Saturday Creative Love

No-fat potato chip.

Creativity can come in many styles, including cooking. Potato chips are not on any of my menus anymore, until Cooking Man made me some. He sliced washed, raw potatoes on a mandolin, soaked them in cold water, spread them on a paper towel, and cooked them in the microwave. Presto, amazing potato chips! No fat, low calorie and even low carb, as long as I don’t eat a bag full. He got the recipe from another blog, and am I glad! Here is an extra:  low-carb, gluten-free chewy almond bars. I’ve made them twice and they are delish!

Joshua Katz noticed that even though we have cable TV and hear each others languages, we in the U.S. still have different words for the same thing and different pronunciations. So he made 22 maps for different words pronounced different ways. They are fascinating to look at, particularly if you feel strongly about how the word “caramel” is pronounced.

Paddi McDonnell did an article on typographic art. I love typographic art–the subtlety, the cleverness. The portraits (scroll down on the link) are really well done.

BrussPup’s  YouTube channel is a mix of art and sound. He sprinkles sand onto a metal plate and connects it to a speaker that plays various frequencies. The sand vibrates and moves to areas of no frequency (so no shaking) and fascinating patterns are formed.

Mircea Popescu does linocuts. That’s sort of like saying that Bach wrote some music. Her linocuts are so complicated, it is difficult to imagine how she does them, and how she keeps track of the layers. Or the lines.

Have a creative weekend!

–Quinn McDonald is chief curiosity officer of QuinnCreative.

The Objective Correlative

That headline alone will cause me to lose half my readers. Still, I press on.

Wheat Field taken by Angel Villalba

Every artist and writer has been asked, “What does this [poem, story, artwork] mean? What were you thinking when you created it?” Often, the artist struggles through an awkward self-revelatory answer that disappoints the listener, who had a private idea that wasn’t honored.

It is the moment for the Objective Correlative. It’s a term that serves as a measure of success of a creative work. A work that has an objective correlative allows each viewer (or reader) to become a participant in the art. Each person brings a private vision of understanding to artwork.  The viewer applies the metaphors to his or her own life, and it makes sense. Each person brings a personal vision, and although there are many personal visions, each one works with the meaning of the art.

Hmm, not clear enough. Let’s use an example. Laura Crozier is a Canadian poet. In her book, Inventing the Hawk, she has a series of poems on angels. One of them, “The Motionless Angel” (on p.54) is about a horse standing  motionless in a snowstorm. He becomes white on the side facing the snow and remains black on the other; the dark is so intense that

” . . .anything could walk
right through it
and disappear. “

One person reading those lines will remember the skin-searing winters of their childhood. Another person will remember a relationship with a person who owned a horse and who loved the horse more than the person. A third person will remember a relationship which ended after a midnight walk during which her companion said something that made her feel invisible. Each one of those people is experiencing the objective correlative. And if the poem is well written, it will support all of the different ideas all the way through.

What the writer meant is not nearly as important as what the reader can understand. That’s the great gift of the Objective Correlative. The term was invented by T. S. Eliot, who wrote The Wasteland.  I simplified Eliot’s explanation, and I hope he forgives me.

If you share your art, and someone asks “what did you meant by that line?” or “Why did you take this photo this way?” you can smile and ask what it means to the viewer. It’s the opening to a far more interesting conversation than trying to explain yourself.

Here’s a wonderful poem from Laura Crozier:

The Dead Angels

The angels lie down
in he field. That delicate
rustling is not the wind
playing the thin pipes of wheat,
but the angels’ feathers,
their dead wings.

You can’t see them, but listen
when you check your crops,
the wheat so golden
it seems to float above the ground.

What a beautiful
sad sound they make,
all those feathers
remembering the wind.

–Quinn McDonald is discovering the love of poetry all over again.

Saturday Dip in Creativity

It’s Saturday, so it’s time for a skip through the interwebs, looking for creative ideas and projects. The Wellcome Collection describes itself as: “Wellcome Collection is a free visitor destination for the incurably curious, exploring the connections between medicine, life and art in the past, present and future. “ Sounds good. I was intrigued by an exhibition called Souzou: Outsider Art from Japan, which talks about identity and the relationship between names and letters.

Rome Rooftops by Isaac Tobin. Details below.

There are many other areas on the site that I haven’t checked out yet, including High Tea, a game you can play on line, in which you try to make money in the teas and drug trade, 10 years before the Opium Wars. Before you wrinkle your nose, there are related articles including one which considers whether or not drug use is a sin, a crime, a vice,  or a a disease.

The Color Of is an app that shows you the color of abstract ideas. It does it by going to Instagram, grabbing photos that mentions the word, then creating an abstract by overlapping the images. Interesting.

