creativity and co-creation

this morning an article with the shocking headline of ted talks are lying to you caught my eye. my initial thought was, "say it isn't so!" but then i remembered that brené brown drivel on which i once spent 20 minutes of my life that i'll never have back. brené - what kind of a pretentious crap name is that? but thomas frank lays out a pretty good case for the pop phenomenon of self-help/business books on the topic of creativity. they're formulaic (like most business books), they're filled with the same stories (invention of the post-it with a few bob dylan lyrics thrown in) and they're not really about creativity at all, but about conformity and societal norms. and that made a lot of sense to me. because i've experienced myself how truly thinking outside the box will get you thrown out of the club, because what people really want is to be surrounded by people who think as they do, not by people who push them to think differently and behave in new ways.

it's an interesting read and it makes a lot of sense to me and articulates the aversion i've found that i have for books on cultivating creativity, without really knowing why i found myself rolling my eyes at them. what he doesn't go into is something i've been pondering of late and that's whether it's even possible to be truly creative and think outside of the box (i hate that phrase)? i'm beginning to think that creativity has much more to do with regular, even dogged, practice than it has to do with any epiphanies. the possibility of developing something unique and which is truly yours or truly an expression of what you'd like to, well, express, is nearly null. anything we make is somehow a conglomeration of influences and experiences and contains grains of them all, rather than being something completely new and unique. even a post it is really just weak tape and a small piece of paper, it's not anything new.

but that said, i do believe in a creative practice, tho' i admit that i do it myself in fits and starts and not very consistently. and i believe in the power of co-creation - where a group of people from different, seemingly diverse fields, come together and put their ideas into one big pot, where they are stirred together and become new and improved ideas. and i'd say that one of my main talents lies in an ability to put such groups together and have magic come of it. but it's unpredictable and the magic is always, always different than you imagined it would be. that's actually the magical thing about magic. to co-create ideas with other people also means being very open and willing to throw an idea into the mix and see it change and morph and become something else that only carries a kernel of what it originally was. and it's there that a lot of people have problems. they're not willing to let go of their precious baby ideas and really let them outside of their original box. i think that's where the dogged persistence and the actual nitty, gritty work come in. you have to keep going and pushing and seeing what happens. just like in real life.

and ultimately, it's why i still think ted talks are a good thing - ideas are floated into the world, consumed by people, who combine them with their own ideas and they become something else entirely. life, it's an act of co-creation.

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always pondering libraries, so i liked this guardian piece by neil gaiman.

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fantastic photos and stories of a forgotten russia.

seeking inspiration in saul steinberg's work

as i move to the next stage of decorating my torso (it's finally the color i want it to be - funnily enough, based on leftover paint from my beloved blue room), i find myself turning to saul steinberg. a jew who fled europe in the years leading to WWII, he became the quintessential new yorker and was, for years, a cartoonist at the new yorker.

i'm drawn to his simple lines, his use of rubber stamps, his clever fingerprints, his small topographies and the way in which he mixes styles. especially that last bit.

i do like to draw and mostly i draw plants and feathers, but also buildings - barns and houses. i had a couple of steinberg's books from the library a couple of months ago and i snapped these iPhone shots of the things i wanted to save.

there's something about me and inspiration and i never know when i will actually use it, but i am a compulsive collector of things which inspire. but, if you've been coming around here any length of time,  or follow any of my 119 pinterest boards, you know that.

i love this passport photo steinberg made with his own fingerprints. a passport is an identifying document, and what could be more identifying than a fingerprint. it's genius.

this seems to have been made of spilled ink - i love the notion that something artistic and beautiful can come of a mistake and i imagine being able to use that on my torso somewhere.

here's some of that mixed style i was referring to - all within one piece. the man in the middle is my favorite. people aren't really something that i draw much, but i'd like to try something like that.

i love the way these small, disparate drawings are connected by ladders and stairs, it has an autobiographical ring to it that i think will be perfect on my torso.

and a collection of meaningful objects - this is the kind of thing i draw in my art journals - just collections of the random things which are lying around the house.

and this use of rubber stamps in an unexpected fashion just speaks to me. i guess i'd better get to work.

