Today's Muse: Tim Burton

In 2011, I attended an exhibit of Tim Burton's work at a museum in Los Angeles.  I marveled at his prolific creativity.  The man must have visions of art buzzing in his head morning, noon and night.  He doodles, draws and scribbles all the time.  How I wish there were a way to make that kind of stuff happen in my head.  Today I picked up the book of Burton's work that I bought that day at the museum and was inspired to just goof around with water colors and pen.  Oh my goodness, do I have work to do!

While I am trying to find time to be creative, I have found that I struggle with what I want to make and create.  Haven't I fussed about this before?  I continue to spend a lot of my spare time working with my son's girlfriend as her senior project mentor.  In trying to come up with creative ideas, I thought it would be fun for both of us to learn how to solder and make jewelry like the piece I had published in Cloth Paper Scissors (which was not soldered, but easily assembled) as well as try sketching and painting.  Now I had a reason to paint.  This is my attempt at playing around for something to sandwich between glass for a necklace.  We'll just call these practice and a source of chuckles.

This is where we learn what happens when we put too much paint on at once and then touch it.

This is what happens when we try again and DON'T touch it

All I can do is just keep trying.  I'm going to put a little sketch book in my car so when I'm waiting to pick up kids from school, I've got no excuse.  I hope to continue to be inspired to just give various types of art a whirl, improve my skills and more importantly, get back to having fun being creative regardless of the outcome.

Brain Freeze

The work in our new house has slowed to a crawl, so I have a little more time for art IF I blow off housework.  I can live with that :-)  My husband is traveling a lot, my daughter is in Asia for weeks, so it's just me and the teenager.  This means less cooking time.  Woohoo!  With mess-makers reduced to half in numbers, I may have time to do something!

The problem is what to do when I am having a brain freeze in terms of ideas.  Prompted by the high school senior project for my young mentee (is that a word?), I bought the stuff to solder pendants.  Looking at the pendants so many other artists have for sale, I do NOT want to do the same thing.  Today I pulled out my folders of papers for my collage journal (that's been dead in the water for a year) and started looking at old photographs.  I tweaked, cut, doodled and made nothing.  Nothing.  Trying to stay attentive to the task at hand, I put on a Harry Potter movie I've seen a hundred times so that I had voices for company, but wasn't distracted.  No help.  I tweaked a few old photos, made a few more notes, and managed to cut two pieces of paper.  Good grief.  I'd like to blame my lack of creativity on the hideous green carpet we've not yet replaced (during spring break!) or the blah color on the walls I just had painted and need to repaint, but it's just being out of practice and out of my mind.

Regularly working on art has got to become a greater priority.  If only my life, my schedule and the calendar were more cooperative.

Urgent Crafting

It's been much longer than I thought since I posted last.  Working on our new house prompted the creation of a second blog, my method of keeping family informed on our progress.  My efforts to keep track of whom I had told what made me realize I needed an easier method than email.  Most of my energy has gone into hovering over contractors, driving my son to school and back (21 miles each way in Southern California traffic - ugh) and frantically trying to help him get caught up on his required-to-graduate senior project that was JUST approved (other students' projects were approved in October and November).  The requirements and deadlines remain the same.  O.M.G. 

In order to squeeze in some art time, I am happy to be working with his girlfriend as her mentor on her senior project, creating and stocking an Etsy shop.  The problem is that she lives quite a distance away and I've got to teach her how to make whatever she wants to make.  We went from, "Wouldn't it be fun to learn how to quilt?" or "Want to learn how to make neat stuff with Friendly Plastic?" to "OMG, what you can whip up quickly that doesn't require costly supplies or challenges in shippin that we can get online before the deadline?!?"  And still have fun.  And have the project meet the requirement of "a stretch," something that the school leaves us to figure out by means of ESP or osmosis or anything other than just telling us.

