, little glass scarlet stars packaged in tiny red envelopes & copies of sven's "notes on making art" which were requested last week. the best artist's way clusters spontaneously bring gifts for each other because they're so excited to share their projects: the wednesday group gave each other little "inspiration boxes" filled with tiny collage-able objects, little inspirational magnets, seashells from the oregon coast, and small homemade accordian books. one of the participants even made one an accordian book for sven, even though she had never met him. wow! how cool is that?

and now i have a little less than 2 months to promote the february clusters. *takes a deep breath*

center (faith): a red handprint w/ gold accents, anchored by flames and darker squares of painted paper, the hand is supported by a net of tiny golden stars that twinkle between its fingers, and a dark red tealight glows in the center of the palm. i created this as an artist response for my friend terrilynn, whose college-aged daughter has a brain tumour that's just resurfaced after an operation she had in high school. terrilynn & i created the handprint before i shaved my head in 2001 & the little squares are part of an art project we're working on.

music: kd lang's ingénue, which is a great album to listen to while eating a bowl of homemade soup.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

November 30, 2005

artist's way: week 12

by gl. at 6:43 pm

this week we did one of the hardest exercises i facilitate in a creative cluster: authentic dance. doing it well hinges on group trust and a willingness to take creative risks. i remember when i first participated in this activity i wasn't sure i could do it. i was positive, in fact, i wasn't going to do it until after i had done it. so facilitating it always makes me a little nervous because i understand how hard it is to commit to and how delicately it has to be handled. even people who have adapted well to exploring visual creativity exercises find creating art with something as intimate as one's own body is a challenging experience. the same is true for music exerices and using one's voice, and to some extent, the playback theatre exercise.

the tuesday night group had it a little rough. one of the participants was having a horrible night and though she began her dancing strong, by the end she was small: better than she had arrived, but not as transformative as last week's exercise. but the beauty of authentic dance is because it's not a performance but an expression of one's own body, not moving at all is still communicating something. authentic dancing is done in pairs, with the other person being your witness. having a witness allows you to remain grounded and pulls poetry from you even when you think the motions will appear to be meaningless.

the wednesday morning group really leapt right in, even the participant who looked at me with big round eyes as i explained the exercise. i could tell she was scared, but she was willing, and people often underestimate the power of being willing to try something in a safe space. and since there were only three of them, and authentic dance happens in pairs, i had to do it, too (and yes, authentic dance still makes me nervous. less nervous than it used to, but as the facilitator there felt like self-imposed pressure to be "good" rather than just expressive).

the wednesday cluster was having such a good time we actually got out 15 minutes late, which is unusual because i'm pretty good about getting them out on time, but some things can't be rushed. and i was surprised and pleased to discover that one of the participants has been influenced by sven, even though she's never met him. but his "witch" and "pajama dreamer" sculptures are hanging in the studio & she was thrilled w/ sven's new pegboard, and everyone asked for copies of "notes on making art." how delightful!

next week is the last week for these clusters. we've started to talk about how to continue artistic development once the clusters end, stressing the use of morning pages, artist dates, and finding supportive companions. after we stop meeting, i'll start promoting the next round of clusters that begin in february. promotion is one of my least favorite things ever, so if anyone has any tips or advice about who & where & what & how, please feel free to say something.

center (autonomy): a wooden cigar box filled with chestnuts, topped w/ a warm slate candleholder. a pool of silver & gold stars surrounds the box & the stone.

music: i began tuesday night with enya's shepherd moons, but one participant wanted something "angrier" for her so i dug around in sven's room till i found patti smith's trampin'. this morning i moved to enya's the celts, which has a little more body than shepherd moons but isn't as angry as patti smith. :)

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

November 23, 2005

artist's way: week 11

by gl. at 11:06 pm

two pretty good sessions this week.

tuesday night finally got their blind painting session. one participant came in crying, but by the end of the night, her mood had lifted and she was excited and smiling. it's just amazing to watch the art process work like that; i don't often use the word "transformational," but in this case there is no other word for it.

this morning's group created a collaborative story using image cards they created, which they enjoyed so much all of them had ideas of how to take it home with them and get others involved. at the end they huddled closer and closer together, waiting for an opportunity to play a card, spinning story so quickly i could barely keep up! it seems more common than not that the collaborative stories begin in a magical forest. before the cluster began, one woman confessed privately, at the risk of seeming maudlin, that she admired me and was very grateful to get the chance to get to do artist's way with me. and if that isn't the perfect thanksgiving present, i don't know what is.

center (self-protection): the "flesh & spirit" box i created for the "outside the box" show in san diego. the outside very clearly shows the box "skeleton" and its panels are oversized limb & organ pictures from a victorian anatomy book that have been painted & gilded. the warm interior is a heart twinkling w/ light, filled w/ shimmery, gauzy materials, stars and hidden treasures.

music: the ambient cd of moby's hotel.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

November 17, 2005

artist's way open studio (november)

by gl. at 11:25 pm

we had a full house of rsvps with people who were excited to come (and even turned away several prospects), but in the end, it was just me & sven. after that whole "collage night wants to be free!" speech, i'm considering instituting a paypal "rsvp fee" in january to staunch the attrition rate, or maybe just overbook. we'll see what happens next month.

i cheated and didn't actually even collage: i glued a large image onto a card and played w/ the gocco some more (edging toward the two-screen process). but sven created three collages, this one being my favorite:

[sven's "monster": click the image to see the other collages]

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

November 16, 2005

artist's way: week 10

by gl. at 11:49 pm

blind painting is always a fun activity and it allows people who are afraid of paint to try it because they can't see it! :)

after a tearful reunion last week, last night's group had the weird vanishing act again, so i had unexpected time to play w/ the gocco, but it was a little rough on the morale. the wednesday group, however, was chatty and excited and playful & brave. one of the participants has been a member of a previous cluster and has said the last two chapters really resonated for her -- which was good to hear because she really didn't have a connection to the book the last time 'round. but her life has shifted in some fairly dramatic ways, and this illustrates my theory of the artist's way process being a spiral one: not all the chapters will work for you, but at least one of them certainly will, and different chapters will mean more to you than others each time you read it.

i've been asked the same question now twice in two days: why do i host a free collage night? the job club for creatives asked it first, implying that if i want to use it as a recruitment tool for creative clusters, i need to target people willing to pay for collage night. today one of the participants asked about it, worried i was undervaluing my time & attention.

there are several reasons why collage night is free:

• i believe in the gifting economy. i want to have a range of offerings, including one for people who can't afford to join a creative cluster.

• i don't like the idea that every art experience has to be commodified & paid for. i charge for artist's way creative clusters because they are a significant investment of time & attention. but collage is something anyone should be able to do at any time. to charge for it seems incredibly counterintuitive.

• i don't provide instruction & don't plan to. i simply provide an opportunity, a catalyst. i believe art can be communal without requiring it to be collaborative.

