mixed media monday - 'memories'

This week's challenge over at Mixed Media Monday is 'memories.' Here is a piece I created a few years ago during an artist's retreat at Hacienda Mosaico, using my favourite photo of myself as a child, running in a little grove of birch saplings on an early spring day. This piece reminds me that I still have access to that young girl who felt so lean and strong, who lived to be out of doors and at one with the elements, who was grounded in joy and a sense of belonging in the world.

My next "7 Keys to an Artful Life e-Course" begins October 10th!
Start your autumn season with 7 weeks of creativity, life-balance, self-care, and fun. Read about it here.

Bug Eyes

This is only half the image, click on the image to see full size.

I've been slowly bringing order to to the chaotic and neglected back room of my studio, where all my wonderful painting and mixed media supplies are. My ceramics business has absorbed all my creative time and energy over the last year or so, and I am looking forward to pulling in more art-for-me time, more art play, teaching, retreats, and workshops! Yay! The creating sanctuary process (otherwise known as cleaning and organizing!) has unearthed some fun things, including lots of art journals and altered books. Above is a page from one.

Tap Into Creativity: The Visual Dream Journal How-To

Just so you know, our power went out this morning in the wee hours, so I am writing the original of this post by hand, in my journal, while happily ensconced in the bed with the sounds of morning birdsong and snoring dogs, and the scents of a pineapple and papaya candle burning, and a steamy cup of coconut chai. I'm really hoping no early-bird tourists drop by to tour the studio :)

My dreams are guides, teachers, and mentors; mysterious daily companions, opening windows onto a parallel life. I've been blessed - sometimes cursed - with an extremely vivid dream life, and the attempt to understand and make use of this elusive and enigmatic aspect of self has been a lifelong challenge - a dance with a dark & strange partner. When I have taken the time to listen deeply to my dreams, I have been richly rewarded with insight, guidance, humour, and creative inspiration. Dreams offer insight into hidden aspects of ourselves, often the very aspects of ourselves we are searching for and yearning to manifest in our daily lives: our inner adventurers, artists, sensualists, leaders, and mystics! Dreams can help us bring these aspects to light in harmless and life-affirming ways - and we all know what can happen if we repress these beauties!! SO how do we work with something that arrives in such a mysterious package? What if we don't have, or remember, long vivid narrative dreams - just the occasional flash of an image or feeling? How do we work with that? Over the past few years, I've developed a wonderful tool I call Visual Dream Journaling. For many years, on and off, I kept a written dream journal. Over time I found that writing out my dreams became time consuming and cumbersome - and valuable insights were slipping through my fingers as I tried to translate dream flashes into daytime language. I began to explore ways to work with imagery directly from the dream to the page, without the interference of the critical mind. Drawing worked well, but was limited, slow, and not so easy when half-asleep! So I started working intuitively with found images. I kept a basket next to the bed with journal, pen, and a stack of old magazines (which I constantly refreshed so the images would be unfamiliar.) I didn't bother with scissors after a while, I found tearing to be quick & it left the door open for "accidents" which yielded insight. I want to emphasise that this is a way to work directly with the unconscious magic of the dream, a way to let the dream energy continue into waking activity. So here is how to do it:

1. as soon as you wake from a dream, pull your basket on to the bed and open your journal to a fresh page.
2. flip through magazines and begin, quickly, without much thought, to pull out any images that resonate with your dream images and feelings. You are not looking for images that duplicate what you saw in your dream. Instead, you are looking for images, words, and colours that strike the same chord in your mind and heart that the dream did. Go with your instinct, don't worry if the images seem "different" than what your dream looked like. Allow the dreaming mind to make the connections.
3. once you have a nice pile of pages and feel finished, set the magazines aside and sort through the images again. Choose the three to six images that resonate the most deeply with the feelings in your dream.
   