what/who is inspiring you?

is this art? a torso project update

it's time for a little torso project update. some of the creative women from the original torso project weekend met up yesterday to show their finished products/works in progress and to discuss next steps towards showing the work.

the end results are as diverse as the women themselves. as i see it, the common thread for all is autobiography. these casts of our very bodies, frozen in a moment in time, are the canvas for a snapshot of all that we feel has made us who we are, right here and right now.

words, photos, maps, yarn, paint, drawings, color - all have been used to depict the individual lives of each of us. how we see ourselves and how we imagine that others see us. these torsos hold fragments of our memories, our lives, our documents, our experiences. they are there, written on our very bodies.

but i find myself thinking about whether they are art. we used artistic techniques - collage, paint, photography, one person even "drew" in yarn, as you can see above - but did we achieve actual art?  which raises the more complicated question of what is art anyway? it's a bit like that old joke about pornography, "i know it when i see it." and i can't help but think that what we made wasn't art per se.

but if it's not art, then what is it? it is expressive. and highly personal. it is storytelling. and a bit of art therapy, in that i think we all found it therapeutic to look within for our memories and stories. but to ask a museum to display our work would be a stretch. a big one. maybe it would be different if yoko ono or madonna had been part of our project - they would lend caché and would have perhaps lifted us all in our visions and our work. one of the most powerful things we did yesterday was that each person shared the thoughts behind their torso. and it made them so much more meaningful to hear people's stories.  but art needs to be able to stand alone, as we can't stand them beside at an exhibition and explain them to people.

but the fact is that we are a bunch of creative people in a little town in the middle of nowhere in denmark who happen to have tried to tell a little piece of the story of who we are in the form of a plaster cast of our own bodies. and while a few members of the group are trained as artists, as a whole we are not. we are teachers and office workers and librarians and nurses and consultants and physical therapists and prison guards. and those are wonderful things to be.

what we had was an amazing experience - to make those torsos together in a room of 20+ women. baring ourselves (literally) and opening up our hearts and experiences and stories and sharing them is a powerful thing, a wild woman sisterhood sort of thing. but where do we go with it? we are going to exhibit them locally at the end of august, but i wonder beyond that. they might fit well in a library exhibition, connected to other forms of autobiography, or to part of a storytelling conference. but i honestly don't think we'll convince a museum or a gallery to show them.

here's mine, i'm not done yet. it's filled with words that resonated with me - many in danish, because those are the newspapers that i have at hand. i've given those words first a wash of sepia, followed by a a wash of watered down paynes grey ink, as i don't want to completely cover them. tho' i do intend to cover them to an extent with small paintings and drawings of places and memories that are important to me. but mine isn't art either, but it is a personal expression of me. words are important to me. as is expressing myself. right now, it's darker and more foreboding than i actually feel, which is interesting, but doesn't reflect the hazy vision of it that resides in my head. and that's a big part of the process too.

dabbling

just catching up on my blog reader (in flipboard, still thru google reader, while it lasts)...also writing this on the iPad mini my sis gave to me (how fabulous is she?)...and having this sinking feeling, as i read blogs i subscribed to ages ago, that i do not sufficiently stick with the things that i try...whether stitching or dyeing or felting or sewing or quilting or whatever....i am a dabbler. it means that while bloggers i long ago followed continue to share their particular area of interest, ever more honed and refined, ever evolving, their techniques more and more beautiful, i dabble and never get any better at anything, continuously flitting from one thing to the next.

what holds me back, prevents me from embracing a thing that is me? or even figuring out what it might be? i'm honestly not sure. it's surely bound up in all kinds of unutterable fears - of failure, of success, of exhausting ideas, of never having another one again, of being derivative, of being unique, of critique, of praise, of it becoming humdrum and boring (hmm, seems i could utter a few of those fears after all).

there are a few things i stick with - breathing, writing, taking photos and cooking. with cooking, i've slogged through a recent slump, cooking daily anyway, despite not feeling like it. at all. i suppose on that front, i'm driven largely by hunger. but it's the same with daily photos - i'm not always inspired to take one, but i persevere anyway, always finding something to notice and photograph. but even there, i don't think i've pushed my photography forward in any meaningful way in a long time.