• the artist's way open studio benefits me just as much as it benefits the other participants: it provides me with an obligation to create art, as well as the opportunity to broadcast consistent updates about the studio that are more than simply solictations for money.

besides, who would come if i charged? i don't know how others do it, but it still feels like pulling taffy to get the studio to fill even when it is free. :P

center (compassion): layers of shimmery fabric folded into comfortable pillows, cradling a frosted glass candleholder. a gossamer ribbon of stars is tucked between the layers. i've been wanting to do something w/ fabric, and compassion seemed to be a nice way to use it. the first layer of fabric is a sort of dichroic or interference fabric: it drastically changes colors as you change the angle of the light, moving from dusky rose to plum twilight.

music: pink martini's hang on little tomato because i referenced it in the weekly email i send out between sessions.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

November 9, 2005

artist's way: week 9

by gl. at 10:23 pm

everybody was at both clusters this week! we worked in clay today, which is a deliberately ephemeral & sensory exercise: the only exercise where we don't write or share or document or respond. we just do.

center (strength): taken from above, this picture is misleading, as from most other angles, the candle is hidden below the bricks, mysteriously illuminating them and shining through the ink bottles elevating them. i used to make these bricks when i lived in california, but it's a messy process & we don't have a space to make them inside, and leaving them to dry outside in the rain hasn't seemed very viable. :)

music: loreena mckennitt's the visit (thanks, michaelmas!)

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

November 2, 2005

artist's way: week 8

by gl. at 11:14 pm

a very emotional cluster on tuesday night as members created day of the dead altars for people they had lost: in this case, they had both lost their fathers. the wednesday morning cluster members created altars for friends they had lost, which required a lot fewer tissues.

one of the wednesday morning members shyly asked if i could copy a demo CD she only had one copy of and had been afraid to let anyone listen to for years. another wednesday morning member is so thrilled with her artist's way experience she's planning on teaching it in salem herself in 2006, "and i'm just going to copy you," she says. certainly i've adapted pamela's excellent techniques, and thus the cycle continues.

center (connection): i made a feeble attempt at an altar for amelia using an izone picture i took of her a long time ago and her ultrasound images. but it didn't communicate what i wanted and hence no picture. that's the beauty of the "quality through quantity" ethos: i don't have to love or share everything i make. i just have to keep making. :)

music: cowboy junkies' the trinity session because boy, is it sad.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

October 26, 2005

artist's way: week 7

by gl. at 11:03 pm

since halloween is monday (!), this week we created masks, which transforms the studio into a glorious mess of paints & paper plates & found objects & glue guns & heat guns & beads & ribbons & raffia. one of the wednesday morning participants sent a great checkin from new york city. one of the tuesday participants was gone again, and she worried it would be "inappropriate" to return. so i asked the rest of the cluster what they thought, and their thoughts echoed mine: when you begin a cluster, you matter. you belong. there's a space for you. as ursula le guin writes in a poem i read at the beginning of each cluster, "return with us, return to us, be always coming home." unless, you know, you choose to drop, in which case we totally respect your decision. :)

this morning i got to the studio at 9 a.m. to get ready for the cluster at 9:30, and by 9:45 i was pretty mad that nobody had shown up until i remembered the cluster didn't begin until 10. :) it gave me some time to work on the layout for the mhcc calligraphy class that's due friday, though: i started sketching some ideas while the tuesday night class was assembling their masks.

center (abundance): 30 apples spilling out of a bowl, w/ three apples cored enough to place tealights in (to represent the three participants in each group. awwww....!). the picture you're seeing is from the wednesday group, who added a dramatic winter-blooming camilla & tucked ocean stones among the apples.

music: delerium's karma

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

October 21, 2005

artist's way open studio (october)

by gl. at 12:34 am

tonight's open studio went pretty well, considering we turned away three people thinking we were full, but then two rsvps never showed. those who came were welcomed w/ spicy apple cider warming on the studio stove. shaedra returned, a newly married woman w/ photographs and the speaker sven lent her in august. we also got a last-minute inquiry from a printmaker and former tech writer from mary lansing's 8-week group who was both kind and conversational. it made for a very pleasant autumnal evening, and when we returned home, a copper-rimmed moon was rising above powell butte while fog gathered on the streets below.

["not yet": click to see the other intuitive collages]

you may not be able to tell, but this is a very dimensional piece: i got out the hot glue and added a rusty nail at the top, a tufted pink fuzzy scrap, a round metal bit with tiny little sharp points, and a folded paper star. ordinarily i gather collage pieces i think will work together before the open studio to get a head start, but this one was truly intuitive, simply using whatever appealed to me, and i can tell the difference. it's much less carefully composed, but much more expressive of my mood.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

October 19, 2005

artist's way: week 6

by gl. at 9:31 pm

so we're about halfway through the fall sessions and the tuesday night cluster has had a rather large and embarassing snafu: nobody showed up yesterday. i've never seen anything like this happen before. after two members called and said they didn't feel like coming that night for various reasons, i scrambled to find a solitary exercise for the member remaining, but then i didn't hear from her at all, even though i sent her a follow-up email today to ask if she was okay. i'm struggling w/ how to approach this. i want to be flexible about the way life works, but i also think it's inconsiderate to the other cluster members and of me. this is not a large lecture class. in a cluster, you matter. creative clusters are not inconsequential committments, and most people join a creative cluster because they can't get through the book alone.

the wednesday morning cluster members make up for it a bit, though: they're independently rearranging their conference schedules and plane flights in order to make it to sessions. today i thought i was going to have them try the "love letters" exercise, but something told me to try the playback theatre exercise instead, and i'm glad i did. at this point i want them to be moving from self-contained projects to more group/trust based ones (of course, as you'll see, that won't be very true the next two weeks. all the more reason to get one in now!).

playback theatre involves a "storyteller" and the "actors" who renact the story in various forms (e.g., as moving scupture, as a "play," as dance). everyone rotates through the roles. it's more fun than it sounds, even if you're not a theatre person. it gets the blood moving, involves a lot of laughter and often helps people work through situations. even people who are normally afraid of improv do well w/ playback theatre.

center (possibility): a candle in a glass votive surrounded by a pile of blazing autumn leaves (picked at nw 18/glisan) and layered with stamps from foreign countries.

music: bela fleck's ufo tofu, which is an energetic, cheerful album (though "sinister minister" from their first album is my favorite song, i think ufo tofu is probably their best album). bela fleck was the first concert i ever saw (hi, matt!), and they were great.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

October 13, 2005

artist's way: week 5

by gl. at 11:40 am

the tuesday and wednesday clusters did different activities again: a tuesday participant couldn't come and so i scrambled to find an additional solo or pair activity, since the critic transformation really needs at least three people. so tuesday got an activity using only shape, colour & line to create a portrait of positive & negative traits (based on an exercise i did during one of the creative arts therapy workshops i attended the year before last). wednesday got to do blind contour drawing, which worked out well, i think, even though we were missing a participant, too.

the wednesday cluster also got an impromptu image transfer workshop at the end because one of the participants mentioned in passing wanting to know more about image transfers, so during the writing portion of the activity i grabbed a photocopy of the blind contour drawing i created in artist's way years ago, a scrap of paper, and citrisolv (a tip i picked up from the iprc transfer printing workshop -- citrisolve works like a dream). afterwards, we ended up in the kitchen playing with various transfers & papers.

