We're Up! Whew.....

2012 Artist's Way Celebration of Creativity.....Installation Day from Cheryl Evans on Vimeo.

And....it begins!

Today begins 2 of the most exciting and possibly exhausting weeks I have had with my art since…. 


Tonight we install the 2012 Artist’s Way Group (the group I facilitate) exhibition “Breaking Down Creative Blocks”. Each of the creatives, in addition to their own work, had the assignment to paint, sculpt, or “whatever “an 8” x 8” x 8” cube that will be suspended on a 20” x 20” black background. What I have seen of them so far is AMAZING! I cannot wait to see them all hung together! The opening reception for this exhibit is appropriately called a Celebration of Creativity (this Saturday 8-4) because we want it to be anything BUT another stuffy art exhibition. Artist’s Way openings have always been more than just another art opening but truly a celebration of our art and our time together as creatives!

Do the Walls Come Down?

Ah…today they do.

It is one of those crappy heart days and my feet look as if they belong to an elephant. But I could not stop. When a piece tells me, it is coming…. I can do nothing but let it flow through me and so it did!

What a wonderful feeling, to lose track of time and space while images pass through me and out of my hands. I have no idea where they come from or how they move from a feeling in my heart, a thought in my head to an image on the paper, but how blessed I am to have the experience. There is nothing, not a lousy heart day, swollen feet or anything else that can stand in the way! Alleluia-Alleluia!

Do the Walls Come Down? 
http://www.artistwayworks.com/Red%20Curtains.html

A Creative!

Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence. ~Norman Podhoretz

 Thank goodness the for the uninhibited energy of a child!

 It heals, invents, imagines, builds, sings, dances, plays, and loves!

I cannot imagine that I could possibly want to be anything else but…..

A creative!

Still have time to be....

I find myself rushing, worrying, grieving, and needing to have the next few weeks be perfect because I am afraid this will be my last chance to do these kinds of things.  

I need to relax, enjoy, and celebrate the process…

instead of suffering the end product.

I still have time to be everything I want to be.

Better than all of the other possibilities...

A creative life is full of fear, frustration, self-sabotage, procrastination, panic, and anxiety. But, it’s breathtaking flip side is a life full of inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.

A creative experiences living from a unique point of view that provokes passion for life and art in everyone around them.

Even when it is really really really hard, it is better than all of the other possibilities.

"Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth."

"Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth." Pablo Picasso

Even when I do not want me or anyone else to see the truth of my own emotions, my art will betray me. The art is my Gladys Kravitz, prowling through my head and exposing all of my secrets to the world.

When choosing an image, my intention is not to reveal anything of myself; my only desire is to entertain with a pretty picture. However, as I move through that image it begins revealing me to me, and I know that eventually it is going to disclose these personal raw emotions to everyone.

Three weeks before the heart attack, a piece of abstract work came through me, it was so different from anything I had ever done.  Although it made no sense at the time, there it was telling me what was happening to my heart.
 
Sometimes my truth is evident, sometimes not, but the truth is always there right in front of me.

Confidence and Courage

Please give me more…
and if I cannot get more confidence and courage, can I please just have the audacity to fake it!  

For the next few weeks, I need the confidence and courage to move way outside my comfort zone. I do not want to slip back into the secure areas just because they feel good. I want to push well past the boundaries, all of the restrictions that limit me. I need to walk on the edge to prove to myself and everyone else that I can do it.  

So, even if I do not recover the confidence and courage that would make this easier, I know that I can pull this off with plain conviction, hard work and pain. Some of my most incredible accomplishments were born from this, not always confidence and courage.

It's Alright to Cry...

So much going on right now! Creating, framing, organizing, IRS and scholarship applications, teaching, house repairs and on and on and on. I used to be able to handle this (and more) without missing a step or breaking a sweat. It just flowed. Now I find every little piece of this life is a struggle, nothing coming easy!

My heart and body conspire to rebel at every inappropriate opportunity without consulting with me and certainly without my permission!

My ability to balance what I want to do and what this body is capable of doing is still exasperating. Each day is different, some days this body seems to be perfectly willing to allow me to accomplish anything and everything I want it to do, and then without warning, another day will arrive and it protests every move I make. There is no detectable rhyme or reason for which day will be good and which day will be bad. No way to predict and work around it, there are days there is nothing I can do but cry, then get back up and keep moving.