4. begin to tear the images down to size, and arrange them on the page. I like to leave plenty of white space around the images - this helps your mind to move freely when you contemplate the work later. TIP: to create a nice white deckle edge on your torn paper, hold the image you want to keep firmly down on a hard surface, and tear by pulling the discard able portion towards you.
5. glue down your images, using a glue stick
6. give the dream a title. This is a great way to discover the most important aspect of the dream. I like to stamp the title in with my alphabet rubber stamps, and the date, too.
   
7. you may wish to supplement your images with a line or two of text, giving a synopsis of the dream narrative, if there was one.
8. after a quick glance at your work, put your journal away for a while - at least a few hours. Be prepared to be surprised by the insights you glean when you come back to your images later.

Sweet dreams! If you make a special dream journal page that you want to share, send it to me (bbsimons@telus.net) and I'll post it! Here are a few of my pages for inspiration:

Artful Resources:
Books:
Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung
Dream On, A Dream Interpretation & Exploration Guide for Women
Web:
Stampington.com, for alphabet & other stamps

Artful Project:
Create your own dream journal page and send it to me!

nurturing ourselves on mother's day

My blessings to you today if your kids brought you breakfast in bed (and then cleaned the kitchen.) Blessings if you're just heading out for lunch then a pedicure with Mum, or if like me, you got the most terrific card in the world (above.) Blessings to you especially if this isn't your reality. Maybe, like my sweetie, your mum is far away, in the hospital, and too sick to talk on the phone. Maybe it's your first year without your mum, or maybe you aren't able to be together lovingly, for one of a million different possible reasons. For both mothers and daughters, and maybe especially for those of us who are both mothers and daughters, this day can be fraught. Today is a beautiful sunny day, I hope, that brings you some ease and celebration, and some family intimacy, some chocolate and champagne... Maybe the day also brings an extra awareness of that soft spot, the open heart, the young part in all of us that still craves unconditional love and nurturing, wisdom, and the power to chase the monsters away. So many of us truly need to learn to mother ourselves well. So my Mothers Day wish for you is that you begin to find this ultimate nurturing in yourself. I wish for you the gift of some time to yourself today, with a cup of tea and your journal, so you can begin to answer these questions:

• What part of me still needs nurturing? (my body, my playful side, my inner artist, my innocence, my health?)
  
• Am I nurturing that part, or am I waiting? What am I waiting for?
  
• What can I do today to begin to nurture myself better? (make an appointment with my doctor [or therapist or financial adviser or lawyer or massuese...] , schedule a personal day, buy a new journal, sign up for a dance class, hire a housekeeper, forgive myself..)

I'll leave you with some wonderful art-eye-candy for mum's day - these are a few of the pieces from a mail art show, Mother Madonna May Queen, that I curated a few years back. It opened on Mother's Day, and the challenge that went out to the mail artists was "send me a picture of a mother you love...". ( By the way, if you don't yet know about the wonderful world of Mail Art, you're in for a treat. I'll post about it soon!!!)

by Lu Minoti

by Patricia Kambitsch

by Carole Reidby Patricia Kambitsch

by Carole Reid

The Fool

Our homework this week from Elena at Inner Revealings Tarot was to spend some time with the first of the Major Arcana ( the 22 cards of the Tarot that represent the great archetypes, the stages on the souls journey ), and reflect on the meaning of the archetype in our own lives. I've lived with the Tarot imagery for so long, and I really want to take Elena's homework as an opportunity to revisit these familiar images with beginner's mind. I chose to by-pass my intellectual knowledge of the card by engaging in some creative play (a great Fool activity!) and making a spontaneous collage of my own inner Fool! Here are the results. She's now sitting on my bedside table, encouraging me to reflect on her qualities. I am by nature a very goal-oriented person: I like plans, order, and security. The Fool challenges me to remember the importance of nurturing my creativity with occasional spontaneity, risk, adventure, travel, and imaginative flights of fancy! I've already started researching retreat centres in Hawaii to teach at next winter!
Here are some positive Fool qualities I manifest:

• childlike vision
• ability to take risks
• love for nature
• hope
• big dreams
• desire for adventure
• beginner's mind approach to the spiritual

and a few shadow Fool qualities I'd like to transform:

• procrastinating on responsibilities
• not always considering consequences of actions
• occasional negative impulsiveness!