where do people find their motivation? their dedication? their confidence? their belief? their dogged persistence? their spark?

i don't really have trouble at all finding sparks, it's more that i find too many of them. i am an ideas person. i love new ideas and spending time with people who give me new ideas.  i love thinking of new ideas, but i also love letting go of them again and moving on to a new one. and that doesn't lend itself very well to developing a craft. or a job. or a business. because those take persistently and consistently developing and pushing the ideas further and further. and that's what i admire about so many of the blogs in my reader - the ability their creators have to keep working on their ideas, pushing them further, honing them and polishing them and perfecting them.

maybe my thing is initiating ideas and i need to do a better job of passing them to people who will nurture them. i don't think that i ever need worry about running out. now, to turn that into a viable business...

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perhaps i should just go read this article on finding fulfilling work.

showing up to creativity

sewing, drinking tea, battling a sore throat and a head that's filling up with snot and sewing. sewing is meditative for me and i love to listen to TED talks while i sew. they cause thoughts to go off in all directions.

i really loved this one from elizabeth gilbert on the pressures and fears of the creative process - do watch it if you have time:



i think sometimes that's the problem with my own creativity - i'm not very consistent about it. i don't just show up every day and keep plugging away at it. i come at it in fits and starts. i am also increasingly aware that creativity is not a solitary process - i'm actually at my most creative in conversation and in the presence of others. and what's actually weird is that i thought i had to be alone to be creative. i vow to spend more time in the presence of other creative people in 2013.

when rivers of ideas begin to flow

here's what happened with my green felted stone - in fact, in this shot, it's not even dry yet.  if you recall, i used lisa's stone felting tutorial. and i fussed about worried about over-thought pondered how to make it my own. with a little viking helleristning (petroglyph), i think i managed it. i'm not done with this idea yet.

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i have spent a couple of very energizing days with a friend with whom i feel very much in synch. so many ideas surfaced and best of all, it feels like there is action and impetus behind the ideas, so some of them may even materialize. i had the strangest feeling after we met last friday (what i thought would be a 2-hour meeting turned into 5 because we were so crazy in flow)...it felt like a dam had been released inside me and all of the pent-up ideas and thoughts i had had in recent months just began to surface and tho' they were coming quickly, it feels like it's at a pace where i can grab and examine them. some of them had been there for awhile, but some were entirely new. it was positively elating. it's odd how you can get all blocked and not even realize it until you're not blocked anymore.

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things i'm pondering:

what it might mean to be a social artist

community gardens.

art walls.

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i think my keyboard may be menopausal - the period is getting pretty unpredictable.

sorry. bad joke. couldn't help myself.

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what's your type?

find out here.

apparently i'm architype van doesburg (a brutally fair typeface).

play the game, if only to hear the narrator's awesome accent.

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the p boards on pinterest: patchwork. peacocks. personal style. photos that make me think.

influences, pastiche, fusion: thoughts on the creative process

i'm reading nicole krauss' great house. she's a marvelous writer that i only discovered this past summer when a friend lent me her novel the history of love. she's a writer of the holocaust, but at the same time very contemporary. back in the mid nineties at arizona state, i took a class called the holocaust in american literature. we didn't read anything nearly as marvelous as krauss back then (of course she hadn't written these books yet at that point as she was probably still in high school). i hope they've added her books to the syllabus, as they get at holocaust issues in a much deeper and more profound way than anything we read then (painted bird, sophie's choice, etc.). but perhaps that's a natural progression of things, as we gain more distance from the horror, it can be better and more artistically processed.

but i didn't mean to write about holocaust lit. what i meant to write about is her style - a pastiche of seemingly separate stories that intertwine at the end. because it got me thinking about how things connect. and how nearly everything is a sort of amalgamation of influences that start out separate and come together.

