Space

For 2 months, this harpsichord (spinnet virginal, replica of a 17th century instrument) has lived on my work table while I painted the sound board. Normally this isn’t a problem, but recently I’ve had several commissions coming in at once, and I’ve been going crazy.  In the studio I also have a light table and another drawing board, but they were taken up with office and drafting work, so all the other projects  got spread out on the floor or the bed.

I am organising a workshop, and I’ve literally felt that I couldn’t think straight with all the clutter around, and without a clear area to just spread things out to look at.

Well, it all changed this morning. The instrument was picked up at 11:00 AM and I have Space.

Space, I just sit there looking at what seems to be endless acres of fresh, virgin potential.  I fantasize spreading out all my workshop plans on that empty white table, being able to see for the first time the structure of the day and how the exercises lead into each other.  After that is cleared up then I can draw, cut and assemble my craft kits, (soon to be available through my webshop). Oh what a luxury to have everything at hand, all on one table, and pile and stack things according to progress made. And to see in a glimpse what has been done and what still needs doing.

Having my table back has shown me how much my well being and ability to think and organise are dependent on space, space to move and space to think.

 The Dutch have a saying,’ A clean house, a clean spirit’.  That’s sure how it feels today.

Art Healing Network awards 2009

I have been given the privilege of being able to give a workshop I’ve been dreaming of for years. It is a mix of enchantment, making objects of personal power, using art techniques to create meaning and healing in one’s life, creating room for creative wishes and dreams, and just plain having fun with wonderful materials.   This is the place I feel the most connected and useful and inspired.

I wish I had the words to express what art and creativity mean in my life, and how much it means to me to share this.  For years I wanted to go into the healing professions, but it never felt entirely right to have to choose between that and my art. And now, approaching 60, I see they are not at all separated.

Many times in this blog I’ve been trying to express what it is about the new subcultures in art that inspires me in the way conventional channels for making and selling art don’t.    Tonight I received the latest Art Healing Network Newsletter with their 2009 awards. The approach to art as a transformative  and healing tool is perfectly expressed in this year’s winners. Here is a link to Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang, two of the award winners.  What they are doing, their sensibilities, their stature as artists and  aesthetic quality perfectly express what it is about the new art that so entirely captures my imagination.

I am just so grateful that my life seems to be opening out into ways to share this way of seeing with others and participate in my own way in this holistic and engaged art.

Showing up

When my life is busy, I tend to avoid the computer. So I’m showing up on the page here to keep some continuity going.

At the moment I have a lot going on. My large worktable is completely taken over by a small harpsichord (or spinnet) waiting to be painted;  I have a small business identity to design; there is a large art health event coming up in the beginning of October and I’ve done two in the last week; and there is my first ‘Re-enchantment’ workshop coming up.

The last is the fulfilment of a long-held dream to combine consciousness-raising with creativity. There is so much to say about it I will save it for another post. But basically it is about ensouling one’s life through creative expression.

I’m also working on my book about creativity and dementia care, and am finishing up the third article in a series of 3  on the same subject for the Journal of Dementia Care.

All this is so welcome after months of no incoming work. Yet it is also demanding patience from me since I was aiming to get my webshop launched in August and have to postpone that for awhile.

More on my new products in a later post.

Hi to all. Wishing you an inspired and creative autumn.

Memory bundles

Last weekend I cycled to a favorite spot of mine on the northern sea coast of Holland. It is not far from where we live, and I don’t know why it holds such a fascination for me. I think part of it might be that it reminds me of the inner Hebrides in Scotland. There are always sheep walking on the sea dike, there are no trees and there’s loads of sky and space;  it’s a lot like Erraid and Iona.

I wanted to somehow bring back part of the feeling of peace I find there, so collected some grasses, a feather, and some( filthy) sheepswool.

I made the little memory bundle when I came back, a soothing activity in itself. It is about 4 inches long. The tiny calligraphed label notes the place, date and a few words about the experience.

The bundle on the left top was inspired by several things coming together.  When I am pruning in the garden, I always am attracted to colours and textures of the dried out flower stalks. Occasionally I keep them around as they are, but I never quite know what to do with them. 

