Pablo Picasso Month - Day 18

This is absolutely the way I work.

You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.
~ Pablo Picasso

I make sketches and plans. I set out specific stone and glass. I test how things are going to fit together.

But all that changes once the mortar is on the board...

---

Why Pablo Picasso Month?

Fortune favors the brave

Started a new blog this past week.

 I'm one of those people who takes their fortune cookie fortunes home with them... Over the years I've collected quite a few (nearly 700 I think). Some of those were from dinners I ate and some were from friends.

I've decided to share them with everyone and so...

fortuna favet fortibus - fortune favors the brave

Right now I'm just posting the images. That might end up being all that I do - I haven't decided yet.

Encouraging an art-filled life

A friend asked me about art opportunities for her son (who spent his morning making masks)... and I said:

There are some venues around here that offer art opportunities. We can talk about them sometime. But I want to say that while it is grand to get kids together to make art, I think it's more important to make sure that the creative creature that lives inside of each of us has a chance. Parents are the best incubators for that creative creature.

I think that the critical thing is to encourage constant experimentation... making art is experimentation - pure, wonderful, exasperating, beautiful experimentation - it's giving in to the urge to "what if..." something, to take a bit of this and a bit of that and put them together to make a new thing. It doesn't have to be limited to traditional art activities - building a snow fort or baking a pie or making some contraption can be experimental - and if it is, you're feeding the creative creature.

The most important thing for raising a child (or an adult) to live an art-filled life - to be blessed with the indescribable lightness of being that art generates - is to be willing to totally wreck havoc in the name of experimentation, to be willing to put the journey and the finding out ahead of things like order and propriety and everything else that shuts down the creative mind, that forces us to be those cogs in the machine.

I was very lucky as a child - my parents did not have much, but they let us play with almost everything they had. The contraptions we made were applauded and treasured - even when they had to be scraped off the sidewalk, or painted over, or dismantled so that dinner could be put on the table, or, or, or...

I was "sewing" before I started school, "building" before I was out of grade school... I learned how to use tools, how to make stuff from bits of this and that, how to fix things, how to "see" what might be, how to be fearless in my experimentation - to know "I can do that..." whatever "that" was.

And all because I was taught that the creative creature was important, that it was the most important part of me - the part that made me alive - the creative creature was me. Life was all about the making and thinking and looking and finding... All those doings done, all those thoughts thought, they stayed with me throughout my life. Even in the times when I was too afraid to make art, when life demanded too much of me to be able to spare the energy, I still was art-filled.

And one day I came back to it.

So, would I like to make my living making art? Hell yes. I'd love to... and I am really stubborn, so maybe it will happen.

But it's ever so much more important to just be making the art.

They say it's your birthday...

You know, sometimes the down-and-dirty part of life really gets to me... the stupid allergies and the limits they impose on me, the bad shoulder, the bad hip, the whole getting older thing.

And then there are the days when, even though I still feel all those things, I also feel luminous - all brand new and shiny and full of potential.

Family and friends and making art are things that help me feel luminous. Last night it was Wes and Jude and Tinee and the sunset and the moonrise and the change-bringing wind up on Garvin Heights. This morning it was waking up, thinking about my birth 54 years ago (I'm the oldest, my mother was scared - who wouldn't be - and it was a Friday, she really wanted to wait one more day...) and thinking about the births of my kids. Right now it's the early morning bicycle ride euphoria and the flock of geese that greeted me with honks and hisses and much ruckus as I passed by on my way to work that's got me buoyed and calm.

I'm thinking about beauty today.

More to ponder as the school year begins...

A friend of mine sent me a link in response to my last posting. 

Like Lilly Like Wilson by Taylor Mali

Thanks Dirk. The poem made me smile. I loved the story it told.

Something to ponder as the school year begins

Overheard as I passed a classroom last semester:

"God, I hate this. This class is so stupid..."

"What makes you say it's stupid?"

"It just is!"

"I've found that people often say a class -- or anything else, for that matter -- is stupid when in fact they are simply uncomfortable with the ideas being examined.

My job here -- the entire purpose of higher education -- is to challenge your comfortable life. To get you to think about the uncomfortable things in the world. And perhaps most important of all, to help you develop a mind that is open to all the conceivable possibilities. Because if you're not open to all the possibilities, you'll never understand the questions, let alone find the answers."

Dedicated with deepest respect, love and appreciation to every teacher, every professor, that made me think about the uncomfortable things.

Visitor to Beelandia

Sometimes a very simple thing can make your day...

This Swallowtail came to dine in Beelandia.

I hope she returns and brings her friends...

Dali Lami, Darwin, and more

Listening to Tadie and Abelisto last night set my head to spinning.

If there were more hours in a day, I'd take some more philosophy classes, some more history classes, some more theory classes, so that I could more fully participate in the discussion. But there isn't, so I'll concentrate on the things I must know, instead of the things I'd like to know.

Life is interesting. Each choice we make both expands and limits our horizons. Well, each choice has the potential to do so. Some merely limit us.

Damn Ken Starr to the Deepest Hell

This breaks my heart.

I've signed the letter. I don't usually do this sort of thing. I don't know if things like this are effective. It often seems like just a feel good (like driving a hybrid) that really doesn't do what we need (like way less driving around).

This one I signed.

And I love the music.

The Year of Ideas

New York Times - 8th Annual Year in Ideas

My favorite so far - Snowball the dancing cockatoo.

Funny - well, maybe not...

I think my art practice has been depressed lately.

It is funny - or maybe strange - how having some sort of success reinvigorates my practice. I can get so down about doing art, I find myself constantly saying "I need to do some art..." but no art happens because I tell myself I am not in the mood...

It is not that, not really. It is just that when I get out of the practice of doing art, or when I have not had any meaningful successes with any of it, I lose my focus and it gets harder and harder to make art, to get started making art, to even decide what kind of art I want to do.

And of course, this is a downward spiral - I do not make art because I have not made it. I have not made it because I have not made it. And so on...

It is important to step out of that circle and actually do something. The life of my practice may depend on it - and considering the stress relief I have experienced over the last couple days, my life in general may depend on getting out of the morass and making art.

Right now the inspiration for weaving tapestries is flowing through me like a river.