i think i see this fusion of influences most often in my cooking - it often contains elements from my upbringing, my travels and my surroundings. last evening, it being thanksgiving which is not (shock!) a holiday here and thus you don't have the whole day to devote to cooking like you do in the US, i found myself wanting to make a turkey anyway. since it was just an ordinary weekday dinner and with all of our ordinary obligations, i didn't have hours and hours to cook, so i bought a turkey breast. i slathered it with a purchased garlic cream cheese and topped it with a protective layer of bacon to keep it from drying out. then i asked husband and sabin to dig me some potatoes (it hasn't frozen yet, so the best storage place for them is in the ground), which we peeled and sliced and put in the oven with leeks and cream and butter for a batch of traditional danish flødekartofler (tho' not that traditional, since they don't usually contain leeks). i didn't have any sweet potato, so i baked up a butternut squash, which i served simply with butter, salt and pepper, foregoing any cloyingly sweet marshmallows or brown sugar. so in the end, it was a thanksgiving of sorts, but using both the time constraints and the ingredients i had at hand. thanksgiving enough to make me feel less sorrowful that i was far from my family on the day and yet simple enough to be made on an ordinary weeknight.

but i've been thinking about influences as well where creating is concerned. trying out stitching on felted stones ala lisa or using the photo transfer techniques i learned of from artist anne brodersen. we try out someone else's style or technique in order to get a feel for it. copying something is a way of learning, as well as a sort of homage to someone whose work you admire. such copies, i look upon as experiments and not by any means something i would put in my sadly neglected big cartel shop. they are but a step on the road towards something else, something my own, but i sense they are an essential step of sorts, even tho' i don't yet know where they're taking me.

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here's the deal, people, swatch watches from the 90s are not vintage. 

i don't give a rat's ass what etsy says.

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china's next top model?

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the d boards on pinterest: down by the lake. down on the farm. drinkie poo.

monday inspiration

Margaret Mellis: A life in Colour (Suffolk excerpt) from artcornwallvideo on Vimeo.

a marvelous peek into the creative process of margaret mellis, who made fantastic driftwood collages. i found the video here. but i learned of margaret mellis' work in roger deakin's wildwood, which i'm still savoring.

a valuable reminder for me that the practice is key to the inspiration. i've got to get practicing again. and possibly head for the west coast and a walk on the beach.

pinspiration no. 3

i've just finished up pinspiration no. 3 - this fresh and fabulous bag. inspired by this pin (which i am ashamed to say i pinned 45 weeks ago - yes, it took me that long to do something about it). there is a free pattern and directions here (thank you, very purple person!). i just got out a newspaper and drew my own pattern (will make the handles slightly longer in the next go), but i used the directions. they're good if you're an experienced seamstress.

this is some fabric i bought ages ago, with pillows in mind, but i absolutely LOVE it as a bag. it's a rather heavy canvas - i suppose it's an upholstery fabric. it has some synthetic content (you'll see in a minute how i found that out).

the directions are pretty good, but i'm not sure i would have thought that if i hadn't made all of those reversible dresses last autumn. the bag is theoretically reversible, tho' i put a pocket on the plain black lining inside and don't intend to reverse it. if you had two fabulous fabrics, you could definitely nake a reversible and versatile bag. here's where i'm using a brush to help me turn it - that moment is always a bit weird, as it feels like you must have done it wrong, but then it ends up all right.

finishing the handles was easier than i thought and easier than my dresses were last autumn. it was here that i felt the directions were a bit iffy - i wished there were better photos of the process, but i muddled through and it did go together quite smoothly.

the improvised pocket i put on the inside - i just NEED somewhere to put my phone so i'm not rummaging around for it in the midst of 50 old receipts and wads of used kleenex.

my version of the bag is a bit wider than the one i pinned - it will make it nice and roomy for all kinds of things - i'm thinking knitting projects and cameras.

i'm using a little room off my living room as a craft room these days - i moved the dining table there a few weeks ago. unfortunately, there's no working electricity out there, as when we moved the 1940s electrical box and got a new, modern one, they didn't reconnect that end of the house (it had been cobbled together originally and so the electrician didn't realize it wasn't reconnected). until i moved my crafty bits out there, it didn't really matter, as we didn't use that room except when we had couchsurfers. this morning, i lit some candles on the table and as you can see, kind of forgot about them when i was working on laying out the bag. soon, my fabric was flaming up rather merrily and stinking up the place - possibly indicating synthetic fibers. i managed to quickly put it out and only ruined a small corner of my fabulous fabric.

the first bag was so much fun, i'm going to make up another one with this fabulous fabric that i bought ages ago in oslo. you can never have too many bags.