in both clusters, i was interested to note that during media deprivation, participant partners were suspiciously alert for what they considered to be inappropriate behaviour: "are you reading?" "is that really an artist date?"

center (integrity): a small shaker-style wooden lid w/ three candles clustered in the center, surrounded by poetry beads. a gossamer ribbon runs beneath it, anchored by glass stars. the candles don't look centered, but they were on tuesday night. when i had to replace the candles on wednesday morning, i coudn't get it all back together again. :)

music: amelie on tuesday night, but since one of the participants remembered me playing it before (and this is one of the reasons why i wanted to write this stuff down), i played the mirrormask soundtrack for the wednesday cluster, because as sven pointed out, it was very unlikely anyone had heard it before. :) he also recommended the balafón marimba ensemble as a good post-media deprivation album, but alas! the cd player i bought is just a cd player. and sven's copy of balafón is a tape. so mirrormask it was! which, as it turns out, is often a little too frenetic to be a good artist's way cd.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

October 5, 2005

artist's way: week 4

by gl. at 3:15 pm

we did our first split exercise between the tuesday & wednesday groups because one of the participants couldn't make it to tuesday night and the exercise i had planned requires at least three people. so tuesday night did blind contour drawing and wednesday morning did the critic transformation exercise. next week, they'll swap.

and thus also begins the ever-popular media deprivation exercise, which is one of artist's way's most frustrating and rewarding experiences. i even emailed the sacred circle list in case anyone wanted to try it again, the germ of which may very well lead into the "artist's way spiral" (?) concept i want to implement someday (where artist's way graduates have an opportunity to review previous tasks, often synchronously with the current clusters).

one of this morning's participants says she'd like to start a similar cluster in salem. hooray, i say! and one of last night's participants named the getty travertine block i use as a speaking stone "sebastian."

center (power): a mirror beneath a red mosaic candleholder, surrounded by small glass spheres, red glass stones, and a glass star.

music: michael's nyman's the piano soundtrack. it may have been a little early to pull this one out (i could say the same about passion), but these have been fairly emotional exercises and deserve dramatic music. i'd like to play the akira soundtrack, but it's got too many quiet/loud spikes (and that one superweird song i always have to forward past) to be a very good background album.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

September 28, 2005

artist's way: week 3

by gl. at 9:19 pm

this week the artist's way creative clusters created lifemaps, an exercise i think went pretty well for both clusters. this was laura's first session after a series of unfortunate events kept her from attending the first two sessions, so this was a perfect introductory exercise for her and her cluster. susan brought lovely roses from her garden for the studio this morning.

at this point, the clusters seem pretty solid. i think there will probably be some unrest around week 8 when the clusters begin to get more emotionally risky and the outside world becomes more demanding, but for now, it feels like we are all more comfortable w/ each other. btw, it turns out that running two clusters is only a little more work than just running one, but i'm still glad i'm not teaching at the mac this term.

each week i create a different center sculpture/assemblage for the clusters, usually based on the theme of the chapter we're covering. to give these otherwise plain text entries some color, i'll begin posting pix & descriptions now:

center (identity): an art brick i made a couple of years ago, bounded by four different kinds of calligraphy pens (including one i made from a pepsi can & a chopstick).

also, some of you might want to know what music was played, which i will also begin including, along w/ amazon associate links. this week it was paul simon's graceland & peter gabriel's passion. susan, especially, found passion inspiring.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

September 23, 2005

poem: balanced

by gl. at 10:28 pm

this is the poem i wrote on the wednesday morning poetry walk:

balanced

when the sun shines there is no mystery
every blade of grass clipped and crisp against the lawn
every flower clamouring for attention
the hidden cat spotted among bright dandelions
while sawing and hammering and clattering compete
with the chorus of birds and chanting insects

but even in the brightest day there is shadow
relief from the sun, heavy & hollow
in a field wide with blackberries and soft piles of dried grass
autumn apples rest on the ground, examined by ants
behind me, the leaves rustle cool like water
as the wind passes with its silent secrets

tomorrow is the equinox
balanced between night and light
today i am walking the sliver between seasons
the iron weathervane perfectly still
waiting for what comes next

...september 21, 2005...

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, writing

poem: autumn walk

by gl. at 10:25 pm

this is the poem i wrote on the tuesday night poetry walk:

autumn walk

with every step, we fall further into the night.
the trees glow in the dusk, each leaf
wearing the last rays of sunset like a halo.
cars flash past in roars and whispers.
gleaming houses line the horizon
like white silk in a dark coat.
we pass roses, cosmos
the last of the thistles
peppers in a pot.
the crickets are singing lullabyes to the dogs.
the moon is still sleeping
in her bed behind powell butte
but the stars are just waking
and i follow the scarlet one home
into brightness and warmth.

...september 20, 2005...

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, writing

artist's way: week 2

by gl. at 10:10 pm

this week we did one of my favorite activities: a poetry walk around the neighborhod while it was still early enough in fall to have sunlight for the tuesday night cluster and beautiful and clear for wednesday morning. we live in a lovely area, right at the base of powell butte and about 6 blocks away from the springwater corridor trail. but the walk is so slow (you try writing every noun & verb down in a 3-block radius and keep walking at the same time), we never get to those areas. still, we end in a lovely open field nearby, so it mixes a little bit of rural with suburbia. i rarely participate in the activities when i'm facilitating, but in this case it turns out to be important to model the process, including writing the poems, so i'll be including them in two more posts.

an interesting encounter during tuesday night's poetry walk:
a man is walking his dog across the street: "what are you girls taking pictures of?"
"oh, we're just writing," i say, with my best harmless smile.
he speaks to his dog: "we've got three of them right here. they must be students or something."

center (safety): a single candle surrounded by chestnuts resting on silver tags w/ embossed words (yes, fall, heart, naked, heaven, light). three of erica moen's tiny paper stars are scattered about.

music played: sundays' blind.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

September 16, 2005

artist's way open studio (september)

by gl. at 1:20 am

tonight's open studio went pretty well. two new people found me via craigslist and joanne was finally able to come -- she even postponed her morning pages today so she could begin them in a newly collaged journal! and she brought tiny tomatoes from her garden, much to our newly discovered tomato-lovin' delight. tonight was the first night it's really felt like fall, with an edge to the air and the moon burning behind quicksilver clouds.

an interesting test of the open studio philosophy: one of the participants used several sheets of my sink-marbled paper and i tried not to panic, reminding myself that supplies are for using and i can easily make more. do i believe in a gift economy? do i believe in abundance? gifts should be given without an expectation of return or monitoring their "best" use. i very much enjoy seeing art made with things i've been saving for years, and that's enough for me. i was glad to struggle briefly with this issue and arrive at a generous conclusion: it doesn't mean that i can't keep some supplies marked exclusively for me & sven, but otherwise i want to place no limits on what can be made at the open studio.

btw, the collage below is more vibrant than this appears. i may rescan it when it's not almost 2 o'clock in the morning. i do like collage night, but the photo & update distribution program keeps me up late.

