Evolution of Koi

When artists are juried into a show, one of the standard requirements is that the piece contain “the hand of the aritst,” or sometimes, more directly, “the fingerprints of the artist.” What juries are looking for is evidence that an artist has a personal viewpoint, an original take, a fresh viewpoint. That concept was one of the great lessons I learned in the collage class I took this weekend.

I started with a traditional Japanese koi painting, done by many artists:

From there I did the underpainting, trying to keep to the original shape. But already the chop, the red-square signature block was gone,  the image was rotated to make it horizontal, and the traditional poem was gone. The painting also gave the fish a lot more background.

In class, there were problems to solve. To keep the original background smooth and even, I’d have to apply a single sheet of paper over the board, re-apply the fish, then collage them on. While that’s a choice, it didn’t feel like collage to me. I wanted to show movement, ripples, even waves of active fish swimming.

While in Sedona, I visited a gallery that was having a showing of the instructor’s work, and noticed that in a collage she did of koi, there was a distinct splash of ripples.

After some thought I decided to move away from a monochromatic background, and create the entire setting as a field of ripples, in blues and whites and ivories.

Not only that, but when I was working, the instructor told me that the koi did not have to be orange and black, that a more impressionistic view was fine, even desirable. She suggested several different pieces of paper that worked well, but weren’t orange or black.

In the end, I decided that the original placement of fish–orange on top and the shadowy gray on the bottom, was what worked best. The image isn’t complete, but this is where I am now:

It’s not the traditional koi, it’s the constant movement of koi, creating a push and pull of color and action. As artists, we interpret the world in our own way, and when we talk about it to others, we show them what we see through our eyes via artwork–collage, writing, idea presentation.

This evolution of koi is personal, my vision. Several members of the class didn’t like it,(which is fine with me). That’s the point of art–it’s not really meant to please, or to match the sofa or drapes. It’s meant to show a view of the world through the artist’s eyes, and satisfy the artist in some way. If it pleases others, well, then, that’s a great bonus. Had I decided to create a piece that pleased the majority of the class, I would have pleased no one fully. Least of all myself. In creating a piece that delighted me, I can explain a viewpoint clearly. For me, that’s art.

--Quinn McDonald is a certified creativity coach working on creative projects.

Prompts for a Wabi-Sabi Journal

Wabi-Sabi is a Japanese aesthetic that values the time-worn, the aged, the imperfect. It is a philosophy and a way of accepting and giving up control. Bringing wabi-sabi into your life allows you to make room for daydreams, for accepting a simpler life and for valuing the riches already in your life.

Pollen dust form a leaf shape as it gathers in sprinkler run-off.

A wabi sabi journal is one filled with authentic you, the one that hungers for simplicity, nature, the organic flow of life. Here are a few quotes to help you open your mind to Wabi-Sabi. They make great journal prompts.

You are the person you are when no one is looking.

Anger is only one letter short of danger.

No one can give you abilities. For example, an Olympic athlete works with a trainer to develop her abilities, but the trainer only helps manifest what was inherent all along. Likewise, no one can give you happiness. At most, others simply help manifest the joy that was always within you.

Happiness does not mean ‘absence of problems.’ There has never been a life free from problems. It is not the presence of problems, but how we tackle them that determines the quality of our lives.

A yellow dividing line wears away on a bike trail.

Blind faith is no faith

One does not win by making others lose.

–All quotes from “Open Your Mind, Open Your Life.” edited by Taro Gold

–Image from Still in the Stream, a site reflecting on Wabi-Sabi in nature.

--Quinn McDonald teaches “Wabi-Sabi Art Journaling” and is presently updating the course. She’s thinking about making ink from ashes of burned hope.

Creative Prompt

Let’s try another creative prompt. Remember the doodle road pattern I posted a few weeks ago?

Raw art journaling in tar and road.

It was a photograph of how we repair roads in the summer–you can’t re-surface them, because the tar won’t harden. So we just drizzle tar on the cracks and wait till autumn, when it gets cooler at night.

This (2012) summer, in Washington, D.C. a plane couldn’t take off because the runway surface had softened in the heat, and the plane sunk into a pit caused by its own weight.