The Graphics Fairy publishes hundreds of copyright-free images that you can use on cards or stationery. Sort of online ephemera, printable.

Nerhol is a two-artist collective who uses photography in unusual ways. In this series, subjects were asked to sit still for three minutes, while a camera clicked away, taking a series of photos. The photos were then layered and cut to show the subtle movement and facial changes of the “sitting still” subjects.

Isaac Tobin designs typefaces and works for Chicago University Press designing book covers. But the work of his I love are his minimalist collages. That’s one of them up there, but there are many more, some of them so spare, so not “layers on layers” we are used to loving now, that they are refreshing.

It’s the weekend! Enjoy your own creativity.

—Quinn McDonald is working on a collage of her own. It’s done with letters and numbers. Again.

Mind Over Chatter: On the Road to Minneapolis

Minneapolis has an incredible resource called the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. It teaches book structure, printing, marbling, and other book arts skills. And best of all, I’ll be there on the weekend of May 18 and 19, teaching Mind Over Chatter: Confronting Your Inner Critic Through Deep Writing and Mixed Media Journaling.  There is also a round-table discussion on Inner Critics on May 17 (Friday) evening.

Loose leaf journal page: gilded, dried leaves, double-exposure film photograph, on painted and stained watercolor paper.

What will the participants do in two days? Deep writing and art journaling–a combination I love teaching because of the incredible results that come from giving yourself time to write what you feel.

Art journaling is often more about art and less about journaling. But deep writing as an intuitive and creative tool transforms your art journals into rich explorations instead of a collection of completed pages. Come explore and experiment with both writing and art techniques and then combine both on loose leaf journal pages. Students will make “Monsoon Papers” — a surface design technique that requires giving up control with astonishing results — and a folio for completed pages.

There will be a good deal of experimentation, and because the pages are loose-leaf, they can be re-worked and then selected and sequenced in various orders with different results.

Folder for loose-leaf journal pages. Monsoon papers, stitched.

I don’t teach often in the Midwest, and I’m already looking forward to meeting book contributor T.J. Goerlitz, whose enthusiasm for the Center made the connection for me. What a find! (Both TJ and the Book Arts Center).

You can register on this page, scroll down as the workshops are listed by date, and May 18-19 is closer to the bottom than the top.

There is early-bird pricing and joining the Center will give you a break in the price as well.

I’m so excited about this class.Deep writing, Monsoon Papers and loose-leaf journal pages all in two days–explore your journey, art journaling, and discover yourself in deep writing. I hope to see you in May in Minneapolis!

–Quinn McDonald will be doing a lot of traveling starting in May. There will be more announcements as the workshops develop.

Authority Neurosis

This weekend, I was talking to someone for whom I have great understanding–someone with an bit of an attitude about authority. Maybe even an authority neurosis. Someone who doesn’t like being told what to do or how to do it. I know this feeling. What we hate in others is what we hate in ourselves. What we admire in others are our own good qualities. And that gives us a hinge to authority troubles.

Authority figures show us our own unclaimed power. The part of us that didn’t make it to the top of the heap, the part of us that, our Inner Critic tells us, just doesn’t quite cut it. And we become angry at those  in leadership who are not as bright, talented, disciplined as we are, but who made it to the top anyway. They got discovered. They had mentors.  And since they don’t deserve respect, we don’t give respect. And that’s where thinking trips over its own shoelaces.

No one is going to come up and ask to mentor you. No one is waiting to hand you the Crown of Retribution and congratulate you for your leadership. See that cape on the ironing board? The magic is not in the cape. It’s in the story you tell yourself about the cape.

Some people believe what authority figures tell them to believe. A few more believe what their friends tell them. But everyone believes their own story—the one they tell themselves. And once you believe it, you tell it to others and they believe your story, too. The one where you never got the breaks. About being overlooked and under-appreciated. And then others don’t give you breaks, overlook you and under-appreciate you. Because you told them to.

Tell yourself that cape is yours,. Then iron it and put it on. It’s time for you to step up and re-claim the powerful bits of yourself you storied away, hoping people would disagree with you.  Being a leader doesn’t mean being given power. It means working with people who believe in you.

Be the person people can believe in, and you’ll have your power. If you believe in it yourself.

—Quinn McDonald is a believer. In herself and in others.

Images from: A Pretty Cool Life.com

Saturday Creative Round-Up

Cooking Man and I have started to make our own yogurt. It’s way easy, a yogurt maker is cheap, and the resulting yogurt is exactly what you want. We add vanilla, lemon or orange zest (from our own trees!) or nutmeg. There are eight cups, so we can get a variety of flavors. It’s about half the cost of store-bought yogurt, and carb-friendly and tasty. Proving once more that mixed-media can include the art of cooking and the joy of eating.