[pattern from tangle: click to see the other intuitive collages]

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

September 14, 2005

artist's way: week 1

by gl. at 6:44 pm

so both the tuesday night and the wednesday morning creative clusters have met for the first time! alas, we've already lost three members, including the two i suspected wouldn't make it: one boy decided to do it on his own, one girl couldn't come to the first few sessions because of her wedding, and another had pregnancy complications. laura was also home sick with a fever, but i'm glad she didn't bring it to us and as far as i know she'll be back.

it felt fairly chaotic to get a rush of new registrations and then an equivalent amount of fallout, but as i said today at the end of the morning cluster, i'm glad it's begun. this i know how to do; promotion gives me hives. i wonder how much i could afford to pay someone to do promotion for me, if it could be a fee-per-student arrangement.

but the art activity, which for the first time is always a 20-minute intuitive collage, was very successful in both clusters. it's a deliberately short timeframe to thwart the demons of perfectionism and self-criticism. i think i might call it an "exuberant collage" rather than an "intuitive collage" because it more accurately conveys the sense of energy and enthusiasm i see when people are engaged in this activity. afterwards we discussed three different ways to give feedback and respond to artwork without being critical about it: phenomenological, aesthetic, and artistic.

having never had a cluster form in the morning before, i have noticed some differences from the evening clusters: in the physical checkin, people are less likely to say they're tired; the room feels lighter with so much sunlight; the construction workers mercilessly grind away at the stone facade on the house across the street (argh); the stars & candles don't really need to be lit but i like to do it anyway. and when i'm done, i have the whole day ahead of me. :)

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

September 12, 2005

last two

by gl. at 11:44 pm

two final artist's way registrations came today, both for tuesday night. so wednesday morning is full and tuesday night is past quorum. hooray! can i breathe now?

i suspect one person in each group might not make it all the way through. i'm trying to get okay with this to begin with: everyone has their own path to take through the artist's way, and when it gets tough, it's sometimes best to leave and return later than it is to try to struggle against & resent it.

last night sven & i saw a shooting star streak past casseiopia & perseus while mars hovered above the butte. mars is our "scarlet star" and so i hope this bodes well for artist's way.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

September 9, 2005

but wait, there's more!

by gl. at 6:11 pm

two more registrations!

a woman from the MAC summer core wants to continue to pursue artist's way, which pleases me greatly. she thought she'd have a travel conflict, but it looks like she'll be able to make it. i am hoping the longer, gentler format works better for her, too. and that also means the wednesday morning class is full! (i can hardly believe it. i have to get more large cushions from costplus/world market!)

in addition to lending us a steam cleaner, laura also decided she wanted to do artist's way! she's in transition after the house settlement & says she wants a "kick start" to be more creative, as someone who dances and sings and writes. and i'm thrilled to add someone to tuesday night. the "last chance" emails & posts need to go out tonight.

and now i hope michaelmas (and reza & kara: happy reception!) understands why i couldn't be gone the weekend before artist's way begins.... :)

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

September 8, 2005

final descent

by gl. at 11:34 pm

my sixth fall registration today was my first contact in july, who found me via the first round of flyering sven did for me at the wild oats on division. another one for wednesday morning, no less, for a total of 5 in that cluster!

alas, with only two MAC registrations, lori & i chose to cancel that class rather than spend the energy packing, travelling, teaching, packing and returning once a week. perhaps the 13-week version was too long for them; i'm happy to revise it to make it more palatable to its members and i think i'll get another shot for its next term, so though it was a surprise, i don't feel too badly about it. and i have wednesday evening free again!

we are heavily into studio cleaning & tinkering now. we're borrowing a steam cleaner from laura tomorrow and sven put a lot of work today into clearly labeling & arranging the supplies in the kitchen. next up is more star lamps, art, cleaning the floors, etc. i've been looking for a cute cd player since the purple translucent one michaelmas gave me over 3 or 4 years ago is finally dying, but i've checked fred meyers, best buy, circuit city and even amazon with no success. boomboxes just aren't hip anymore, i guess. it might be time for me to look at those cool jbl speakers for your ipod.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, studio space

September 6, 2005

fifth fall registration!

by gl. at 8:57 pm

art media finally came through for me! (maybe it was the supplies i just got today that i've been waiting to get till my teacher discount rose to 20% in september. ;) that's four people now in the wednesday morning group -- a surprise to find the most populated one to be the morning! i'm relieved, because while three is the absolute minimum for fusion, four is much more stable and is less awkward when someone is gone for a week. i prefer small class sizes, but they're always nervewracking to watch form. :)

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

September 1, 2005

fourth fall registration!

by gl. at 2:49 pm

from a woman in salem! that makes three for the wednesday morning group, a number i consider to be minimum fusion for group cohesion, and i have a limit of six, so i'm breathing a little easier for that cluster. i paid to place an advertisement in the soapstone weekly newsletter; though i certainly wasn't planning on placing paid advertisements this round, vicki convinced me it was worth the investment. and voila! no other nibbles from the venue, unfortunately, but i'm pretty happy it generated something. plus, it may motivate me to promote artist's way open studio that way, because free events get listed for free. :)

after my last craigslist post (a new one goes up today), i suddenly remembered that i could check my stats page to see how many times the post had been loaded and then approximate clickthrough to the portland artist's way page! very illuminating (and obvious! i ought to have thought of that before!). alas, analog's stats make it difficult to actually follow a particular ip, so sometimes i have to root through the raw files myself.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: administrivia, artist's way

August 30, 2005

third fall registration

by gl. at 6:33 pm

a guy who found me on craigslist who may be the only tuesday night member ("what the heck," he said, "i'd happy to have you as a guide."). may have another nibble for a wednesday morning group, too. crosses fingers

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

August 29, 2005

second fall registration!

by gl. at 8:19 pm

i received my second fall registration via the mail today! hooray! i really know very little about him except that he found me via a world cup flyer (the place we have our job club meetings). i'm very glad he also wants a wednesday morning session so shaedra isn't the only one there. one of my former MAC students also wants to also join the Wednesday cluster, but she'll be gone the first three sessions. i wish i had a good alternative for her; i'll tell her about mary & cheri's group.

for anyone who's keeping track: 69 flyer locations, 20 virtual locations, 10 contacts, 2 registrations.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

August 25, 2005

and and and

by gl. at 11:56 pm

when i facilitate artist's way, i spend a lot of time not actually facilitating: for instance, i'm doing a great deal of promotional work at the moment. some of my time is also spent hooking up w/ people & events that may help me become a better facilitator, by generating a referral for me or from me, inspiring me, or discovering something i can adapt for a cluster exercise. this week i went to three events: meeting w/ the kindly art therapists at artful balance, attending a systemic constellation workshop recommended by another artist's way facilitator, and attending my first secp meeting.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

August 20, 2005

first fall registration!

by gl. at 9:06 pm

i received my first fall artist's way registration today! thanks, shaedra! shaedra's someone i met at my first job club for creatives meeting, but then she promptly left the group and later contacted me to do some calligraphy for her wedding next month, which i refused in part because i had promised myself august off. :) she was excited about artist's way, though, and had a great time at the (portland) artist's way open studio on thursday.

btw, the mac class became available to register for aug16, but as far as i know nobody's registered for that yet.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

August 18, 2005

artist's way open studio (august)

by gl. at 11:40 pm

5 attendees at tonight's open studio, including a woman who had gone to tonya's first group in may, someone from the mac, and a woman who i had denied doing calligraphic work for three times -- not because i didn't want to work with her, but because i wanted to enjoy my august off. but even though i'm not doing her wedding license, it worked out well -- her wedding needed a big speaker, which sven just happened to have, and so she took it home with her. plus she's almost certainly going to be an artist's way member in fall. yay!

feeling a little swirly headed and possibly sick, which didn't help a small unhappy tension tonight when i asked why one of the attendees had become a foster parent, making her uncomfortable. i'm always interested in foster parents because i was a foster child and i wonder from time to time if i should be a foster parent, too. but she felt "on the spot" and that i was asking "too many personal questions," which made my interactions awkward for the rest of the evening.

we got 7 collages out of 5 people, though. wow!

