Fairy Godmother Synchronicity...

Funny how things fall together without any effort on my part.  Just paying attention and all kinds of connections and synchronicity seem to be showing up!

This morning I found myself wishing on a star, the first time I have ever really wished on a star, then I realized that my very first, and I might add my only ballet recital solo was to the song "When You Wish Upon a Star"  I was a dancing Fairy Godmother. Unfortunately,  I am a real  klutz, the ballet career was short lived and that may explain why I forgot all about it!

However,  it may be the reason I am so attracted to tiaras and magic wands. Although I clearly remember a magic wand as part of this lovely ensemble, it did not seem to make it into the photograph.  Tiara is on, magic wand is waving madly, and I am wishing on a star knowing that all of these coincidences mean something, Just wishing I knew what.
I need a Fairy Godmother...and I need her right now!


"When You Wish Upon a Star"  Rod Stewart

When You Wish Upon a Star.....

When you wish upon a star

Makes no difference who you are

Anything your heart desires

Will come to you.

If your heart is in your dream

No request is too extreme

When you wish upon a star

As dreamers do.

Fate is kind,

She brings to those who love

The sweet fulfillment of

Their secret longing.

Like a bolt out of the blue

Fate steps in and sees you through

When you wish upon a star 

Your dreams come true

I am an artist!

And a perverse fantasy world,
is a most wonderful place!

I get to make up all of the rules!

Imagination is the only guiding factor.
Anything and everything is possible

Afraid to invite others into my world...
They will bring a whole mess of reality.
I did not think I was ready for reality,

But as it turns out, 
I am
I am an artist
and I am filling my reality 
full of unrealistic expectations!

And it makes me smile!


              "Smile" Uncle Kracker

The Comfort Zone

The most exciting things in my life come when I am willing to step outside of my comfort zone.

The most painful things in my life have also come when I am willing to step outside my comfort zone.

The catch is I do not get to know which one I am headed for when I take those first steps. 

 
And now I am way outside my comfort zone, and I still have no idea.

She's Come Undone...

Finished this piece last month for the Artist's Way Exhibit.  It has always been one of those from the "gut" works.  The neck cracked when fired, I almost quit.  But then realized that was going to be part of what I needed to say.

Yes she did not want to be here, did everything not to show up.  But showed up anyway if for no other reason than to say "She's Come Undone" but she is still here!

Loved her tenacity, loved how the light recognized and created the 3 shadows in my life. There they all are.....




"Undun" The Guess Who

That...I know!

Every day there are at least 47 questions I ask myself they always begin like this “What are you doing?” & “Why are you doing that?” Most of the time the answers are so easy, they take very little thought at all….
Laundry-need clean clothes
Marketing-out of food
Gas-want to go somewhere

In the studio, I never ask what or why. I create because it feels good and right. I have something to say and I do not have the words. All I want the viewer to know it is how I feel by using shapes, colors & texture. It works so well in the studio, but in the real world….it does not...they really do not want to know about feelings.

If you ask questions of me, I am most likely to skip the what and the why, not because I do not want you to know…. because I really do not know myself.
                                                                             Ask me how it made me feel, that.... I know!

What was I thinking????

OMG….there is nothing more embarrassing than screwing up my courage, trying something really new and different, and failing …..I mean it was a spectacular FAIL.
The good news….the failure although not caught in time, is manageable and exposure is minimal limiting my total degradation…
Oh dear God…..What was I thinking????

                                                           and NO I am not telling anyone what I did !

                                                                        
                                                                               "No Sugar Tonight"  Guess Who

Good and Bad Days....

There are ecstatic, wonderful celebrate life days and then there are these crappy, crummy, cannot get my shit together days. We all have dreadful days from time to time, but I have managed, for the most part, to avoid them at all costs! The price for this marvelous avoidance has simply been, do not allow anyone into my life enough that could impact my ability to maintain this level of blissful ignorance. If the crappy days are this bad in my isolation, I could not bare it if I were emotionally vulnerable and exposed to people, too.

I understand there is a direct necessary relationship and balance between joy and grief or light and dark, life and death. It is the yin yang of life. They all must exist together and in balance. I have to experience this grief in order to feel the joy that is available to me. But, I wrestle with so much concealed grief every day; I just cannot risk the chance of letting people too far into my life that could tip my own delicate balance. I am so much better at doing this by myself, although I may have just blown my own cover by posting it here.

And this day like all of the rest will surely pass.


"Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying"  Gerry and the Pacemakers

What's Next?

My life seems to flow in stages….I bet everyone’s does this may not be big news to anyone.

The biggest swath was dedicated to being a Momma, although sandwiched in there, out of necessity were years of working, too. The work was fulfilling, but I always knew that that particular job was not what I was “meant” to do. It was the beginning but not the end.

The next identifiable stage was when I began painting and drawing. That erupted pretty quick and there was a gut feeling this was right. Many years on the eastern US art festival circuit finally allowed me to give up the picture framing business and Studio E, Inc. officially closed . It truly was one of the most exciting, challenging parts of my life. As I look back, I realize it was the part of my life that I most enjoyed and was truly satisfied both emotionally and financially.