Urban Sketchers are on Spring Break, but still posting, and I love to see their page layouts and sketches.

Diane Becka takes a photo a day, and this one, about creating natural art with what you find while you are out on a walk, is both inspiring and satisfying. The post on creation and destruction both puzzled me and didn’t surprise me. But the boy’s action does make you think about what you would have done in the same circumstances–as an onlooker, as a parent.

I’m a fan of Buddhist Boot Camp, because of the incongruous name as well as the inspiration that works for me. Here’s one I liked this week: “Find something worth dying for, then live for it!” And no, I’m still not religious. So I love this quote from the site: “As the Dalai Lama says, ‘Don’t try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.’”  When people ask me about religion, sometimes I say, “I’m Buddish”

It took me a long time to start sketching. Because, you know, I was chicken. (Image: ink on watercolor paper, inked papers. © Quinn McDonald, all rights reserved, 2012.

I’ve narrowed down my art choices so I can get better at fewer things. I’ve chosen pen and ink sketching (OK, and hand lettering, using the same pen nibs) and collage (which includes found poetry.) See how it gets out of hand quickly? But if you are a pen and ink sketcher, here’s a good site for choosing nibs for your art.

Today is the deadline  to get the download on stenciling tips from Glenda Waterworth’s site, Chocolate Baroque. The offer ends on March 17, 2013. Get the code and link to her site here.

Yesterday, I spent the day re-vamping the way I make Monsoon Papers. I’d wanted to get richer colors faster, and decided that I liked to have the front and back look different. The same color family, but different looks. I spent an entire day doing it, and of course, the Inner Critic showed up to comment and tell me how I was wasting time. But it turns out, he was wrong. I got some great results, was smart enough to take notes. Which means I can teach it. And I will be teaching it in Mid-May in Minneapolis. The link isn’t up yet, but as soon as it is, I’ll give you more details. But meanwhile, save the date for May 18-19, 2013. (There’s more to the class than Monsoon Papers, but all that information will be up in about 10 days or so.)

Having updated the technique, I’ll also be teaching the new technique at the five-day  art and writinf retreat at Madeline Island this July 22 to 26, 2013. (Wonder why I keep adding the year? Because I’ve had people try to register for classes I taught four years ago. Once you’ve got more than 1,600 blog posts, it can be hard to demand people check the dates of the post.)

That’s it for the weekend! See you on Monday!

--Quinn McDonald is a creativity coach, writer, and artist who is creating new classes combining all three and having an excellent time doing it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Perfect Journal

After making the technique samples of loose-leaf journal pages, I knew the perfectionists in the class would want to walk away with a bound journal. After all, the class was Journaling for Perfectionists. I came up with an idea for binding individual pages into a book, but then I was stumped for what to put on the cover.

It came to me, as most good ideas do, while I was out for a walk. Using rubber stamps, I wrote “Perfection” in a badly-spaced rubber-stamp script, cut the paper slightly at an angle and used it on the cover of the book. I find it perfect for a class on perfectionism.

The pages are held together with tape, in this case, a paper tape that allows me to vary the amount of space between pages so the signatures line up.

The next book will use the tape only as positioning piece. I’m going to sew strips of grosgrain ribbon over it to create a more permanent and attractive way of holding the pages together.

The book contains several poems I love, both popular and not well known. In this one, by Lorna Crozier, from her book Inventing the Hawk, I created one page that looked like snow drifting from the sky on one side,

and a page of bright winter colors with tissue paper snow on the other.

Here’s the poem:

The Angel of Numbers

In heaven the season for mathematics
is Winter. Chalk falls from the blackboard,
covers the earth.
The angel who invented arithmetic is trying
to get rid of zeros.
She erases and erases the boards
Then starts again

Assigning to the numbers already in the air
Their own lost stars to live on,
their own dark infinity
to name.

* * *

—Quinn McDonald is creating a course on writing poetry. The research is deeply satisfying.

 

The rest of the book:

 

 

 

 

 

The center spread:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And the inside back cover:

Go Back to Possibility

Note: The winner of the Featuring magazine #3 is Sandy Ward. Congratulations, Sandy! The three people who want to buy the magazine have also been notified. Thanks to everyone for participating and loving Featuring magazine!
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For my visual readers: Thanks to Pete, here is the visual treat for the day: Peter Callesan is a paper artist who cuts images out of paper and uses both the positive and negative space. CreativeGreed has a series of his work. You can also see different sculptures at Peter Callesan’s website.