["we are made whole" -- click the image to see tonight's other collages]

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

August 8, 2005

artist's way reunion breakfast

by gl. at 4:17 pm

colleen hosted an artist's way reunion breakfast for the spring05 students and it was really quite lovely. everyone but rob was there, but colleen made us eggs & veggie sausage and had several caffeinated drinks for us to imbibe, and non-caffeinated water w/ cucumber & lime. each item had a large calligraphed label. colleen's house is -full- of art and yet is comfortable and cozy, so we chatted & nibbled for hours. she even gave us gifts as we left -- garden dragonflies and in my case, more collage materials. hooray!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

July 29, 2005

artist's way open studio (july)

by gl. at 11:22 am

i lost the post i made about this last night, damnit. :( here is my attempt to recreate it.

--
wow! this was a fantastic event! even the heat couldn't keep them away. we had a full house of people digging through bins of delectable collage materials, good conversations, and lots of newcomers. (i even had to turn someone away for lack of space!). sven, alas, worked on the movie in "the lab" while we all played in the main room, but even he was visited by curious folks.

three people from the "create the world" event came, one person from the free monthly artist's way group that just got started, and colleen, who has just been dogged about getting flyers into libraries and then checking them to make sure they're still up and replacing them if they aren't. hooray, colleen!

[colleen's collage: outside cover. click the picture to see the other collages]

(still wish i could adjust the red on the images; i think the star lamps give everything in the studio a red cast. iphoto's "enhance" feature usually just makes the pieces look bizarre, so rather than going to another photo program, i just post as they are.)

everyone is always surprised when i say i like cleaning up after an event. to me it feels like a proper conclusion, sort of like a zen meditation. wax on, wax off.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

July 27, 2005

fall promotional status

by gl. at 10:43 pm

my goal was 50 flyer locations and as of today i have 52, assuming those who took them placed them. yay! that's less than 2 weeks! 3 inquires so far, no registrations.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

July 25, 2005

artist's way @mac: week 7

by gl. at 11:55 pm

well, that went very well! i got a little teary & chilled at the end, even, with everyone talking about how much they'll miss the group. only the three core group tonight, too, which was disappointing mostly because the fourth said she would definitely come to the final class. the labyrinth was wildly popular, and though they had to take an elevator to get to it, the room was suffiently big and open, with enough natural light i didn't need the lights on at all, so i could keep it dimly lit with candles.

two unforseen labyrinth issues:

• the participants kept stopping to read the art bricks the candles were sitting on!
• i used a single orante kesler gothic initial for each of the small labyrinth gifts and they couldn't tell whose was whose, so the "create an artistic reponse based on the labyrinth gift" didn't happen quite as planned, but it all got straightened out.

and one forseen labyrinth issue i'll need to fix before the next one:

• the print is too small for older eyes in a darkened room. i'll need to learn how to play with the margins & bump up the type to get the "print two per page" option to come out more usefully.

sven came to help set up the labyrinth and then hung around the mac to help clean up afterwards. he's such a sweetheart! i took him to burgerville afterwards, where we debriefed about the class.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

July 23, 2005

first fall inquiry

by gl. at 10:35 pm

yay! i got my first fall inquiry today! via email, even!

and i'm up to 41 flyer locations out of my goal of 50. this might be doable! unfortunately, some are also already disappearing: at the art show in gresham, for instance, where the small flyers disappeared between one day and the next for no apparent reason; and at powell's on hawthorne, where someone posted a large flyer of a large man w/ a naked woman draped in his arms right over it. flyer maintenance is painful.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

July 20, 2005

on word and art word: reception

by gl. at 3:58 pm

it was a fairly good reception, as receptions go. certainly i've said before that i am missing the mingling gene that powers most receptions, but enough people i knew came to keep me busy. colleen was there when sven & i got there, even wearing the labyrinth gift calligraphy! then a current mac student stopped by. rob & kyrie got there just a couple of minutes before the reception ended and the gresham city hall meeting began. michaelmas was late; we had to slip in and whisper and point. alas, my calligraphy instructor was apparently hit w/ a golf ball and had to stay home.

btw, i've already had to reprint both batches of artist's way flyers! that's a milestone i didn't hit for the spring classes. being out & about in gresham yesterday allowed me to hit a couple of places there and give flyers to people who stopped by the art show (thanks, colleen, rob & michaelmas!).

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, calligraphy, exhibits & events

July 18, 2005

artist's way @mac: week 6

by gl. at 11:30 pm

finally! a successful session despite some substantial roadblocks! when i brought in my four bags of paint materials and destructable clothing, i discovered the activities classroom was locked and we had been moved to a dining room. "uh, oh," i thought, because they had specifically put me in the activities room so i could get paint on things. the dining rooms have carpet and nice fabric walls.

i checked in at the member events office even though i thought they might be closed, and found the manager writing an email to me to tell me the room had been changed. then we scrambled to make the room more paint-friendly, just in time for my first participant to walk in.

it was a good thing we went through all that trouble, though: only three participants tonight, but this turned out to be a very successful exercise for them. i was so relieved. only one tense moment where a participant decided she was done and then tried to make everyone else done, but it was handled quickly enough. this group still has trouble with the aesthetic response when evaluating pieces: they can speak articulately about what things are in the piece and how those things feel, but not how it makes -them- feel.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

July 17, 2005

distribution center

by gl. at 6:03 pm

so i've just finished printing some artist's way flyers: 30 full-size w/ tags (pdf) and 60 half-size flyers (also pdf). they probably look very similar to the spring flyers, but a lot of input has been taken into account from the job club people, former artist's way students, and the call a while back for feedback about my marketing plan -- some of the language and focus is different, and text has been cut, which i can't pretend doesn't give me hives. :)

for the linkophiles among us, i have finally cobbled together a portland artist's way page you can point to -- it's not much, but for now, it's enough. :) i plan on hitting the electronic distribution channels next month.

maybe for spring i'll have gocco flyers.... metallic lettering on darker paper. i'm very fond of the the sandstone-with-sparkles paper i'm using for the fall flyers, but the text will always be black and betray its inkjet roots.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

