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I think that what artists do is they invent strategies that allow themselves to see in a way that they haven't seen before - to extend their vision. ~ Richard Serra, art:21 Art in the Twenty-First Century, Essay by Susan Sollins.
My morning strategy involves drawing outside in order to 'capture' the seasons, things that move me, oddities, old tools and other found objects.
See more here: Drawings
I'm on skull time. This morning while drawing, a roadrunner came very close and I watched as it scooped up a gecko for lunch.
Discipline seems to be a key word for my process right now. The key is keeping Facebook time low! The computer world is insidious; it creeps into your life quickly and it stays there.
Each morning I sketch outside (plein air is the fancy French term for it) and have been focusing on still lives rather than landscapes as of late. My 2B pencil is put to work although I need to find a 6H to get really serious ;) It feels like I'm in training right now (athletic discipline required).
I'm also brainstorming; giving my corpus callosum a work out for a couple of prints I'm conjuring for an exhibit called Verse to Image at the Riverside Community Arts Association Center. I chose a quote about rebellion from Chris Hedges' book, Death of the Liberal Class and a poem by Margaret Atwood titled The Poet Has Come Back; both reference death. Somehow printmaking brings out the darker more political side of life for me. Prints are due mid March and making an etching can take a while so I'm digging in and going deeper with Atwood's poem for starters; perhaps the two will tie in somehow. I hope to post some photos here in the coming weeks so stay tuned.
Quotations of Interest (originally posted on my Facebook page this week)
"Unfortunately, many works sold at art fairs, and in the global market in general, promote cultural cliches or personal brands...Formatted for private collection spaces and museum galleries, this art is too often totally predictable and non experimental." ~ Hou Hanru, Art in America, Nov. 2011
"College Art Association is at the LA Convention Center. CAA is a front for Goldman Sachs student loan scam to keep young creative people broke and enslaved in debt. CAA is the Monsanto of Art, complicit in crimes against creativity. Top that rant!!!" ~ Matt Gleason (who was expelled from every school he attended according to his Facebook Info page...hmmmm, not surprising really, is it?)
California Alliance for Arts Education Webinar: How to work with your local school board to keep arts education in schools.
"All we have, as Vaclav Havel writes, is our own powerlessness. And that powerlessness is our strength. The survival of the movement depends on embracing this powerlessness. It depends on two of our most important assets—utter and complete transparency and a rigid adherence to nonviolence, including respect for private property. This permits us, as Havel puts it in his 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” to live in truth. And by living in truth we expose a corrupt corporate state that perpetrates lies and lives in deceit." ~ Chris Hedges
Utne Magazine's 10 Most Enlightened Towns to live in America
Divinely busy, I shuttle between meditation, readings, writing and typing up readings, astrology analysis, online networking and marketing, writing courses and books, making art and collages and life! Divinely busy.
This sketch offers me a page of relief. My Art Mystic soul is parched, I haven't painted in two weeks! So instead, I collage and sketch and meditate and muse as my lonely paints sigh and the days heat up, the wind it blows and the asparagus is cut down.
Musical Ambiance: the birds and the bees.