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.

What You Get Is What You See

In the last section of Raw Art Journaling, I use photographs as a starting point. I find something in the photograph that wants out, and let it out with pencils, markers, paint. You can do the same thing with words. Look at the photos below and use them as the starting point for writing. A photographic journal prompt. In this case, I wrote haiku, although you can use it as a journal prompt for a nature journal as well.

Water

Water: smooth. Danger?
Frozen, biting, hot and cold.
Holding time in check.

Earth

Earth waits for water
Water waits for freshing wind
Wind waits for no one.

Fire

Light years cool fire’s heat
Less in the burning desert
Even the moon is hot

Air

Dust hangs in the air
Reflecting heat and cactus
Glass is dust, is air

Haven’t bought the book yet? It’s time. Here’s a free shipping bonus!

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–Quinn McDonald is the author of Raw Art Journaling.

There is a reason

Roses do well here in Arizona. But not for long. They seem tragic, somehow, working so hard to put out leaves and blooms and then the sun scorches them to nothing. We have our share of people in the desert who want their roses. Want to say they grow roses in the scrub-brush land of purples, grays and browns.

The same people who say, “There is a reason for everything,” do not want to accept the reason that some plants don’t grow in the desert on their own.

They want to prove they can outsmart the weather, the climate, the plan that doesn’t suit them.

But in the end, the climate is part of our lives, part of the big circle of life that brings us birth and brings us death. And there is beauty in both, whether we want to see it or not. Because the desert climate believes in us, even if we do not believe in it.

--Quinn McDonald is a writer and journaler who is a life coach because she believes in putting down roots where you thrive.

Raw Art Photography

Maybe you could call them altered photos, but they aren’t really altered. They aren’t as much altered as they are found, like found poetry. When I see something more in an ordinary photo, it’s found art photography. I take the photo, and then print it out. Using colored pencils, markers, pastels, I bring out what I see. Sure, I could do this with Photoshop or some other digital program, but there is something profoundly interesting in using my hands and colored pencils or markers to bring out what I see in a photograph.

Art photographers show the world what they see through their viewfinders. I take photographs to document something I don’t see. . .yet. And then I allow it to appear. Camera as art tool.

Here is the photograph of the crack in the pavement–note the small vertical line on the middle and the slanting dark line on the right.

It looks like an ordinary crack in the pavement, until you take a closer look. . .

Here’s what I saw when I took the original photograph. I just coaxed it out with pencils and markers:

. . . and see the lightning storm and the washed out road.

What’s hiding in your photographs that needs to be seen and let out?

–Quinn McDonald is an artist and certified creativity coach.

Fear and the Photograph

Check out your rights as a photographer: http://tinyurl.com/4neyed

Washington, D.C. in the summer. The humidity is a given. So are the tourists, camera clicking away. But times are changing. While the public is getting used to less privacy as video cameras watch them from street corners, parking lots and store security stations, the police and security guards and chasing photographers away, telling them that photographs taken in public places, while standing on public property, is illegal.

It isn’t, of course, but who wants to argue with an official with a gun? Jerome Vorus, a 19-year-old college student was detained by police after he took a photograph of a traffic stop in the Georgetown area of Washington, D.C. Although he stood 20 feet away from the scene, the police accused him of photographing the inside of a cruiser, and claimed this was illegal. (It’s not, according to the police guidelines.)

The Washington Post recently ran an article citing a number of cases where ordinary citizens were prevented from taking photos in public places. Often, the photos were of federal buildings, and images of those buildings were posted on the governments website.

This is another case of fear. Once fear is set lose, the reaction is more fear. Tourists are seen as terrorists, citizens as threats. Non-citizens are seen as bigger threats. Courts have ruled that anyone standing in a public area have no expectation of privacy, but it’s hard to carry around a court ruling and reason with someone who has seized your camera and is deleting your photos.

Fear of strangers, fear of your neighbor, and fear of people and ideas we don’t understand have risen considerably since 9/11. We create our own reality—if we see harm and malice in every photographer, we become a nation that makes decisions out of fear, that reacts in fear. That leads us to a nation that abandons the First Amendment or allows security guards to define the law as they see fit, and enforce it in any way they choose. Let’s put down the fear and settle for a little thinking, instead.

New Year’s Wish, 2009

Let the old year run off you like drops of rain. Let a small part of it hang on the edge of your consciousness for just one moment, so you can get the most of it, and then it drops, soaking into the ground of your experience.

Water drop on bougainvilla

Water dripping from a tree branch

Water falling from a catsclaw

—Quinn McDonald is a writer and a certified creativity coach who helps people reinvent themsleves.

Homer Simpson Tree

Other people see the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich or Jesus in a potato chip, or grow a rutabaga that looks like Lincoln.