July 11, 2005

artist's way @mac: week 5

by gl. at 10:31 pm

we did clay tonight but the participant who requested it wasn't there and didn't tell me she wasn't going to be there. in fact, out of a class of six, only two were there tonight, and one of them didn't want to participate (one of the ones from last session). i've always said, and still believe, that though you should attempt to stretch yourself while in artist's way, you shouldn't be forced to participate in an exercise that makes you truly uncomfortable. i remember my first session w/ pamela went badly because she insisted i name my collage and i really didn't want to. i'm unsure how to manage outright rudeness though, and i don't want it to rub off on the others; even when i was resisting pamela, i didn't roll my eyes or sigh heavily or glare.

two more sessions to go.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

June 27, 2005

artist's way @mac: week 4

by gl. at 10:50 pm

well, then. that was.... disappointing. i wouldn't ordinarily use that word for an artist's way group because everyone is where they are and that is where they should be. but tonight i tried a new musical exploration activity involving voice, drumming, moving & piano, and none of it went well. we were missing two people and two others pretty much refused to participate, so only two of them were trying to hold the group together. and because it was so tenuous, i ended each portion very early and ended up having to make up 3 more writing assignments on the spot.

the best part about the evening was the centerpiece, made w/ raspberries from our studio bush:

[click on the image for a bigger version]

i'm sure it didn't help that i was worried about how this would go because it was new and because music is my weakest area. i was hoping they'd feel safe enough by now to try new things, and would be especially interested in a music activity after 3/4 of the group used the same "music" collage piece in the week 1' intuitive collage, and even more especially after media dep. authentic dance is definitely out in a 7-week group, then, i guess.

but oddly, at the end of the evening one of the participants who hadn't, in fact, participated asked if she could "buy more time" for a longer artist's way. and the other non-participant wanted to know if we could have a longer session, too. so now i'm just confused.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

June 23, 2005

artist's way open studio (june)

by gl. at 10:59 pm

another artist's way open studio; just me & sven again. i host it because i want to hold the space open for myself or otherwise i don't do art, but i'm wondering what i can do to make other people want to do art, too.

i was feeling derivative and unimaginative (still working with the "everything is born in the dark," poem) so below i'm showing one of sven's collages, but clicking the image will take you to see the others:

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

June 20, 2005

artist's way @mac: week 3

by gl. at 11:12 pm

yipe! i forgot media fasting will begin tomorrow until right before i left for class. i so didn't prepare to be without reading or music or movies this week, and it begins when i wake up tomorrow. alas, the mac forgot to set up my room again, which was especially sad given the lack of music tonight leading into media dep, as i was all set to play pink martini.

after the critic transformation exercise last week, i had them do a love letter exercise this week which went well, but they were almost more interested in the watercolor pencils! we had a little group love about the emotional safety present. alas, we were missing two participants tonight, so i hope next week everyone will be back, especially since we're skipping the july fourth session.

at least two of tonight's participants were interested in knowing whether i taught this class outside the mac and one of them wanted to know if i would come to her home. i invited them to thursday's artist's way open studio, but it might be too late for any of them to come.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

June 14, 2005

artist's way @mac: week 2

by gl. at 12:18 am

better vibe tonight even though it seems like everybody has had some sort of family crisis during the last week; one participant was even unable to make it tonight, but she was sweet and smart to call me in the activities room to tell me so. i forgot my music, in part because i made a last-minute change to the agenda, so i had to scurry to the car to find dang's elliott smith cd, which at least had "rose parade" on it.

i was thinking of doing a music exercise but instead tonight was the "critic transformation," night which everyone thinks is dumb until they get theirs back and are delighted. good for trust building and understanding that the group is here to hear painful personal histories.

because two people are going to be gone next week, i had to talk about the media fasting exercise, and i may have unduly frightened everyone. oh, it's big & scary, to be sure, but it's worse when you have to worry about it for a week intead of just getting right into it. and because two people are going to be gone, i may need to change my plan for playback theatre to something else.

i mentioned the pride parade as a potential artist date this week and i could hear the several-second pause of crickets. :)

i wore sven's mom's sunstone? necklace tonight-- even took off my lamplighter necklace to do it. i tend towards wearing only jewelry w/ personal significance, but the other day i figured that i ought to try viewing it as an art display instead.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

June 6, 2005

artist's way @mac: week 1

by gl. at 11:20 pm

six students: 5 girls, 1 boy. 1 boy dropped before the class began and another never showed tonight.

two people had heard of artist's way before and one even has a copy -signed- by julia cameron! two people thought it sounded neat but had no idea what they were getting into. we have at least three poets and a singer, and four people who used the same calligraphed "music" word on their collage. music, of course, is one of my weakest areas, but this seems too serendipitous to pass up so i am inspired to find music exercises that exploit the piano in the room or are based on handmade rhythms.

but i felt clumsy: i kept calling one woman the wrong name, missed many opportunities to elaborate, and even missed asking people for comments on their collages, and had to backtrack! one woman even thought to bring up the whole confidentiality issue, which hasn't even made it into my boilerplate yet. ugh. i'm better than this. i hope next week i feel like i did a better job.

i do so like collage night, though, in part because i love to see the ways in which people use things i've been keeping for years.

there's probably more worth mentioning, but i'm way tired and a i have a meeting in the morning....

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

it begins!

by gl. at 3:40 pm

i'm all packed and ready * knocks wood * for the first mac class tonight. carrying in the supplies is going to be the hardest part, i think, especially the bins of collage materials. :P

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

May 27, 2005

on word and art word

by gl. at 11:29 pm

oo! i'm going to exhibit four pieces in the "on word and art word" exhibit at gresham city hall in july! my calligraphy teacher introduced me to the guy who's hanging the show and he said yes! the pieces will be the four i still have framed: "aliya's tree," "blue fish," "tongue far from heart" and "a grace it had, devouring." of these, only "tongue far from heart" will not be for sale. not that i expect them to sell, but "tongue far from heart" is the first piece i executed from a late-night calligraphic epiphany, and it was my first insight into how the artist's way was finally working for me, so i consider it irreplaceable.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, calligraphy, exhibits & events

May 26, 2005

reviewing the MAC space

by gl. at 1:01 pm

on tuesday i stopped by the MAC to turn in a tax form, receive my "entrance authorization" form (also known as a "nanny pass"), and review the activities room space for the summer, because i remembered it being tiny & long. good thing i looked again, because it turns out the space is huge! 17'x33'! so now the challenge has moved from "how will i fit 8 people in a circle?" to "how will i make the space a comfortable, inviting space?" seriously. linoleum tiles=easy cleanup, but doesn't make me want to sit on it.

because there is so much space, the movement exercises will go better, like the authentic dance and "find your mother like a baby penguin." but my plan to do blind painting may not work because there's a large radiator blocking direct access to the window-lined wall, and the other wall is cabinets & sink. i'm still working on a format that works for me, too: i don't really like just making it faster, nor do i like the "optional book"approach.

got a chance to meet the new activities director (the person who found me apparently left after her 90-day trial period), and got to say goodbye to jackie, who has been very, very supportive of this endeavor. she's amenable to the artist's way open studio, but probably can't do artist's way sacred circle because she's getting her master's in special ed.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

May 17, 2005

artist's way open studio (may)

by gl. at 9:45 pm

just me & sven tonight, but we got some good collage out of it, and i even finally got a chance to practice rotunda (spanish round gothic). yum.