UPDATE: now with the second bag complete - and a bit longer handles so it fits over the shoulder a bit better. i'm so happy i finally used some of my fabric stash! i'll enjoy it so much more now than i did while it languished on the shelf.

pinspiration process

a bit of the process on pinspiration no. 1 - the advantage of having an old, crappy house, cobbled together with string and tape, is that you don't mind writing on the wall, so i started by sketching out the letters for CREATE.

next, i used half a box of husband's little tiny nails and banged them into the wall. luckily it was some kind of gypsum/papiermache wall material and not a brick wall, so it was time-consuming, but relatively easy.

i held the nails in my mouth, which rather alarmed the child. and i did, myself, have several rather vivid visions of accidentally inhaling one or more of them and having to drive myself to the doctor.  i managed, despite a cold and stuffed-up nose, not to.

we raided the yarn stash (i let sabin pick the colors - rainbow, of course) and wove the yarn around the nails until we thought it looked right.

sabin wasn't very patient about it, she wanted to be done NOW, NOW, NOW and wanted to hear none of it, when i pointed out that it as also about enjoying the process. she wants results. fast results. oh, and in this shot, you can see pinspiration no. 2 - sabin's dotty nails! - inspired by this pin. i even made a little dotting tool by sticking a pin in an eraser.

we left long tails, not sure what we would do with them. i kind of liked them just hanging down, a bit like dripping paint, but sabin wanted them swept up to the side. i have to agree, it did look better.  and again, for reference, here's the pin that inspired our morning project.

we've got a little diffuser of clary sage going in the making room and sabin said, "mom, it smells just like your blue room." scent memory is a wonderful thing and clary sage definitely stimulates creativity. back later with today's products of pinspiration.

panic sets in (in a good way)

my very first market draws near. it will be on saturday and i'll have a table, together with jude & elizabeth at a spring market in sønderborg. the local fish shop guy had the idea last year and they hold four of them per year. it's a mix of food and handmade items and they want to have a focus on organic - i imagine the june and august markets will have more local food. but i imagine a lot of things about the market, because i've never been to it, nor have i ever participated as a seller myself.

sabin has selected a few of her stones to sell as well (tho' i have to sneak a few back out since i want them!)

it feels like i've been working towards it for forever and a day, but i suppose it's really only since january. i have quite a good stash of items built up, but there are lot of unfinished items as well, that aren't going to make it this time. i'm trying to be kind to myself about that. i have plenty - i have birds and stones, a couple of quilts, a tea cozy, a coffee cozy, some sweet little duvet covers for the baby duvets they use here in denmark (baby dyne, as they're called), garlands. lots of items.

a new helleristning viking ship - now i'm branching out a bit more from the originals.

my sewing machine broke down in earnest on the weekend and i was a bit panicked as i have a number of unfinished things for the market that need sewing. but i came up with an idea for some scarves made of jersey that won't need any sewing! i found beautiful, thin, soft jersey in soft spring colors and got out my gocco printer.

i drew up some feathers and burned two screens and got to work with the fabric inks. i've done plenty of gocco with paper in the past, but not much with fabric. i learned so much about how the ink behaves and how the screens behave. the hours melted away as i worked on the scarves. in a very good way. it was definitely a feeling of being completely in flow. and that's what it's all about, really.

i am absolutely delighted with how they turned out. again, an instance of something that's even better in reality than it was when the picture popped into my head. it's also an interesting exercise in how necessity does indeed breed invention. i was a bit panicked about my sewing machine and wasn't sure i'd get it back in time to finish the last items that i wanted to take to the market, but then this idea came to me (surely a product of hours of browsing goodness on blogs and online - but also my own) and i was able to do it without needing the machine.

better photos of the scarves once they're totally dry. i'm really excited how they turned out! and while i had the screens out, i did a little stack of moleskines with feathers for the market as well.

i have all day tomorrow to finish the items i can finish (i DID get my machine back - more on that later, as it's a story itself) and then i'm ready. i'm really ready. i have no idea whether anything will sell, but if it doesn't,  my etsy and big cartel shops will be well-stocked next week. and the process itself has been worth it.

daily art journal: march

this month, the details are on flickr, so click each picture below if you want to know more.

