Saturday Surprises

The winners of the free creativity coaching have been notified. Because of my confidentiality rules, the names won’t appear here. Thanks to all of you for participating!

Skywhale, being inflated.

What’s new for Saturday? For a whole new way of thinking about creativity, visit Patricia Piccinini’s site, and read about her amazing hot-air balloon sculpture. Part pre-historic fish, part breast, it was commissioned for a Canberra Centennial. The photos are amazing, beautiful and funny. Of course, I think flying breasts are funny.

Geraldo Feldstein is an absurd super-realist whose work is both familiar and reminiscent of outsider art. His installation work is startling and humorous, and his paintings are spare but rich in color.

Yep, a record. Of wood.

Amanda Ghassael combines science and art. In this project, she laser cuts a record. It’s entirely playable, but instead of vinyl, it’s made of wood. She also has one of paper.

The world of creativity is large and interesting and not always about painting or mixed media. Enjoy the weekend and  wherever your creative explorations take you!

—Quinn McDonald is looking through books for a project. Uh-oh.

 

 

A Million Views–and a Giveaway

Photo: Lickthebowlgood.com

Yes, it’s happened. My blog passed a million views yesterday. That number sounds amazing to me. Oh, I know that the blog is six years old, and a million views isn’t record-breaking. Not the point. For me, it means that people keep coming back, looking at older pages, waiting for new pages. A million views.

It makes me happy and grateful that people have found me, stuck around, left and come back, and posted insightful, interesting comments.

So it’s time to celebrate! I’m giving away two, one-hour creativity coaching sessions. If I receive more than 60 comments, I’ll do one free coaching for every 30 comments left, and choose the winners from among the first, the middle and the last groups of comments.

Photo by Lynn Viehl

The coaching is not a demos. Real-life, get-down-to-the-issues creativity coaching session. Want to tackle your inner critic? Good idea. How about choosing your next project and starting it? Or taking a look at your perfectionism? It’s your choice. It’s a one-hour session, either by phone or Skype, and it is my gift to you. No charge, no sales pitch, just coaching.

If you’ve ever wanted to experience creativity coaching, this is your chance. You will experience the feeling of support and possibility, perhaps even a moment of clarity and a breakthrough. It depends on what you bring into the session, and I am excited to have the experience of free-form coaching again.

Here’s the small print: We’ll choose a time that works for both of us. You will initiate the call. If we use Skype, it will be computer to computer and without video. International entries are encouraged, if you have a computer and a Skype account (which is free).

Thanks so much for continuing to read my blog and celebrate with me!

Note: The winners of the free coaching have been notified. My privacy policy keeps me from disclosing their names, like I usually do with winners.

--Quinn McDonald is thinking, “A million views. Wow.”

Photo credit: Cake:  Lickthebowlgood.com Spring challenge.
Sparkler: Lynn Viehl, photographer.

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.

Saturday Creative Stroll

Serena Barton has a just-released book on one of my favorite topics: wabi sabi. The Japanese esthetic honors the worn, the old and the weathered. Her book is on making art that honors wabi-sabi. It just arrived in my mailbox, so I have just glanced at it, but I’m already happy I ordered it.

You’ll find a nice selection of her art on her site, including some collages, encaustics and mixed media pieces.

Elizabeth LeCourt lives and works in London, creating quirky illustrations and some interesting fashions. After a fashion. She constructs dresses out of antique maps, and that’s always fascinating to look at. And wonder about.

One of Daniel Barreto’s houses embedded in a tree.

If you like small houses, you will fall in love with the art of 21 year old Boston, MA based illustrator Daniel Barreto. His houses are carved into hidden  trees deep in the woods. Their windows, glowing with light in the snowy forest night is mysterious and haunting.

If I thought I had trouble ginning myself up for a head shot, Wes Naman must have scared his subjects out of their wits. Naman is a photographer, and for this series on faces, he wrapped his subjects in Scotch tape, wildly distorting their faces before he grabbed the camera. It looks like collage of plastic surgery gone wrong, but it’s compelling. OK, just a teensy bit creepy, too. Art’s job is to upset the apple cart, not re-arrange the fruit plate.

Hong Yi works in . . . coffee. She does  detailed, realistic portraits in coffee stains. Prefer tea? No worries, she does those, too. Her name, Hong, sounds like the word Red in Mandarin, so her website is called Red. From her website: “Red is a Malaysian artist-architect.  She also loves how a colour can stir up conflicting emotions – one of love and passion, and of danger and sacrifice.” She has a big variety of art on her website.

Have a creative weekend!