(click the picture to see the other art.)

the tiny text is a goreyism: "the Ulp is very very small/it hardly can be seen at all."

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

April 25, 2005

fall MAC classes!

by gl. at 11:10 pm

the MAC has already asked me to schedule artist's way classes with them for their fall schedule! i'm excited, but really want it to be in the 13-week format so i can do more with the participants and run it concurrently with my studio artist's way classes, so we'll see what they say. planning through december like this makes me squirm a little, especially when i see my number of free evenings shrink precipitously.

[update 05.17: it -is- a 13-week class for fall! i hope they get enough students!]

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

April 20, 2005

summer MAC class is full!

by gl. at 9:57 pm

i just got word that the summer MAC class has filled! after only a month and a half! still, 8 people means i need to now buy 4 more of everything i currently have 4 of, like brushes and pillows and scissors. thank you, craigslist!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

April 19, 2005

artist's way meetup

by gl. at 11:12 pm

rob & kyrie brought someone new, someone who's from the other artist's way group that recently found me! but rob was all collaged out from his omega project, and kyrie knitted on the floor. by this time next month she may have had maya! so only carol & i did collage.

(click the picture to see the other art)

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

artist's way: week 13

by gl. at 5:57 pm

the last artist's way session for the spring group was last night. they had some terrific omega projects: two had amazing collages, one danced and gave away books & bouquets, and sven had gotten them each to paint handmade wire-frame flowers so that i'd have a special "bouquet" to keep, reminding me of each participant (as if i'd forget!).

and sven & i FINALLY got to unveil the supernifty supersecret project we've been hiding since the vernal equinox: a labyrinth!

(the pictures are blurry in an arty and "not enough light" kind of way.)

yep, sven made a labyrinth (and i'm sure project details about that will be forthcoming: i just filled in the lines). and the weather has sucked ever since, an important thing to consider when you want people to walk on it in their socks. of course, when we got desparate enough to build a rain structure the day before the last possible artist's way class, the weather cleared up, but it turned out for the best: adding white christmas lights to the structure made the whole thing magical.

thank you, artist's way! see you in fall!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

April 12, 2005

meetup to begin charging organizers

by gl. at 10:56 am

darn it! i just became the portland artist's way meetup organizer and now they want to charge me $20/month! a month! i committed to doing the meetup thing for a year so i'll do the "special 2005 rate" of $10/month, and then in march i'll see if i want to continue with the meetup group or continue with the original vision of having a monthly collage night for former artist's way participants (especially since that's who's mostly coming, anyway).

though the group foundered without an organizer for months, i don't think i would have become the organizer if i had known i was going to have to pay for it. and i certainly wouldn't have paid to start one. i don't plan on directly passing the fee onto anyone who comes, though maybe i'll host a raffle or funding drive at some point in the year.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

April 11, 2005

artist's way: week 12

by gl. at 10:41 pm

today we created image cards and created a collaborative story from them. one of the participants said she was angry at parts of this chapter; thinks julia is stretching her even thinner than she already is.

next week is the last artist's way & the omega project, which panicked one participant tonight because he thought we had two more weeks left. i can't believe it's almost over!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

April 4, 2005

artist's way: week 11

by gl. at 9:44 pm

tonight we did a poetry walk as our very first thing while it was still light. i gave them a choice between an indoor & an outdoor activity and as it only sprinkled a tad bit and wasn't very windy, they chose to go for the walk, which involved walking very slowly writing down in separate columns all the nouns & verbs (only nouns & verbs!) you experience. you can get a lot of words that way: in my case, 165 nouns and 136 verbs. upon returning, you write a poem, share, and -then- get into the chapter check-ins. this is my first time doing a poetry walk here and it turned out to be about the perfect path: the right timing, the right mix of suburban and forested areas, and not too difficult uphill.

only two more weeks left. yeep!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

March 28, 2005

artist's way: week 10

by gl. at 10:25 pm

easter egg 3d pieces tonight: easter eggs in the sense of hidden computer curiousities or a dvd surprise you have to know the secret button combination for. 45 minutes to decorate the inside and the outside of the eggs, 20 minutes to write a poem about how to open it, then sharing, surprisingly, only two particpants had eggs that opened; the other two deliberately sealed theirs shut.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

March 21, 2005

artist's way: week 9

by gl. at 11:49 pm

we worked with clay tonight because though it finally stopped raining, it's still a little cold for the supernifty supersecret surprise.

it was a hard night. the participants are 2 months into the process now and many of them are stretching themselves very thin. it looks like i have several the overachievers this term, and they don't want to give up. i'm actually worried about one of them, who gets up at 3:45 a.m. to do morning pages and is having nerve issues. another participant bristled against the purposely ephemeral nature of this exercise, since we did no writing about and very little showing of the creations.

there were some bright spots: there was a fair amount of lightening while tossing clay into the air and outright giggling when passing around the pieces while blind and trying to figure out what they were. and after mentioning the possibility a few week ago, one of the participants really is quitting her job!

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

4 summer students!

by gl. at 1:54 pm

the MAC just told me the first promotional article has run in their internal publication "the winged m," and they already have four students registered! ee! it looks like this might happen after all! the condensed summer classes there run june 6-july 28.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

March 20, 2005

unsolicited & effusive praise

by gl. at 11:29 am

rob, with a master's in american studies, has commented that artist's way might be the best class he's ever taken. at any rate, he writes a wholly unexpected and flattering post on his blog about some of the effects artist's way has had on him (as well as sweet commentary on his impending fatherhood).

though he's absolutely right when he says "which is not to say that we participants four have not proved an intrepid and wowsomely intuitive band...." because they have! each person is here because of a series of serendipities & synchronicities, but now there's a level of trust & cameraderie i find very heartening because i think a lot of artistic self-censoring happens in isolation. supported by a community of what julia cameron calls "believing mirrors," you find courage and hope -- and as rob says, confidence -- to take with you after artist's way is over.

of course, it looks to me as if artist's way is never over. it's more of a spiral than a circle, where you keep seeing the same thing from different perspectives. i mean, there's a lot of ground to cover in 13 weeks (especially if you're struggling against years of doubt or uncertainty). :)

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, links

March 16, 2005

innaugural artist's way meetup

by gl. at 12:46 am

alas, i didn't meet anyone new. the most recent artist's way member had to send a "no" rsvp and the first member i haven't heard from in months.

but sven & rob came, and rob brought kyrie, so we had four, which is three more than would have been there otherwise. and hey, we all got art out of it! so i consider it a huge success. :) if nothing else, i want to hold this space open as an opportunity for former artist's way students to have a collage night if they choose, and it forced me to do art, so i'm willing to keep it small for a long time. and collage is a "spreading" sort of activity, anyway: even with the big table w/ all the leaves, it felt like we could have used even more room! :)

the meetup photo format didn't do what i expected (i can't edit captions and it places them in FILO order rather that FIFO). and it takes a predictably long while to download, tweak, export small, upload them to meetup, etc., etc.

more i could do and say, but it's almost 1 a.m. and i am so tired....