Harry K, a friend from my online artist’s group mentioned an artist, Willem Boshoff whose work includes bundled twigs from various places. 

So I decided to make small bundles of various dried plant stalks from my garden, label and  and save them for awhile.

The one above is from a clematis with a tiny but fragrant flower. For weeks we’d get blasted by a cloud of vanilla perfume whenever we’d pass by it.  It’s official name is ‘Clematis x triternata ‘Rubromarginata’.

Pronkkoamer show and other updates

I usually only write when I have something specific to say, but it has been so long, I thought I’d check in. There are a few of you who visit regularly. Thank you so much.

At the moment I have 19 pieces being shown in a good local gallery. I am showing with my sister-in-law, Wilhelmina and a glass artist, Jakobine von Dömming. Wilhelmina has made some remarkable paper objects for the exhibition- half two dimensional, half sculptural.

work by Wilhelmina van Beek Zoutewelle

This one is called ‘Closed Book’ (SOLD).  She has painstakingly torn old books (in this case a Bible) and meticulously bundled them into little packets.  The work is wonderful. It occupies a small side room of the gallery; the work has such a strong ritual presence that when you walk in it feels like a temple.

My work is the same series that I’ve been posting from time to time here and is in the Gallery section at the top of the menu to the right. It looks good framed, and the whole expo feels fresh and harmonious.

This is my favorite corner view where some red glass plays off a red painting of mine. It is called, ‘Martin Tissing’s shoes’  after a favorite Dutch artist of mine. Someone at the show was asking me about the title, and I said it was because Tissing wears red shoes. And someone listening in said, ‘Yes, I know’.  We said, ‘How do you know’, she said, ‘I buy them for him, I’m his wife’.  That was cool

Otherwise, I am still working on my series of 3 articles on Creativity and Dementia Care for the Journal of Dementia Care, UK. 
I’ve received my first rejection of my book on the same subject, but am regrouping to send it out again.
I’m working with Anjo, my favorite web designer, to get my webshop up. A LOT of work, but it is fun. And I am developing my craft kits and working on the Dutch and English versions of the instructions.

What Evert taught me

Book inscription from Dutch calligrapher, Evert van Dijk

One of my oldest and dearest friends here in Holland is an impassioned calligrapher and retired teacher of handicapped children.

My encounter with him when I first came to live here changed my life as an artist irrevocably.  Evert saw my dilemma clearly. I was no longer growing artistically because I was caught in the prison of the  prevailing aesthetic in the middleclass American  milieu where I grew up. I’d  learned that art had to be ‘beautiful’ and that my calligraphy had to be as close to perfection as the human hand would allow.

Evert, with his wonderfully ebullient personality and outspoken views, blasted through that shell of pretense and released my authenticity. I think this is the task of all true teachers and mentors.

This altered view is also what releases calligraphy from craft and lifts it to art. My letters and mark making became much more expressive of who I was, and this had a ripple effect throughout my life; one I am only truly coming to understand about 20 years later.

In the article I am writing about art and dementia care, this theme of authenticity keeps reappearing.
Artists accept people with dementia as completely whole, viable, interesting human beings, and therefore often elicit lucid repsonses where trained staff have failed.   In an art session, the person ’s markmaking is seen in the context of authenticity rather than conventional aesthetics.  I am not after a pretty picture (this would expose the person and me to the potential of ‘failure’)  instead, I look for interaction and engagement.  The rules change, a person’s  raw and spontaneous line becomes the new context for  ’beautiful’.  The Japanese have a philosphy of aesthetics based on this called Wabi Sabi*.  

It is the ability to see the worth in something or someone just as they are without requiring that they fit a preconceived ideal.

 

*Wabi Sabi is an asethetic of the fragile, weathered and transient. It is the opposite of the Western tendency to aspire to the imposing, large and powerful. We idealize a perfect rose in bloom, Wabi Sabi cherishes the rose past its prime:  a chipped flea market wooden table with flaking paint as opposed to the latest design statement in glass and chrome.