The cover up.

On my walk this morning, I saw the blinking light of a paving truck, out at 5:30a.m., re-surfacing the road. I watched the funny doodle-patterns get covered up. Seems that the doodle tar acts like glue to hold the surface in place.

Sunrise on a re-surfaced road

The question is–what are you hiding underneath your fresh, new surface? Specifically, what clever, interesting things are you hiding that were beautiful, but not practical. Or maybe there was something that just needed hiding.

This is a creativity prompt–not just for journalers, but for any way you would like to address it. Dance on your new creative feet. Sing your new joyous song. Sway to your new creative prayer. You (obviously) don’t have to talk about thoughts that are private, but if you feel moved to talk about what’s underneath that practical surface, let us know!

--Quinn McDonald is a creativity coach and a writer who keeps an art journal.

On the Studio Table

New supplies are always fun, but new supplies that are weird are also wonderful.

Here are two items on my studio table for upcoming projects that I’m not sure about yet. I’m sure I’ll use both of these items, but I haven’t done enough exploring yet.

Copper fabric

Copper fabric. I mentioned it a few days ago, when I wrote about Inventables. It feels like a highly-starched cotton. It is copper thread woven with cotton thread. It’s washable and has a coating so the copper won’t fade or tarnish. I have a huge urge to sew on it. It would make a great journal page, but I don’t want to write on it just yet. What would you do with this copper fabric?

soy silk

This is a soft fiber in great colors. (Yes, it comes in other colors). It’s faux-silk, which means it’s not silk. In fact, it’s a soy fiber, the by-product of tofu-making. (Let the jokes begin).

I’m going to experiment with this by separating the fibers into delicate strands and seeing if I can use a felting technique (good thing I read the books I review) to make a paper-like material. That should be fun.

What would you do with this soy-silk? With a bit of skill, you could knit with it.

–-Quinn McDonald loves the idea of not using materials in ways they were designed. She got in trouble for that in grade school, but that was then and this is now.

Knowing When It’s Enough

When are you done? When is the art complete? When do you quit? All good questions, and all with similar answers.

This weekend, I was working with ink on watercolor paper. It’s a new technique I’m puzzling out, and the most critical element is knowing when to stop working. It’s incredibly easy to overwork the ink, and once it’s overworked the piece simply looks like a clean-up towel.

Here’s the first step:

Which actually can be left alone. But I wanted to add another layer. The next step promptly overworked it.

So why didn’t I know that? Because I was willing to see what would happen if I tried another layer of ink. So the first reason you don’t quit is curiosity–seeing what will happen if you continue. When the urge to continue is  more interesting or compelling than the need to quit, you push on. If I had been perfectly satisfied with the results, I could have quit.

Another way to know you are finished is when the elements of design you had in mind are all in place. On this paper, I worked  in three stages. When working with ink pieces, it’s important to let one layer dry completely before the next one is started, or the ink will blur. Waiting allows time to make the decision to continue or decide the design is fine the way it is.

In the case of this piece, the black and gray sections were complete, but there was not enough contrast in the overall page. I added the yellow, which was interesting, but still not enough of a contrast. So I added the orange-red over the yellow, allowing both colors to show.

I knew I wasn’t done when the yellow didn’t achieve the purpose of contrast. I knew I was done when the branching edges completed a pleasing design. In other cases, you would continue when you cannot explain how your work is complete.

Ink on watercolor is a fairly tricky medium. You have to balance not being in control as well as controlling color choice and water amount. The medium doesn’t allow erasing, covering with gesso or not clicking “accept” and starting over, as you can with digital work in steps.

It was a mistake to add gold to this page. Not only was the choice in the yellow-green-gold color range, of which there was already too much,  but the eye can’t find a resting place, a catch with everything in one tone. The ink on the upper left looks like a three-legged blowfish sticking out its tongue. The lesson: knowing what you are doing and why. Here I knew why, but the what was a bad choice. Had I given the choice of shimmering ink more thought, I would have realized that I should have stopped after the background was still wet when I applied the second layer.

In this case, the shimmer worked far better.