So I started out teaching her the basics of sewing.  She made a small stuffed figure that she has started to paint.  OK, that's not going to work.  If it takes two weekend get-togethers to get this far, we are definitely going to run out of time.  We decided to just crash a Michael's craft store and brainstorm.  They no longer carried the materials to make the charm like the one I made that was published in Cloth Paper Scissors (darn!), and the other materials were way too expensive.  Then we spotted the hemp rope, and then the coloured nylon cord.  I remembered learning to macrame in my elective class in middle school in the Philippines, and I still remember how!  So we're going to craft up some bracelets, some with colored or dyed cord, some with simple beads, some with just one lovely glass bead...it will be fun, and I'll get some artsy time.  They are very popular with the teens these days and we know a lot of people are making them, but desperate times and all that rot.

It makes me happy that my young mentee still wants to learn a lot of the crafts that I know, and I will be delighted to share studio space and teach her.  That is the most fun part for me. 

Dirty Hands are Busy Hands

While the ground floor of my house is being painted, I'm trapped in my studio space.  I can get in and out through a door to the back yard, but the door to the house is covered with tape and plastic.  Yuck.  This is what I'm living in right now.

The kitchen under wraps

The living room, finally with lights, but weeks to go on the plastering

Being stuck in the studio space isn't a bad thing (I can do laundry at the same time), but being forced to sit in here without a plan has triggered a little bit of fretting. With time to kill I always hope for ideas other than just a tornado of cluttered thoughts about creativity in my head leave me like a deer in headlights, making nothing.  Once again, I sat at my desk, looking around at all of my supplies and not having a single productive thought in my head about what to do.

While rummaging through shelves and bags to organize more (always a good time killer), I did manage to find the torso of a new figurative piece that I started working on before we moved.  In the last few days, we've had so many people in the house related to our renovations.  A number of them have seen my earlier work hanging on the wall.  I didn't observe a single look or comment that was positive.  My lack of courage and confidence in my skills is creeping up on me.  Now what?  Time to silence the inner critic.

I decided I needed a prompt/kick and I just Googled something like "art prompt too many ideas in my head."  Brilliant, I know.  That didn't work.  So I Googled "Teesha Moore journal tutorial" because her work gets me rolling a bit, but I've seen it before and felt like I needed something fresh.  On the side bar, I saw a video by "jenniebellie" about a 15-minute art journal page.  I could do something for 15 minutes.  A recent article by Julie Fei-Fan Balzer suggested starting an art journal to get the creativity juices flowing, but NOT to start with a fresh, clean all-white pages journal.  That produces too much anxiety and pressure.  I remembered having a pretty leather-bound little journal, dug it out and started to play the video while I just painted and printed, rubbing pan pastels, smearing paint, and sponging over stencils.  It's not a finished page and it only took a few minutes, but it was great to get my fingers dirty and not feel pressured to produce art that someone else would find fabulous.

The beginning of a two-page journal spread

We'll see where this goes.  I am going to try to do something like this as many days as I can get into the studio (sometimes I'm trapped upstairs, depending on the work going on in the house).  I will try to draw/sketch a little every day, hoping that the practice doesn't make perfect, just better.

Sneaky Art

My son, along with every other senior in his high school, is required to complete a "Senior Project," in order to graduate from high school.  The students are required to "research a topic of (his) choosing which will be developed into a research paper."  After multiple attempts to get his first idea approved and multiple rejections, he has thrown in the towel and is back to square one.  He wanted to learn the ropes in terms of becoming a professional musician from real pros, put together a jazz band and get a gig.  I have a wonderful friend who is a professional musician that talked trumpet players/recording artists Wayne Bergeron and David Washburn into agreeing to help mentor my son on his project.  It's now so late in the term that it just can't be done within the time constraints imposed, so he's starting over and very worried.  He needs to find a project for which he can write a lengthy research paper, conduct a minimum of 15 hours of field work, all of which must represent a learning stretch.

