Your Courageous Life

So raise your hand if you’re someone who…

*  hoards art supplies, telling herself that she’ll use them (and then somehow that doesn’t happen).

* secretly longs to quit your day job and spend long days sketching or painting or collaging at a studio desk

* gets totally inspired when she buys the canvas at the art store, then feels paralyzed with fear or resistance when it’s time to sit down.

* someone who makes the first brush or pen stroke, sighs and thinks, “That sucks,” maybe gives it another few minutes and then gives up.

* would love to do something creative, but doesn’t have the time or money to go to art school

* would love to do something creative, but doesn’t want to have people critique her work–why can’t it just be fun?

* would love to create lots of artwork, but what would one do with it once it’s finished?

* promises herself that this time, she’ll finish that sketchbook and yet…yet…yet…

A few years ago, I was really inspired by an exhibition I saw at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It was a retrospective of the artist Joseph Cornell, who did a lot of collage art and 3-D work. He was a self-taught artist. What struck me moreso than his finished pieces were these glass cabinet islands in the middle of the room that documented his planning process. This man collected clippings, and bits and baubles, and sketched the bits and baubles, and brainstormed, and made notes, and wrote about objects…he did all of this work before he even began the piece itself. Through these glass cases, I had a window into how much pre-work he did before he got to the actual work, and it struck me that this was one way to let go of how “precious” art can be–you know, that feeling of “I can’t fuck it up” and “well, what’s the point? It’s not like I’m going to make money off of this anyway.”

That feeling.

I was also really struck by how he worked across mediums–with painting, sketching, collage, photography, even incorporating math and physics in the sense that some of his pieces were made into clocks or mazes for a silver ball to wind through. What experimentation! What a melding of sculpture and portrait and color and image!

So I went home and started something that year–a project called Across Mediums. I brainstormed some themes and then each week I sat down and did pre-planning for that theme in which I wrote, brainstormed, etc. Then I tried to use that theme across different mediums like photography, painting, sketching, and writing. So if my theme for the week was “birds,” I would brainstorm all of my associations, then I’d write about birds in either a non-fiction or fiction piece, I’d try to photograph birds, I’d sketch birds, I’d paint birds. I found that this process did two really great things:

1.) By the time I had experimented with the subject in so many ways, I was producing better work than if I’d simply tried a bunch of stabs at it, again and again;

and

2.) I was really, really unattached to the final product, because I’d put so much time into process.

It was a really helpful process for me in doing creative, visual art.

On New Year’s Day, I woke up thinking about the Across Mediums work that I had done, and felt this sudden flash of inspiration: turn it into an e-course, a space to dive in, get inspired, shake up the artistic process, be completely unattached to outcome. In the past few weeks, I’ve been fleshing out what I actually did with my own Across Mediums process to make it more detailed and specific and e-course friendly, and I’m excited to announce that next week, I’m going to open registration for Across Mediums, which will start in mid-February!

The course will be two weeks long–fourteen days straight–and ideal for someone who is going to put in 20 minutes each day for those days. Each and every day will have a new opportunity for you to do more across several different modes of creativity (painting, 3-D, photography, sketching) on a particular theme.

By the end of the process, participants will emerge having had some fun with what they were doing, actually using those art supplies (!), and the best part is that the course will guide you to a place of just letting go with art-making and not worrying about outcome. It will present a series of challenging twists and turns–not artistically, but mentally–for you to experiment with and see what happens. It’s also a great way to connect with other people who like to play with art-making from around the world.

The course will be $35 and registration will be very limited, so if you are interested in joining, add yourself to the spam-free announcement list on this page so that you’ll be notified when registration has opened.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 9:29 pm |