Creating a Life I love Through Art
I have this special thing with maps. I love the intricate lines and the way the streets overlap each other. I’ve been making these map drawings for quite awhile and now I’d really like to somehow base them on a city. Usually I just draw whatever my hand wants to draw, but I wonder if I were looking at a city map of San Diego, or LA, while I was doing this what would happen. Hmmm Maybe I’ll give it a try!
What do you think?
I was browsing through Instagram, like I do,..
When I came across this frickin’ cool artist, Dan Lam.
Check out these funky town blobs and drips! Ha! https://www.instagram.com/sopopomo/
What a crazy fun kick ass artist. Yayyyyyyyyyyyyy
This morning while I was taking a shower, I was thinking about what to write today.
My love of almond butter?
My attempts at shutting up my super loud, (sorta cute) kitten from meowing me off a ledge?
My present situation with my step children?
My sudden 80’s ballad outbursts?
On one hand, I’m really enjoying getting down my thoughts about life and art and my kitten,.. hahah And yet on another hand, it feels really really yuckily self indulgent.
Normally, if you’d met me in real life, I would tell you less about myself, and I’d be asking a lot of questions. I am very fascinated by people and want to know ALL. OF. IT.
You know what I’d like to do? I’d really like to have a creativity circle where everyone comes, brings the thing they are working on, we each take turns discussing our FEELINGS and our FEARS and we RELISH in the fact that we GET TO CREATE. We can all hear and SUPPORT and VALIDATE each other. Ah!
Doesn’t that sound amazing?
I just returned from a long walk close to the beach with my sister in law. We’ve decided to do this every Tuesday from now on. Ahhh!! I just love my time with her! There is seriously nothing better than girl time where BOTH of you get to purge your thoughts and feelings and BOTH of you are engaged in what’s being said. I always leave feeling really heard and much lighter. It’s also helpful that BOTH of us are always looking for ways that we can be our best and truest selves. Sometimes rare to find that in a friend.
Anyway.
I’m seeing how important more GIRL TIME is in my life, and how easy it is to let it slip away. As much as I love my hubby, which I do more than anything, he’s not a WOMAN and I crave female interaction. When I don’t have it for long periods of time, I feel like I try shaping him into a girlfriend.
‘Please don’t give me a SOLUTION, I just need to feel.’ Ha!
He’s so good at attempting, but even as I say out loud what I need from him, I can hear how silly it sounds.
This video is my favorite depiction of gender differences. ahhahah! It’s so perfect!!!
I am always wanting to cry about ‘the nail’ before I can do anything about it. ahahhah
This is a new piece I’m working on. I’m using this lovely thick watercolor paper, acrylic paint and smooth black ink from Japan. I wanted to incorporate my tiny detailed lines with luscious paint color to give it a contrasting effect. I want to create more pieces with lots of color and depth. I’ll post it again when it’s finished!
Thank you for making me an artist. Ahhhh
In this crazy, buzzy world it’s been so easy to get anxious about TIME. The day is moving away from me, I didn’t get this done or that or that or that! How frickin’ mind boggling! The day would leave me gasping for breath, unfunctionable and drained.
I’m looking in my art journal right now and it’s full of designs, doodles to try on a larger scale, tiny pen marks that excite me and make me hungry to create. Now, in the past I would see this as something I need to do NOW. RIGHT NOW. LIKE NOW NOW.
But really, the more that I spend time MAKING WORK, the more TIME I realize it actually takes for each piece to make it the way I want it.
The more that I am starting to
CHILL THE FUCK OUT.
Like seriously. I thought I was a pretty chill laid back chic before, but that was only because it was when I was relaxed that I was even aware. I have NOT been relaxed in my life. I’ve been a HARD CORE, FINGER PICKING, STRESS FACE. And you know what, it’s not that great. I didn’t feel great about myself. I didn’t feel strong or magical or at peace. AT all. So I’m not gunna do it anymore.
What is the most loving thing I can do for myself.
Make some fuckin art.
Here I am, Monday morning so grateful to be home after an extremely packed weekend at Disneyland. If I were to ask my heart what it wants to do, it would say DRAW! CREATE! PAINT! That is seriously all I want to do. It would probably be wrapped up in emotions and tears and these huge beautiful epiphanies. And yet there is still this silly little part of me that thinks, ‘Noooo that sounds too great, maybe you should find things that need to be CLEANED! FIXED! WORKED ON! Things that don’t make you happy, but make you feel PRODUCTIVE.’
There’s that word, productive.
I remember for years,hoping and wishing and praying and basing everything on FEELING PRODUCTIVE. It had NOTHING to do with if I was HAPPY or RELISHING or GRATEFUL or USING MY GIFTS.
What good is feeling PRODUCTIVE if you aren’t actually accomplishing anything that really matters to you. Just the feeling of PRODUCTIVITY doesn’t mean you’re living your passion, or on your path. To me, many times it can be running in circles very fast just so I feel like I’m kicking my ass. It doesn’t actually mean I’m
DOING ANYTHING WORTHWHILE.
How’s that for weirdness? Is this what we WANT?
What does PRODUCTIVE mask for you? For me, it would hide the fact that I was uncomfortable,
or felt incompetent,
or that I couldn’t say no
or stand up for myself.
I was really good at hiding all of those super yucky feelings under a thick blanket of PRODUCTIVE.
I guess this is just one more thing I’m working on. I love the feeling of starting new projects and finishing them, setting goals of things that I actually really care about. I’m saying no to staying BUSY out of FEAR of facing reality.
Every New Years my hubby and I hide away in the mountains and do some intense inner work. One of the things we look at are our beliefs, since we know we can change them. One of the activities I did just a couple months ago during that time in the cabin, was to look at all of my beliefs surrounding the concept of….
THE STARVING ARTIST. dun dun dunnnnnnn!
I hadn’t realized it, but through the years, I’d picked up some pretty horrible lies about being an artist. I believed them FOR SO MANY YEARS. Now, it’s time to change them.
These are just some of the false beliefs that I learned from a variety of people and situations. They all sound so crazy now, and it’s not anyone’s fault that I picked them up along the way. But no wonder I stopped wanting to be an artist, right? I mean, if I really believed all of these (which I did), and continued to forge ahead with this ARTIST DREAM then I’d be creating a life I. DID. NOT. WANT.
Why does society have such a WRONG idea of what being an artist is, or could be? If I would have realized how much easier life is in general to JUST BE ME, I would have said FUCK YOU to those beliefs long ago.
But at least I can do that now. I can create new beliefs, such as these:
Now these feel a lot better!
What are some of your beliefs you’d like to change?
Sunshine and Cerulean 