1. daily art journal for march, 2. march 1-2, 3. curiosity bird detail, 4. march 3-4, 5. march 5-6, 6. march 7-8, 7. march 9-10, 8. march 11-12, 9. march 13-14, 10. march 15-16, 11. march 17-18, 12. march 19-20, 13. march 21-22, 14. detail - march 22, 15. march 23-24, 16. march 25-26, 17. march 27-28, 18. march 29-30, 19. march 31, 20. daily art journal for march

i'll admit the project grew more difficult in march and i fell behind, sometimes by a week at a time. i could definitely feel the effects of house- and job-hunting this month. it ended up both good and bad. good in that i had room for more two-page spreads, which i felt gave me greater flexibility on some of the pieces and some of the thinking it helped me do. bad in that i didn't get the daily creative practice that i embarked on this project to have. but april is a another month and i'm back on track. well. almost anyway. but i blame husband because he said yesterday was only the 2nd and it was actually the 3rd.

recurring themes - maps and eyes continue to crop up again and again. i'm beginning to see that come out when i look back at previous months. in any case, it's an interesting project and i'm starting to see a glimmer of where it's taking me.

reflections on the february daily art journal

click on this mosaic to see the whole set on flickr.

here it is, my mosaic of all of the pages of my february art journal calendar. this is such an interesting process. here in february, i've been less religious about sitting down and doing a page every single day, so there are many which stretch across two pages, because i didn't do them until the second day, thereby giving myself more space. i'm finding that works a bit better for me.

here are the close-ups of the second half of february. the first half is here.

february 15 - doodlings on a heavily embroidered dress seen in jean-paul gaultier's haute couture show

february 16 - sketch of the inkle loom that we bought  for sabin to weave ribbon on at our beloved randbøldal museum.

 february 17 18 - experimenting with monoprinting

i scribbled a thick layer of pastels on an ordinary sheet of paper and then laid it against the page and drew on it. it was fun!

 february 19 - cutting up one of those free postcards

february 20 - more monoprinting, this time a spillover from the soujournal project

february 21 - 22 a doodle a bit inspired by these, seen on flickr,

but with my own motifs. 

this was the first time when i sat down with the calendar and didn't know what to do.

and i think that shows.

as you can see, the past few days, after elizabeth (aka my zen master) sent me a link to a wonderful artist named shannon rankin, i played with some maps and really found my groove. expect more map stuff in the near future. it was well-timed, because husband had just cut up a map to aid him in our property search and so i had some extra bits of map at my disposal. sometimes cutting into such things is hard for me, but since it had already been cut, i had no inhibitions.

february 23 - 24 thinking about redrawing maps

these are places that have been important to me.

but i shuffled them at will. that was liberating.

february 25 - 26  driving around, looking at 8 farm places had me spending a lot of time with maps over two days. i found myself wondering which road would lead to our new home.

february 27-28 - fragments of a topography

maps in general interest me - topographies and mapping and drawing and tracing the topography of a life. that's what we're going to do in moving, we're going to redraw our internal maps. i got a bit of a start on it here at the end of february.

i still don't have a clear idea where this project is taking me. but combined with the soujournal project, i'm doing a lot of art journaling this year and that seems like a good thing. in fact, it seems so good, i've been pondering ways of sharing it.

so i'm putting together an online art journaling course. at first it was only in my mind, but now it's spilled onto the page a bit and i've even begun to make up packets of pretty papers for it. i'm still at the planning stage, but i'd love to know if you'd be interested in taking an online art journaling course and coming to explore this medium with me? please email me with any ideas you have about this - what you'd like to do in such a course, how you'd like to interact with the other participants, thoughts on materials and the like.

and don't forget to check out my fabulous new orange coat below. it was totally worth breaking the year of not buying things. :-)