Art Journaling Quotes

Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must first be overcome.  –Samuel Johnson

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.              —Chuck Close.

Sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out what you can make with what you have left. –-Itzhak Perlman

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.

Muse Swap–It Starts Here

My muse as part of my landscape, in a kind and generous moment.

My muse is yammering today. She doesn’t like how much white space I leave on a page. She kicked my favorite Arches Text Wove off the table and demanded a new paper. For a second, I thought it was my gremlin (also known as Lizard Brain), but it is not. My muse is quite encouraging and creative, she just won’t let me settle down and create. She keeps tossing ideas into my mind and then not finishing them. I find it annoying.

So I did what I normally do when I get distracted, I jumped into the interwebs and noticed that other people are having trouble with their muses as well. Well, what bothers some people is another person’s dream.

I wanted to swap my muse, but I did NOT want to start a complicated swap that involves mailing stuff to other people. I’m pretty terrible at that. But how about this–If you want to swap your muse, post a comment to this post by midnight West Coast Time July 12, 2010–close enough to the new moon for this month. You just post what your muse is doing that annoys you. If you don’t do it now, you won’t do it.

On the 14th, I’ll assign you a randomly swapped muse. You’ll play, work, listen, and live with someone else’s muse for a while. See what happens.

On the full moon, July 26 (or earlier), tell me what happened with your muse swap. You’ll do this via email to Quinn.Classes[at]gmail.com Did your new muse inspire you? Kvetch? Force you to eat chocolate? We want to know.  Your answer can be a video,  a poem, a story, a drawing–anything at all creative. I’ll compile them and report back by the 29th as a blog post.  I’ll post what I can here (with full credit, of course).  If there is overwhelming response, I’ll create a Flickr set. If there is a long, complicated story, you can post the result on your blog or website, and simply send me a link and permission to use the image.

Encourage others. Let’s swap some muses!

UPDATE: 7/15/10: Muses have been swapped. Each person received a short description of the swapped muse and instructions. I’ll be waiting for the exciting report of what happened. . .let me know by July 27, 2010.

Update: 7/31/10: You can read about the muse-swap results.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and raw-art-journaler who is writing a book to be published by North Light Books in June of 2011.

Theme Thursday #14: 8.27.09

It’s Theme Thursday, and this time the Theme is Illumination–growth through inspiration.

Illuminated manuscript from bornemania.com

Illuminated Mind is a thoughtful blog that’s well-written, and longer than most. Rare to find both to today’s culture of microblogging. Jonathan is an iconoclast, but his blog on the commitment needed to start our own revolution is a good read.

There is something about infrared photography that is compelling and other-worldly. You can see a collection of 50 infrared photos here.

Polyvore is a site that lets you make an instant collage or a visual dream board. While at first blush, it looks like it’s all about clothing, start with the background and words and you’ll discover you can create quite a statement that’s not about fashion. If you are a fashionista, you will also have fun.

If you’d rather make your own vision board with photographs and alter them, you can find free photos and textures at Image*After.

The moon has a powerful call to us. It was the original timekeeper, and it still sets our tides. If you want to check on the phase of the moon, or put the information on your website or blog, you can do so at Moon-Phases Calendars.

You can join in on Theme Thursday: post three links to sites you love or blogs you follow. You can do it on your site or in comments here.

Five Most Recent  Theme Thursdays:   * * * Creative Play 8/20/09 * * *  Creative Play 8/15/09 * * *   Creative Play 8/6/09 * * * Creative Play 7/30/09 ***Creative Play 7/23/09 * * *

—Quinn McDonald is a life- and certified creativity coach. She teaches people how to write and give presentations. She also  manages four journals that travel the world.