–Quinn McDonald is at the Women’s Expo in Phoenix this weekend, demoing art projects for Arizona Art Supply.

No Safety Guarantees

After the police arrested the Marathon Bomber in Boston, one of the students interviewed said, “Now we can go back to our life. We don’t have to be scared anymore. There is nothing to fear.” He’s so very wrong. The idea that two bombers caught make the problem go away is a false one. And every time a terrorist attack occurs, we (understandably) want it to be over so we can have our lives back. Go back to what we were doing before we had to think about dying. But that isn’t real, and our lives have changed forever already. There is no going back. There is no closure. People died. People had their legs blown off.

And still, there is a huge difference between living IN fear and living WITH fear. When we live with fear, we understand the world around us is unsteady and not in our control. We promote kindness, compassion and understanding because that is what we can do at the individual level. We understand that death is not within our control, and that someday we, our family and friends will die–maybe of old age, maybe of disease, maybe because a terrorist bomb found us.

Fear, from beaconblog.com

When we live in fear, we become suspicious, angry and controlling. We trade essential freedoms for the hope of safety, and wind up with missing freedoms and no guarantee of safety.  We refuse to think about death as anything except a cruel cheat, and something that happens to others. And we lose our creativity.

Fear is the big scourge of creativity. Fear robs us of flexibility, agility, choices, and the glory of uncertainty. When we live in fear, uncertainty is the enemy (along with almost everything else.) Instead of spending time in creative thinking, we spend time in isolation, developing rationalizations for “them” and “us” thinking. Anything different, unusual, or non-conforming is suspicious, maybe even dangerous.

The very root of creativity is in different, risky, and strange. There are many countries whose citizens have had to adapt to war–Somalia, the Sudan, Mali, Palestine, Israel, Pakistan, Afghanistan–all have innocent citizens whose lives are directed by war they don’t want, and don’t agree with. But yet, there they are, in the middle of a war, still trying to feed the family and provide a normal life for their children.

Creativity is both exciting and calming, involved in giving up and expanding anew. But let fear in the studio, and it vanishes. Fear makes you small. It takes courage to be creative. But it’s worth it.

—Quinn McDonald’s mother was lost to fear. She doesn’t want to follow in those footsteps.

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

Creativty, Originality, and Good Manners

If you do any creative work, you know that you will have a brilliant idea, fall in love with the idea, polish it, then release it to public view. As soon as you do that, you will see the same idea all over. You get angry. Who stole your idea? The answer is–nobody. There are several reasons this happens.

Parallel Universe from May 8, 2012 edition of the NY Times eXaminer. No photo credit is given.

1. Heightened awareness. Once you begin to concentrate on an idea, and certain words, phrases, images begin to repeat in your head. Your heightened awareness makes you see those words “more often,” when you are really simply more aware of seeing them. This happens when you learn a new word–you suddenly see it three times in a day when you don’t recall seeing it before. This is the same reason that gratitude journals work, but that’s another blog post.

2. Mysterious parallel universes. OK, I made that up. If you were to ask a Russian who invented the telephone it’s unlikely they would credit Alexander Graham Bell. They would mention a Russian who invented the device roughly at the same time. Simultaneous invention, writing, advertising ideas do happen. Regularly. And has happened for years. Now, with the increasing speed of knowledge shared through the internet, more people come up with similar ideas more often.

From SquawkFox.com

3. Your grass seed, my lawn. When we talk about our ideas to a friend, the friend often takes the next step with the idea. You talk about creating a journal page using a dictionary page, and suddenly your friend is teaching a class on altering dictionaries. And that’s when things get sticky.

This is the hard part. I know exactly how hard it is, because I just had to go through it. One of my favorite techniques (and the basis for the upcoming book) turned up on another site. Yes, I was angry. Yes, I felt cheated. But I also know that ideas can’t be copyrighted, and that my idea doesn’t belong to me exclusively. What to do? Well, break that list into legal, ethical and generous steps.

Legally, I notified my publisher, so if any of the images I shared or the journal prompts I created and shared appear on another website, the publisher can handle the copyright violation.

Ethically, if my idea is similar to another artists, I have to follow the rules The Ethics Guy uses to judge actions as ethical. (Bruce Weinstein, Ph.D. is the Ethic Guy). This isn’t that complicated:

• Do no harm
• Make things better
• Be respectful
• Be fair
• Be compassionate

But the items may be hugely difficult to manage. If someone treats you unfairly, you don’t want to treat them (or anyone else) fairly. But you have to. The entire reason the world doesn’t collapse into savaging each other is that most of us want to be fair and even generous.