Me, I walk by a tree every day that looks like Homer Simpson. And the eyes kind of follow you. . .

Homer Simpson's in a tree

–Quinn McDonald is a creativity coach who does walking meditation every morning. She helps other people explore possibilities in their lives.

How a Photographer Grew into Her Talent

“When you set a simple, clear goal for a year away, a lot of other goals get done along the way,” Bo Mackison says. Her goal seemed simple enough: post a photograph on her blog every day for a year.

Red Sumac and Birches, (c) Bo Mackison, taken in October, 2007

And a year later, she can point to all those photographs on her blog–a task complete. But a lot happened along the way. The woman who didn’t know how to cut and paste in a Word document is now skimming through Aperture (photography software).

The same woman who picked up a camera again (this time a digital) when her last child left for college, is now working on a career as an assignment photographer.

Red Sumac, (c) Bo Mackison, October 2008

The first pictures Bo posted on Flickr and her blog were snapshots of the world around her. But she had a good eye (those courses on art taken long ago helped), and discovered a huge community of interested photographers on the Web.

“I’d post a photo and someone would tell me how to make it better. Everyone was kind, no one made fun of my amateur work,” Bo says. “One person looked at all my photos on Flickr and helped me solve a sizing problem. Just because she wanted to be helpful.”

Bo bought books for inspiration, books to answer questions and learn techniques. She went out every day–which is saying a lot in Wisconsin’s winters–and took photographs, worked on them and posted them. Every day for a year.

Along the way, a former newspaper editor asked her to photograph and write for a blog about Wisconsin. The blog is now in the early stages of syndication. After a vacation Bo took through the Southwest, including Phoenix, a tour guide saw a photo taken at the Desert Botanical Garden and asked to publish it.

Queen Anne's Lace in Frost, (c) Bo Mackison, October 2008

“Sometimes there is payment, sometimes you get paid in links,” Bo says, “But every time you take another step into learning, you find out more, and you grow.”

Bo hopes that her photographs and writing will lead to regular assignments.

“Photography is an experience. You don’t just walk into a box and learn what’s around you. The learning never ends. That’s what’s makes it so exciting. Who knows where I’ll be a year from now?”

I can’t wait to find ou

Enjoy Bo’s “Wisconsin Alphabet” series. Or, just go right to Seeded Earth’s blog for today: http://seededearth.com/

–Quinn McDonald is a life- and creativity coach who helps people face change and transition in their lives.

Tutorial: Mixed Media Ideaglyph

Many people are scared to draw, so they never do.

I find that sad. I’ve invented a new kind of class to help overcome the lack of drawing ability. I promise you will never have to draw if you don’t want to. You will make marks, however, and discover symbols that are personal and meaningful for you. There are many ways to do this. Today we are going to discover a way of seeing ideaglyphs using photography, colored pencils, and a good quality paper.

“Ideaglyph” is a word I made up. A ‘glyph’ is a meaningful symbol or mark. Here in Arizona, we see ancient symbols carved into canyons and stones by the peoples of the First Nation. They are called petroglyphs. I thought that each person needs to have private and personal symbols for their own ideas, thoughts, feelings. You can share them, you can keep them private. I call them ideaglyphs.

Here is how to start: look around you. Find a pattern, a texture, a color splash that appeals to you. I’ve taken pictures of hard-water stains on sidewalks (that’s it, below), tree bark, clouds–that all have something in common. And that is that I see something in them. Maybe a figure, maybe an idea, but I see it. The photographs are simple, not color altered or changed in any way.

Ideaglyph--tree

Here’s an example: I was in a coffee house the other day. The walls had been painted many times-sponged, splashed, glazed. One of the marks was a red splash of paint. It was right above the chair rail. But to me, that splash of paint made an image. I took a picture and printed it out.

Ideaglyph: wall, before

That red splash looked like an animal to me. It’s important to note that I didn’t see a bear or a cat, just an animal. A figure. Using colored pencils, I darkened some areas and lightened others. I didn’t draw a new picture on it. I used only the color already in the picture, just deepened them or lightened them.

ideaglyph: wall, after

And right in front of me, the animal appeared in the forest. What difference does this make? I didn’t draw anything, I just applied color. It is mark making in its simplest form. But it is my mark, and it is meaningful to me. And now you can do this, too, without knowing how to draw at all. If I gave you the same print out, you could see something different. That’s OK, too.

Have fun exploring your own private symbols, create an ideaglyph of your own. If you want, I’ll post it. Just let me know in the comments that you have one you want to add to this blog post.

–Quinn McDonald is an artist and a creativity coach. She runs workshops and seminars in ideaglyphs and other forms of communication.