Wrestling with Grey

This one just did not want to arrive.  It was a struggle, not just artistically but I wrestled with it emotionally.  Color would go in then literally melt and disappear into the image. I have no explanation for that...It was very strange!

It maybe saying much more about me than I am ready to look at right now.

But then I heard this music and I just knew it was time to stop.  I knew that this is just the way it was supposed to be.  One lesson I have had a hard time learning is when to stop drawing, when to stop trying to make something right, when it is time to step back  and "let it be" before I over work it and ruin it.

and so this time I did....I just stopped.
Link to larger image and lyrics

Self-Sabotage

I have rediscovered one of my excellent talents that I thought I had long since walked away from,
self-sabotage.

It is my ability to seek out and find people, situations, and in general anything that will keep me from doing the work I love, that I am good at and that I am meant to do.

The question of how this has reemerged in my life is nowhere near as important as the why. The how is easy, it always is. The why I deliberately damage my ability to create art and myself is hard.  

This time, I recognized my ugly behavior before it consumed me. Is it enough to recognize self-sabotage to stop it or do I need to understand why I do it?

Maybe, there is no lesson...

People and events arrive in my life to teach. Sometimes I recognize the lessons right away, other times they are just not that obvious. Two have reemerged from my past, one’s lesson was immediate, the other, I still do not know.

I am beginning to wonder if the lesson is there, or am I too emotionally involved to see it.

Maybe things happen for no other reason than to enjoy life, enjoy the relationship and quit looking for a lesson.

Maybe I need to be patient and trust the lesson will reveal itself when the time is right.

Maybe, there is no lesson.

Monumental Choice

I know I need to move forward.  I know that staying in the same comfortable space is not living it is merely existing.  When I made that monumental choice to live with this disease rather than exist with it, I really had no idea that it would be the beginning of so many new decisions, new lessons, and new friends.   I am fairly certain that I will continue to make bad decisions, miss the lessons I should learn,  and connect with old friends too.  I am glad I made that monumental choice!

Celebrating Creativity

It has been, so far an incredible summer bringing far more into my life than I could have ever imagined!  Artist's Way and the new creatives have been a marvelous blessing!  I cannot wait to see what they are doing with thier "creative blocks"  I am certain I will be blown away!

Entering Every Experience

I realized some time ago that nothing was going to happen unless I was willing to put myself out there, while I have no idea what it is I want to happen.   How do I balance living in the now but continue to plan and create a tomorrow.   Getting back into making and showing art brings deadlines and judgments back into my life.  Letting new people into my life opens up a the possibility of emotional  disaster.  All of this is terrifying!

I have fully participated in every gift the Universe has presented, and although scared to death, am embracing and gratefully entering every experience one day at a time.

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

How did we get to this century with ignorant chauvinistic men still functioning? Their bad behavior is alive and well and rude. In a day and age when there are so many wonderful good men that have embraced women with functioning brains, unfortunately there are still, the bad and ugly (spirited) that are still thriving and getting away with it! 

The only choice I have is how much of my energy will I allow the bad and the ugly to consume?

Impromptu Art

I had an interesting and very fun session this morning  in the studio with a bottle of blue paint that I knocked off the shelf.  Plan A.... was to get out of my sweaty gym clothes in the laundry room (on the other side of the studio) where they could be immediately washed then sprint directly to the shower.  In theory, the plan was flawless until I wiped out a bottle of blue acrylic paint as I streaked through the studio.  Unfortunately, (or perhaps fortunately in this case), you cannot get paint back in the bottle once it is out.  Having just finished a good walk I had admired how wonderfully strong my awesome heart has been recently, so it seemed appropriate to use the spilled paint on me, and so I painted a big “S” for Super Woman - Super heart on my chest.  Of course that meant deliberately breaking into some red and yellow paint,too, but it just had to be done!  I have a kick-butt awesome strong heart! Now if I could only find a cape!  (and NO I cannot post the picture here!)

So scary!

I have gotten a serious lesson about “putting it out there”.  The first time this past week, after I had put it out there, I had second thoughts, fear and doubt about how much of myself I was allowing strangers to see.  But before I could make changes I was considering, it was released.  I felt like I was standing naked in front of a host of unknowns, at my most vulnerable.  The wonderful thing is that I have gotten nothing but nice comments one piece has already sold a month before the show opens and literally a ba-zillion or at least my 2 gig bandwith transfer, the point where site goes down.   Holy Crap!
So I have screwed up my courage and put my true, OMG feelings out there again, without a clue about how they will be received.  This is so scary.