Serious procrastination

There are 20 other things I should be doing this morning, but I realized that for my well-being, I needed to get out my materials before doing anything else.

I recently bought some sumptuous colours to add to my collection of Caran d’ache neocolour, water soluble  paint sticks. The above collage, a bit smaller than an A4, was done by first cutting up a ‘nearly made it’ previous oil pastel of mine. Then I added colour using watercolour sticks around the shapes, then went in with water on a fairly stiff brush to blend some of the colours. I’d started out with a piece of  bright orange  Cansons Ingres pastel paper 160 g. and I love how the orange shines through in places. 

I just needed to feel colours sing this morning before obediently planting myself in front of the computer to make myself write a brilliant article on creativity and dementia care, or finally wrap up the folder design for my summer calligraphy courses or get some more of my book printed out for my reader friend, or write some more on my book, or do the administration, or work on the volunteer design job for the local municipal commission, or renovate the house or get my webshop up and running or update my website or or or……….

Yesterday I counselled a dear friend who is going through a rough patch with her health to stop worrying about what society and so-called ‘friends’ thought, to not let her self be pressured to conform to outer demands, to be happy and do what she does best, which is be an artist and make beautiful true things.  

Sometimes I need to take that advice myself.

Domestics

I’ve been enjoying following this new trend in my work. Teapots, lemons, Persian carpets.  I’m looking forward to seeing them framed for the show, but don’t know if I can bear to part with them yet.

Wage peace curtain

The news of the day and some recent deaths in the neighborhood got me down.  I couldn’t concentrate on the work at hand, so I took a  break and threw myself into a creative project that needed doing. Every so often I make a rice paper curtain for our kitchen window. They stay nice and fresh for a year or two, then bleach out from the sun and get all stained from the condensation. So when one gets ratty looking, it is time to make a new one.

The latest uses a combination of spontaneously placed, torn cut and glued (with normal office stick glue) rice papers. I’ve stamped on them and sewn on some dried leaves and stuck some feathers in between the layers. There are also two ‘windows’ cut out, in one detail you can see the house next door through one. These are overlaid with a very transparent fiber paper. The yellowish leaves in a row are actually strung on a thread and hang in front of the curtain.

After I finished the project, I noticed I felt somewhat lighter and realized I’d followed the advice of Judyth Hill’s classic poem written in the aftermath of 9/11 – ‘Wage Peace’.

WAGE PEACE

Wage peace with your breath.

Breathe in firemen and rubble,

Breathe out whole buildings

and flocks of redwing blackbirds.

Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children

and freshly mown fields.

Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.

Breathe in the fallen

and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.

Wage peace with your listening:

hearing sirens, pray loud.

Remember  your tools:

flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.

Make soup.
Play music, learn the word for thank you in three languages.

Learn to knit, and make a hat.

Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,

imagine grief as the outbreath of beauty

or the gesture of fish.

Swim for the other side.

Wage peace.
Never has the world seemd so fresh and precious.

Have a cup of tea and rejoice.

Act as if armistice has already arrived

Don’t wait another minute.

-          Judyth Hill

 

She only flew

I’ve kept an old America Style magazine from 1996. One of the works of art which touched me most was by Brian Andreas . It was a little assemblage with the words,’for a long time she flew only when she thought no one else was watching’. The words have stayed with me for these past 12 years and the oil pastel collage above is a little tribute to Andreas’ piece.  I hadn’t seen his artwork for years, and when I looked it up this evening, I noticed that even after all this time, some of his visual language had crept into my piece.  It made me smile.

I remember in my Dutch class, we had to write a short story. Mine was about a woman who flew at dawn, when she thought no one was watching.  After a long and lonely period, she eventually became aware of others like herself, hidden angels.  When I had to read the story aloud in class tears came to my eyes. I still don’t know why. Do we all have a dream to fly?

ps Since writing this post, I’ve discovered Brian’s ’storypeople’ site. I had run across it months ago without making the connection, but now I know why I had such a good feeling about it. Makes me want to get on the next plane to Iowa. Check it out!