His sense of humor combined with his talent turns ordinary  A4 sheets of paper into clever art.

For seekers: We all know the commentors on this blog are smart, sharp and verbal. So are my coaching clients. Last week, one of my clients was talking about changing her approach to creativity. She’s done some wrestling with her Inner Critic over the past few weeks. “I want to get back to possibility,” she said.

And just like that, I knew it was a brilliant. We wake up in the morning and start thinking what we are not and what we don’t have–”I’m still tired, I didn’t get enough sleep,” or “I’m late,” or “I don’t have time for breakfast,” or  “It’s not Friday, and I hate work.” Imagine if we woke up and got back to possibility.

“It’s a new day, and I wonder what will happen today?” or “If I don’t check my email, I can get to work on time and avoid the stink eye. That would be nice!” The place of possibility is right under the wet blanket we toss on the smouldering resentment of our lives. You don’t have to fear the place of possibility–it doesn’t obligate you. It just has. . . a fresh possibility.

--Quinn McDonald thinks possibility is almost as good as a cappuccino first thing in the morning.

The Simple Joy of Reading

What I wrote: We were the only family in town with a library in the house. When the carpenter put up all the shelves in the combination dining room/library/office for my Dad, he asked, “You opening up a grocery story or what?” When we told him it was for the books, he grunted and said, “Past the Bible and the Sears catalog, don’t have much use for them myself.”

The room was soon filled with books, top to bottom. I learned to read early, and

Reductive art: graphite, eraser on pastel paper. © Quinn McDonald. All rights reserved.

after I mastered the comics in the newspaper, and the Betsey McCall section of my mother’s McCall’s magazine, I began to read National Geographic.

One day, I considered all the books in our library and asked my father if I could read one. (It wold not have occurred to me to simply take a book without asking. Different times, very different upbringing.) My father told me, kindly, that I wouldn’t understand them.

“Why not?” I asked. “I can read English.”
My father smiled and handed me a physics book. “Read this, then,” he said.
I worked through the introduction, getting the words right, but with no idea about the ideas in the book. At 5 years, physics isn’t a familiar concept.

I remember the mix of awe, anger and concern that I could not grasp the material. It was English. I knew how to read English. Why couldn’t I understand this English?

Slowly I came to understand the difference between reading and comprehension; between seeing and knowing. The complex relationship between seeing words and understanding concepts came slowly to me, but I began to read more, eager for the ability to link words to concepts.

There are still many books I don’t understand, and many I don’t try to understand, but the joy and mystery of reading can fill me with a joy that few other things can reach. I hope the love of reading doesn’t fade away, replaced by electronic pastimes. Reading was my comfort, excitement and cure for loneliness. It still is.

What is your first memory of reading?

–Quinn McDonald is pretty sure that people who are good writers also love to read.

Cheesecloth Journaling

The yogurt maker in my kitchen is new. I eat a lot of yogurt, and thought it might be fun to make it myself. So far I’ve made it flavored with orange and lemon zest from our trees, vanilla, nutmeg, and cinnamon. All without any sugar and no added artificial sweetener. The problem (for me, your results may vary) is that if I taste anything sweet, even sweetened with “safe” artificial sweeteners,  I crave sugar. So, the best way for me to avoid sugar is not to eat any. It’s hard, but necessary.

I like the scented yogurts. I add crushed nuts to the nutmeg scented and blueberries to the lemon flavored. But what I love most of all is turning four of the small containers out into a cheesecloth-lined sieve and waiting. In about three hours, I have a sieve full of Greek yogurt.

So why is this called Cheesecloth journaling? Because I have noticed that not all cheesecloth is the same. There is woven and there is knit. And cheesecloth is versatile and excellent for using on journal pages.

The woven cheesecloth looks great on black paper. The stark graphic design allows for busy edges. The cheesecloth on the card is completely flat, held down with matte medium. It looks dimensional, though.

Recently, I’ve lost my heart to knit cheesecloth. It looks like cheesecloth, but it comes in a long tube, and when you dye it, you notice it has stripes. Ink makes a useful dye, so I used it to color up this piece.

Can’t show you what I did with it, not yet. But it goes with one of my inner heroes. And it really transforms a page. You can sew over it to attach it to a page, you can layer the dyed over the white, and you can add random threads over the whole thing. It’s incredibly inexpensive, and it is versatile on the page as in the kitchen.

Meanwhile, I’ve switched to straining the yogurt through a coffee filter, so I can play with more of the cheesecloth. I’ve got priorities, after all.

–-Quinn McDonald is a writer and devotee of homemade yogurt. She wrote 3,000 words today and doesn’t know any more for now.