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

March 14, 2005

artist's way: week 8

by gl. at 11:30 pm

some good group dynamics, even if we were missing one and we began late because i was busy taping brown craft paper on the walls so that tonight's exercise wouldn't streak them. we did blind painting tonight, which is always a lot of fun. i bought tray tables this afternoon so that they'd have somewhere to put their paints & rinsing water.

a brief unfortunate encounter: sven was being playful and added a small red circle near colleen's painting. i felt that was a violation of boundaries and the integrity of each artist's space, so i asked sven not to do that. but it was awkward, and though later colleen said she didn't mind, i still don't want people in our group to be making those sorts of assumptions. in the future, i asked people to -ask- before doing something like that, which was accepted fairly well.

afterwards, i partially set up the artspace for tomorrow's meetup, and it makes me think i should stop at trader joe's tomorrow after work.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

March 11, 2005

creata: creating soul

by gl. at 10:46 pm

taught by an art therapist from spokane, washington. guided meditation: a heathered hill in ireland, fading sunset to a full moon, a black panther, a beach, a cliff above the sea. do you want to walk to the moon? or do you want to dance with her?

one of the interesting things about doing the creata thing the second time around is that i've been able to actually make some contacts. the organizer recognizes me from last year and said it was interesting to hear more about my story. i've met two student art therapists because we've all been to the same sessions and they're both interested in the possibility of artist's way (it's too bad it will start in fall, which is forever from now!).

the other interesting thing is that i've managed to find another field where people care about the letters after your name more than they care about your experience. licensing art therapists is a hot topic, and this was the first facilitator to say it didn't matter and i could feel people cringe. and you might, too, if you had spent over $30,000 for an art therapy degree from marylhurst.

i wish i had a more streamlined way of getting art from paper to blog. i want to add more images to posts (especially on the ART blog...!) but it seems like so many steps for so little gain. camera/scanner > tweak, tweak > tweak some more > save image > upload > link.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: administrivia, artist's way, classes & workshops

March 10, 2005

portland artist's way fall 2005!

by gl. at 5:35 pm

wow. so i'm just halfway through with the spring artist's way and already i have to decide on dates for the fall artist's way so that i can give a flyer to one of the women i worked with at the last creata workshop.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

March 7, 2005

artist's way: week 7

by gl. at 11:57 pm

tonight we did what is usually one of the hardest activities for participants: authentic dance, which is 10 minutes of "dance" in front of a witnessing partner. we do several warm ups to lead up to this, and in a way last week was a warm up for this week. it's great to have a studio where i can dim the lights (i actually turned them off & just left the star lamps on). two of the participants had just been to the ballet, so the timing was quite good. (let's hear it for synchronicity!)

it's also the abundance chapter, and it marks the halfway point, so i like to do a grand gesture at the weekly altar:

the heat from these candles made the star lamp above it spin. :) i also had large clusters of candles on the front porch, the bathroom, the kitchen & on the flat files.

one of the participants has voiced her desire to quit her job by the end of artist's way. wow! what is it about artist's way that provokes that reaction? :)

the one irritation this evening: just as we were getting started, a group of kids(?) ran up the stairs, rang the doorbell and ran away. grrrrrrr......

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

March 6, 2005

creata: directive vs. open studio

by gl. at 10:56 pm

not much to say: i've identified artist's way as a fairly directed activity, not just because of the book but because all the art sessions associated with them are detailed by me and are often designed with something particular in mind. i had never considered having an open studio session, though, and i might give that a go.

our directed activity was, essentially, to draw our happy place: i drew a summer night on the springwater corridor trail, with a full moon rising over mt. hood and a scarlet star twinkling in the sky. i was the only one with a night scene. :)

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way, classes & workshops

March 2, 2005

artist's way meetup

by gl. at 9:53 pm

hey, i'm now the organizer of the portland artist's way meetup, which has floundered w/o an organizer for months! i've been wanting to do a free-monthly-art-making-meeting-thing for a while now, so this seems like a fairly natural way to do it. we'll probably usually be doing collage or other art on our morning pages journals, since most of us go through about one a month, anyway. it gives me a chance to do art instead of just facilitating it, i love it when the studio gets used, and it even gives my current artist's way students a more casual way to convene and do art.

my unanswered question: so if you're meeting to talk about artist's way, but you're not actually in artist's way, what do you talk about? :)

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

March 1, 2005

artist's way: week 6

by gl. at 10:51 am

we did a variation of playback theatre for this artist's way: i forgot how effective it is! unlike writing or visual arts, playback theatre involves articulating a story with other group members, but even more scary to some is telling a story and being the center of attention. we were all laughing and energized by the end of the night -- one piece actually had me in tears we were laughing so hard. it made me realize how focused & tense it's seemed lately: too much to do and just barreling from one thing to the other leaves little room for laughter. the future-oriented event was even better than i expected. next time, i'll figure out a better way to handle the improvisational poetry portion. at the end of the night i also gave more concrete examples of what i'm looking for in an omega project. and i was happy to note that the participants initiated wanting to exhange contact information -- something i don't like to do off the bat, but had meant to ask about for the media fasting exercise.

i've got the post-class cleanup down pretty well, now. a little too well, perhaps -- i found myself wanting to linger a bit longer in the studio. i've got really good clippies now and so i can put up the charcoal pieces sven & i generate in the saturday drawing studio classes on a regular basis, and other unfinished tidbits i'm attached to, without fearing they'll crash on someone's head. having art up makes a big difference, and i'm very fond of rotating ephemeral art rather than always having formal framed art. (of course, i have a lot of framed art thanks to terrilynn, and don't know what to do with it now. :)

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way

February 22, 2005

artist's way: week 5

by gl. at 3:22 pm

missing two participants, though they both emailed their checkins, which i read aloud, and sven left a proxy bear clutching an "Artist's Way!" banner.

this week's activity was blind contour drawing: a self-portrait for 5 minutes, then with another particpant for 10 minutes, then another self-portrait for 15 minutes. writing responses were done with eyes closed. i'm curious about how i'm going to fit more than 4 people on the walls for this exercise & the blind painting exericse.

i don't know how much to say about the participants because one of the most fragile parts of the group process is developing trust and faith in each other. monday nights are supposed to be the nights without expectations, a safe space where participants can be vulnerable and revealing. do i damage that trust by writing about specifics?

for instance, rob says since his last artist date (to see cornell west @ reed w/ sven, and yes, we know that an artist date is meant to be done alone, but i still say something is better than nothing) he's been struggling with his relationship to god and especially church. earlier in the evening, joanne said she was sometimes uncomfortable talking about her buddhist beliefs in a group of agnostics. this is all relevant to artist's way because it's supposed to be a spiritual path. the word "god" is all over that book. am i doing my group a disservice by being unable to go there with them? but at the same time, how do i make it safe for aetheists like dan? joanne wrote a great version of the artist's prayer: "please."

in other artist's way news, brian wanted to give up morning pages altogether because he wasn't getting any exercise and says he doesn't have more time to cut. i recommended he moved to 1 page or 3 smaller pages, that even 10 minutes of morning pages each morning was a practice worth continuing.

posted by gl. | permalink | categories: artist's way