I have attempted to go back and recreate that life, but I knew better, you cannot go backwards. It never works and this was not different. It was a miserable failure.

So… the question that plagues me is what is next. I am trying so hard to be patient and aware of opportunities. Clearly, teaching continues to show up and I do enjoy it, and there is a part of me deep down in my soul that knows this is part of why I am here.  Is this what I am supposed to leave on this earth. Creative Courage….is this what’s next…..creative courage. I need to find some, create some, and leave some.

        "Follow Me"  Uncle Kracker

No Fear!!!

Woo-Hoo ....I DID IT! 

NO FEAR! for all of those times when I just do not think I can do it.....I now have "no fear" tattooed on my foot to remind me....How strong I have got to be everyday, that I CHOOSE no fear....and  I am going to do it anyway!!!!
Bucket List #32-B check!
My first and will be my only tattoo!

Beginnings and Endings

September is here and summer is over. The semester has begun but there is more that my typical sadness that summer has ended, it is the last semester, at the end I will finally have the degree I have longed for. It truly is the beginning of the end.

Summer brought me some new beginnings and I am thrilled, fall looks like it is going to bring me some endings, some of my own choosing others not. But as sad as those endings may be, they will be making room for more beginnings.

So, to my endings I say goodbye, thank you for coming into my life I am a better person for all of the experiences. To my beginnings, I anticipate your arrivals and welcome all of the new lessons I have yet to learn.


    "Auld Lang Syne"  Mairi Campbell

10 Paradoxical Traits Of Creative People

From Fast Company

“I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things. If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an individual, each of them is a multitude." Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they're also often quiet and at rest. They work long hours, with great concentration, while projecting an aura of freshness and enthusiasm.
2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time. “It involves fluency, or the ability to generate a great quantity of ideas; flexibility, or the ability to switch from one perspective to another; and originality in picking unusual associations of ideas. These are the dimensions of thinking that most creativity tests measure and that most workshops try to enhance.”
3. Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility. But this playfulness doesn't go very far without its antithesis, a quality of doggedness, endurance, and perseverance. “Despite the carefree air that many creative people affect, most of them work late into the night and persist when less driven individuals would not. Vasari wrote in 1550 that when Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello was working out the laws of visual perspective, he would walk back and forth all night, muttering to himself: "What a beautiful thing is this perspective!" while his wife called him back to bed with no success.”
4. Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality. Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present.
5. Creative people tend to be both extroverted and introverted. We're usually one or the other, either preferring to be in the thick of crowds or sitting on the sidelines and observing the passing show. Creative individuals, on the other hand, seem to exhibit both traits simultaneously.
6. Creative people are humble and proud at the same time. It is remarkable to meet a famous person who you expect to be arrogant or supercilious, only to encounter self-deprecation and shyness instead.
7. Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping. When tests of masculinity and femininity are given to young people, over and over one finds that creative and talented girls are more dominant and tough than other girls, and creative boys are more sensitive and less aggressive than their male peers.
8. Creative people are both rebellious and conservative. It is impossible to be creative without having first internalized an area of culture. So it's difficult to see how a person can be creative without being both traditional and conservative and at the same time rebellious and iconoclastic.
9. Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well. Without the passion, we soon lose interest in a difficult task. Yet without being objective about it, our work is not very good and lacks credibility. Here is how the historian Natalie Davis puts it: "I think it is very important to find a way to be detached from what you write, so that you can't be so identified with your work that you can't accept criticism and response, and that is the danger of having as much affect as I do. But I am aware of that and of when I think it is particularly important to detach oneself from the work, and that is something where age really does help."
10. Creative people's openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment. “Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake. Without this trait, poets would give up striving for perfection and would write commercial jingles, economists would work for banks where they would earn at least twice as much as they do at universities, and physicists would stop doing basic research and join industrial laboratories where the conditions are better and the expectations more predictable.”

her fire...

a "burner" at heart....

When the rest of the country is celebrating Labor Day weekend, my heart and my imagination soar to the temporary city of Black Rock City, Nevada and the yearly one-week celebration of creativity known as Burning Man http://www.burningman.com/ . I have never been but I fill my creative soul by watching the live video feed, admiring the creative freedom of the art installations, and marveling at the incredible adverse conditions that these creatives are willing to endure just to be in each other’s company and create.  

It is easy to draw the similarities that exist at Burning Man with the collection of amazing artists that lived and created in Montmartre area of Paris France. The excitement and lights of the Moulin Rouge, the enlightened conversations of the cafés inspired them and they thrived artistically.

My body may be sitting in a little air conditioned concrete block house in central Florida, but my imagination is dancing among the creatives that are living for a week in the middle of a Nevada desert, practicing, celebrating and living their art.

                                                                               I am a “Burner” at heart.

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/09/photos-of-burning-man-2013/100584/