For more about the Fool's qualities, visit Inner Revealings here.

Creative Journaling

I just spent a lovely afternoon in the light filled, high ceilinged rooms of the Old School building (Denman's first school, built at the turn of the last century). Seven women gathered to while away a January Saturday making art and sharing life insights. We did some dream collages and shared them, then began a collage about visioning a more balanced life. I teach lots of fun and sometimes complex mixed media techniques, and I love to play with all kinds of art materials, but today I wanted to play with keeping it strictly casual, cheap, and low-tech. Our main tools were old magazines, glue sticks, some donated paper, and our rich and vivid lives and imaginations. As often happens in an all-female group, the talk, and focus of the art, turned to the many challenges of the various stages of the feminine life cycle.... and the challenges of staying peaceful, healthy, and balanced while juggling a multitude of commitments and relationships.... but hooray for us for taking a whole afternoon for pure creative play and self-care!

Creative Journaling

I'm teaching a workshop this weekend sponsored by the DI Women's Outreach Society, part of a series of free workshops for women entitled "Empowerment Through The Arts." I'm looking forward to spending two hours playing with art supplies... yay! I'm going to focus on personal visioning and goal setting through creative journalling. There was a fun article in this month's Cloth Paper Scissors magazine on the topic, worth checking out. Here are a couple of examples of my own recent brainstorming and goal setting in my journals; above from my Terra Home sketchbook, and below from the recent teleclass I took with Hip Tranquil Chick. If you are on the island this Saturday and have a free afternoon, drop by the Old School between 1 and 3 and join us for some fun, creative, empowering art-play!

Artful Journaling

Last Sunday was a sparkling fall day, and this creative group of women got to spend it making art! I taught a Creative Journaling workshop at Leapenhi Paper Design. We played with two different types of journals; recording memories with spontaneous watercolour sketches, and preserving precious photos in elegant gilded settings. I am going to be sharing a couple of techniques in tutorials here at the Artful Life, so check back soon!

Creative Journaling and Visual Autobiography Workshops

I'm teaching a couple of Creative Journaling workshops this summer and fall; the first one is part of the "Artist's Bootcamp" in conjunction with the Arts Denman Celebrating Our Own Festival Aug. 16th & 17th, and the other is at Leapenhi Paper Arts on November 2. This is an exciting new adventure for me! I thought I would take the opportunity to share some pages from my own journals, to show you some of the techniques and ideas we'll be playing with in the workshops. I've been a journaler/diarist since I was a child, and always have one or three on the go.

Here are some pages from last spring's "Sketch a Day" journal. I challenged myself to work fast - no more than 5 or 10 minutes on each sketch - and to record simple details from daily life. These are done on watercolour paper with technical pen and gouache:





I've often kept a dream journal, and have found it really interesting, sometimes startling, and useful for my emotional growth to record these messages from my unconscious. A few years ago I got tired of writing them all down - dreams are so visual and irrational - so I put a basket of really simple collage materials (magazines, pen, glue stick, scissors) next to the bed, and began a visual dream journal. Here are some of the pages:







Of course I keep travel journals -- but I enjoy recording the little details that bring the experience back to me, so my travel journals are quirky and personal. Here are some examples:








Sometimes I use journals as a way to record what I'm learning or as a repository for information about my widely varied personal interests. Here are a couple of pages from an altered book I made about Afro Caribbean spiritual practices:





One final way I've used journals is as a medium for reflection and healing. These pages are from a "Fairy Tale" I created when I was dealing with the tragic onset of mental illness in a family member. These highly personal pages were created very spontaneously within the framework of a story. The process of creating this journal was immensely healing for me, and also created a quiet and non-threatening way for me to share my experience with others:







So these are some ways that my journals have been important tools in my life. I hope this inspires you to try some new and creative ways of recording your own experiences. Feel free to share your journaling experiences with me! Post your pages to your blog, then put the link in the comment section of this post!