They want a stretch?  Here's a stretch.  Take an 18 year old boy that plays the trumpet and is obsessed with online computer games and teach him how to quilt.  He can make a quilt for donation to a service organization like Project Linus or The Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative (AAQI) Raising Awareness & Funding Research Through Art.  I'm thinking, "Momma's going to get some art done and have company doing it!"  We'll have tandem sewing machines (I get the Bernina!).  He actually has another (unrelated) project idea that he hopes will be approved (creating and implementing an emergency preparedness plan since we live in an earthquake/wild fire zone).  Personally, I hope the quilting one is approved ;-)  It would do him good to learn to sew, to break out and do something completely foreign and even contribute to a wonderful cause.  He cringes every time I remind him how much he begged me to let him sew when he was little.  He can make a mean bean bag and whatever that blob of fabric scraps stitched together was supposed to be.  He had so much fun.

About 1999 or so, before renovation of my dining room and before having a real studio.  I had one happy little boy on my hands, making bean bags from fabric scraps on my old machine.

Maybe I'll get some to sneak in some creative time while Kevin is working on a quilt in my studio.  What is more fun that creating art with someone else?  Even if we aren't working on the same project, working side-by-side would be a lovely way to spend time with him.

The Road to Inspiration

This weekend, my husband and I attended the Road to California quilt show.  The mood of the attendees was contagious, starting all the way back in the parking lot.  There is something about this group, this hobby, that is so unique and wonderful.  I saw total strangers striking up conversations with each other about quilts, moving on to where they are from and tales of travel adventures just getting to the show.  At one point I heard a woman ask a group of ladies if she could tag along as they toured the show because they kept bumping into each other on every row and striking up conversations.  They all cheerfully welcomed her to their gang, introducing themselves to one another and just having fun.  I saw this over and over again.  I talked to quilter Vickie Lynn about her beautiful applique work, and she told us about how she did it while recovering from treatment for cancer (she is now cancer free!) and how therapeutic the process was in her recovery.  We were stunned to hear that she only made her first quilt in 2006, noting that she felt that her long history of garment and home sewing gave her a great foundation for quilting.  There is hope! :-)

Being surrounded by so many creative people at one time was such a joy and so inspiring.  My goal isn't to win a prize or entry into a show, but just to get going on creativity.  I found so many things to inspire me - awesome fabric, great books, and artists' stories of their creative inspirations.

My favourite vendor was there - Pamela from Treasure of the Gypsy - and it was a good thing, because I found out that she is not going to be at the International Quilt Show in Long Beach this summer.  I was able to add to my stash of her awesome fabrics for projects unknown and yet-to-be determined project.  If this kind of scene doesn't inspire, what could?

Today I will spend a little time working on my personal resolution for this year, an art journal, and look forward to making a mess.

Turning Tables

My family and I continue to slog through trying to get our new house in order when we're all gone so many hours of the day.  It has finally dawned on me how life is going to change in 2014, both as a mom and an artist. 

Along with a few holiday greeting cards for the few people that have our new address, my son has been receiving notices from colleges about items he still needs to turn in to complete his application file.  It's hit me.  He's leaving.  Now I'm trying to type with vision blurred by tears.

Yesterday I was going through the last box to unpack in the master bedroom.  I found one of my old journals and flipped through a few pages.  This volume was started while I was in my 7th year as an infertility patient, documenting a recent miscarriage (my third), and my 5th and final pregnancy.  Much of it was spent in the hospital emergency department or in bed for more than four months, trying to hang on for as long as possible.  I read with tears in my eyes that I hoped my child would one day know how very much we wanted him and how so very hard we worked to keep him alive.  Now he's applying to colleges.  Where did the time go?

So while I am spending up to four hours in the car every day, two of those are spent with him just talking about learning to drive, politics, news, party planning...  I've been selfishly focused a lot on how I have NO time to do anything creative, spending my time behind the wheel or in the grocery store or cleaning up cat barf (thank you Tabitha, I'm never bored).  Next fall, I will have much more time for making art than I ever have before.  Today, I'm not sure how I feel about the impending change.  I'll be an artist first, then mom when the kids have time for me.  The table is turning.  I hope I'm ready.