How do we act fairly and generously? We give credit. It doesn’t detract from our work, it adds to it. Giving other people credit for helping you get to your own idea is a wonderful way to increase your creativity and your peace of mind.

Saying thank you on your blog, in your classes, in your articles, even giving up some of those precious 140 characters in a Tweet to thank someone, is a gift to yourself.

Thanking and crediting others relieves you of guilt, makes you feel generous, expands your creativity. And I’d like to thank my editor, Tonia Jenny, for helping me come to that conclusion.

–-Quinn McDonald keeps a gratitude journal and another one for ideas on change. Sometimes she writes one idea in another, and then alchemy happens.

Feathers and Paint

Carmelo Rivas works in a dry climate. The charms of wallpaper are not a good choice in that climate. The wallpaper paste dries out and the paper shrinks and sheds off walls.

Carmelo wanted a wallpaper effect on a stucco wall, but wasn’t sure how to achieve it. This was 1994, so Google wasn’t a first choice. Or any choice at all. Carmelo began to talk to people who did renovations and discovered that some people were creating decorative finishes with ostrich feathers. He loved the effect and taught himself how to use a big, curving feather to create an effect that looks a lot like Japanese Unryu paper with grass inclusions.

Over the last 20 years, Carmelo has perfected the technique and gone through a lot of ostrich feathers. The paint can’t soak through the feather, and the finish has to be done with a gentle touch. In order to make the finish look like wallpaper, the pattern has to be evenly spaced, have the same paint distribution and use a blend of colors, and sometimes a glaze.

When I saw Carmelo’s work, I had a lot of questions about techniques. He hasn’t ever been interviewed before, and my questions sounded as if I were trying to pry his secrets out of him. I backed off and just enjoyed the papers.

And here’s a blue wall with cream feathering.

Because I took the photos inside, under fluorescent lights, there was some color distortion, which wasn’t on the wallboard I was holding.

The two more were so subtle that they photograph poorly. Carmelo judges the light in a room and the colors that are outside, but visible from the room and those inside the room before he paints. Sometimes he chooses four of five colors, but the final effect is so well blended that it’s hard to pick out the different colors.

I have a great appreciation for people who choose a creative outlet that inspires them and spend years improving it. If others laugh at them or tell them the work is impossible or silly, they shrug and admit that others have their opinions. But it doesn’t matter as long as their work satisfies  their creative itch and improves with practice.

—Quinn McDonald loves discovering people whose creativity is an integral part of their lives.

 

Saturday Creativity Links

The last week, I have been swooning over those “paper as paint” collages–people who carefully cut, tear, and paste paper pieces to shape images, like Elizabeth St. Hilaire Nelson, who paints with paper. She creates richly-colored paper collages that are illustrations.

This video shows how she builds the support, does the underpainting and then collages.

Peter Clark does the same thing with his dog collages. He uses a variety of

“Too Precious” by Peter Clark’s garment collection.© Peter Clark.

papers, including maps (maps!) to create movement. I’m in love with the greyhound and the dalmatian. He has other sections on his site, too. I’m not generally a fashion maven, but his collages of garments have huge charm for me, as well. Clark has a book out, too.

“Hidden Staircase” © Ronni Jolles, from her collection of sold work.

Not all artists who use this collage have the same result. Another artist who does paper painting collage, but with a totally different look  is Ronni Jolles.  Jolles  subjects are landscapes, and very different from Nelson’s or Clark’s. The subjects she uses are more textured, so her work seems more like mixed media. (Yes, collage really is mixed media as it uses paint and paper). Some of her work is almost photographic.

Interpretation and execution is one of the interesting things about creativity. The same idea can be carried out in so many different ways.

Monsoon Paper Day at the Photo Shoot

Today is Monsoon Paper day. I’m not teaching it, I just get to make it so it can be photographed, step by step. I’m so excited, because Monsoon Papers have come a long way since I started making them in the thrashing summer rains in Phoenix. Now I can make them indoors, in any weather, add glitz, glitter and glaze, and even fix the occasional tears in the papers. So it’s going into the book! (And yes, that is a Monsoon Paper towel in the photo)

The photo shoot has been great so far. Lots of laughing and story telling (you already knew I was a yakker, right?)

But today, book contributor Liz Crain has a great blog on creative ideas. It’s a mash up of great tips, links, and ideas about life in your paracosm. What’s a paracosm? Liz will explain. It’s worth stopping over there and getting inspired.

I’ll be back tomorrow.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and artist who is writing a book on your inner heroes confronting your inner critic.