It was right to choose the shimmer because there was a large, dark center that needed more definition. I left the lower right hand corner (which I love) alone, but did not expect it to carry the entire piece. Adding the shimmer ink gave the middle section texture and made both colors–the blue/gray and the violet, more visible. Knowing how strong (and how much space) the strongest part of a visual piece can carry is a way of knowing when the piece is complete.

These same decision-making questions work for other “should I quit?” questions, too. If one small and excellent part of a relationship can’t carry the rest of it, it may be time to add something to the relationship. But you have to know what and why.

Discovering that art answers are a bigger part of life is one of the reasons I do creative work. Because (you already know what’s coming) it makes meaning out of part of my life.

–-Quinn McDonald is a creativity coach who is exploring the relationship between ink, water and paper, along with the rest of her life.

Hidden Stories

Monsoon Papers hold endless fascination for me because I can’t control them. I think I am going to make a largely blue one, and then one corner, with a yellow flash, holds all the interest. I begin to think of the background of the page, and think of it like tea leaves–that the random patterns hold the story of the past and future.

The detail above looks to me like an exploding sun at the time of creation. It spins off a world into the shadowy ocean. People are born and live on that world, which is not of their choosing. Some thrive, others ache for what they don’t have on this undersea, mysterious world.

When I make them, my hands and arms are covered in ink that takes days to wear off. I don’t get tired of looking at the accidental details in the papers. In this one the sun is back and the gold shows the track of the sun as it crosses the sky in a different path through the seasons. The years behind the gold tracks layer into the colors. There is history on this page.

This looks like an ancient map, on ancient papers, with shadows hiding the parts of the past we want to forget.

My biggest delight today is that I discovered how to make Monsoon Papers in a room with one sink. Without a hose and with rich, deep colors. That means that I have inks, will travel. I no longer need good weather and outdoor space to make Monsoon Papers. And best of all, these new ones also tell me stories about places I’ve never seen.

--Quinn McDonald is a writer and artist who works at the intersection of stories and color. She teaches what she knows.

Spring is Busting Out in Phoenix

Say “Spring” in Phoenix and half the U.S. imagines blooming cactus. That’s it. Areas of the desert that have enough rain sprout Mexican Poppies.

Mexican poppies, see them at http://bestelpaso.com/2010/03/21/spring-forward/

My joy is seeing plants that come into Spring with a metaphor. Here’s what I mean:

Isn’t this the happiest blossom you’ve ever seen? Just bursting with energy. And yes, this delicate bloom is native to the Sonoran Desert.

Palo Verdes grow fast, so they are often trimmed hard in the fall. Palo Verdes have tiny leaves, and in the heat, they drop off. The tree had adapted with green branches and a green trunk–photosynthesis is not left to fickle leaves.

This pair is raising its arms to the sun, shaking fists at the sky that will fry those branches by late May.

Aloes are not indoor windowsill plants here. I have them as border plants. In late January, they send up straight spikes and in February the spikes bloom.

This spike got bent, but the blossom knows which way is up. I love this determination to find the sun.

The fig tree is deciduous—it looses its big, fuzzy leaves in November, and in March, the new leaves unfurl, one by one. The fig tree is about three weeks early this year.

I love watching the leaves peek out and then pop, as big as your hand, in a few weeks. I’m grateful for the shade in the summer, and more grateful for the figs that we eat in June.

–Quinn McDonald is a naturalist who never knew how much greenery thrives in the Sonoran Desert.

Building on the Past

Almost no one I talk to had a happy childhood. We mourn our past as the present trickles by. We want to live it over, do it better, get the mom or dad we really needed.

We can't re-write the past.

What we are doing, of course, is using our adult selves to direct what we should have had as kids. What would happen if you asked yourself, “What would I be today if I had the childhood I so badly needed?” Maybe you did have the childhood you needed then to become the person you are today.  You are you because of your past. You learned lessons you could not have learned had you had that ideal childhood. What did you learn? Maybe it was patience, self-discipline, discernment, independence, self-reliance, or determination. Maybe you learned how to survive. Not a bad skill.

When we treat our past like a swamp, we stoke it until it takes over our present, eating at us, whining at us to blame everyone who didn’t reach out. No doubt they should have, but they didn’t. And tomorrow, they still didn’t. And meanwhile, you are missing out on today’s life.

As we go through the days, mourning our past, we rip each day off the calendar and trample it beneath our feet. The calendar hanging on the wall gets thinner and thinner, as our days get fewer. We still grind each day beneath our feet, treading it into the past that does not change.

What if we handled that calendar page differently? What if we wrote on it–across the big numbers, around the margins, filling it with what we accomplished, how we moved forward, how we celebrate our skills? Then take the calendar page and tuck it back into the end of the calendar.

As the days run on, instead of the proof of loss under your feet, you have a record of what you have created, what you have made. The calender is a bit wobbly with all those loose pages, but it stays full and stuffed with facts, growth, with reminders of how far we have come.

We cannot change the past, but we can change how we see it. We can use it as rich ground to grow our future. Our lives can be the journals that track our steady movement ahead. To become the people we always wanted to be.

–Quinn McDonald is a journaler of  life. She did not have a happy childhood, but she is having a hell of a time now. She’s the author of Raw Art Journaling, Making Meaning, Making Art.

Ideas: Set Free Into the Wild

“Set your ideas into the wild.” It was just a sentence fragment I read on a blog today, but now, hours later, it still resonates. What a wonderful image–taking your ideas and setting them free against an autumn sky, to soar away.

The memory of fireflies, Ink on paper. © Quinn McDonald

You lose control over them, but you never really were in control of your ideas. You just kept them, like fireflies in a jar,  until you had filled your eyes with wonder, and then you let them go, because they weren’t really yours to begin with.  But you never forgot the glow in the dark and the churn of comfort and power you got from opening that jar and having the fireflies crawl to the rim, lift their wings and blink up into the grassy-smelling dark of night.

Our ideas are ours to nourish, marvel over, and set free into the wild. You write a book, you teach a class and your ideas float across space and time, to be caught, transformed and set free again, in different shapes and textures. You may not even recognize it when it comes back, but as it passes you on the street, dressed in a suit and formal with design, you’ll smell a hint of summer grass and catch a slight wink of light, and the memory will still be there.

The experience of recognition, the experience of power and joy, that makes setting free your ideas all the more worthwhile.

–Quinn McDonald has a jar of ideas on her desk. She remembers it once held fireflies.

Heart in the Mail

The low-fire clay is called "Storyteller."

Someone sent me a heart in the mail. A clay heart. Heavy for its size (we have that in common), beautifully glazed. It looks like a pastry. When I unwrapped it, it made me smile immediately. Then I did what I do with all such heart-touching objects–I rubbed it with my fingers and palm. It was very satisfying.

I can’t identify the artist because she is a coaching client of mine, and I promise them anonymity. She’s an artist who works in several media, but this heart made me think she was working in the right area when she made this out of a clay called “Storyteller.”

Now, I have to admit I don’t like hearts as representative icons. They have been

The back of heart with the saving pierce. Or maybe it's the front.

over-sentimentalized, overused, made twee and kitschy by relentless use as a symbol of wedding-cake-topper sticky-sweet love. Ugh. But this one wasn’t that. This one was a tough little heart in pastel colors. It looked sweet but was hard.

I rolled it over. On the back was an inscribed spiral and a hole. The artist had sent a note that said, “I had to put a hole in the heart or it would explode in the kiln. Remember to breathe when in the creative fire.” Perfect. That is what every heart must endure–to be pierced and bruised, marked and damaged and healed to work effectively.  Now that’s a heart that even I can love.

Heart on a spike in my studio. Just as a reminder that every artist heart is always exposed.

It came into the studio with me. The hole in the heart had been made by a pointy object of some sort, so I grabbed a skewer (I use them to write and hold papers together) and slipped it into the fire-hole of the heart. It balanced. Just like creative people–we put our hearts on spikes and show them to people, willing to be accepted or rejected, loved or hated. Being creative means risking it all.

What a perfect lesson. What a perfect gift. I think I might make room for a heart in my life. At least one that won’t explode in a kiln.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach. She’s beginning to notice hearts around her, now.