Teaching, Learning, and Growing

Fall Trees With Lake

a Landscape Lesson by Saga Sabin of Ontario, British Columbia

Throughout the summer months my personal growth emphasis has been on creative recovery.  After an intense year of classes and meeting the expectations of others, I have needed to cultivate my own inner reserves of creative energy.  I had previously believed that the best way to recharge is to check out from all my outside activities, quietly write and study, and drag my friends and loved ones through innumerable art shows and museums.  As far as these things go, all well and good.  But I have also found myself involved in something which is unexpectedly supercharging  my creative renewal.  And what a delight it is!

I refer to my acrylic painting classes at Michaels Arts and Crafts here in Woodland, CA.  I teach Grumbacher (yes, the paintbrush and art supply people) curriculum via lesson plans which are developed by painters like me all over the Michaels network, like the one shown above.  A serendipitous discovery is that, in teaching people of all levels of experience and aptitude, my own inner fires burn brighter.  I so look forward to a painting demonstration or a class or a one-on-one tutorial that I inevitably practice the sample painting so I am training my own hand and eye, often in ways that I have never tried in my own works.

Because each lesson has different, classic, learning outcomes I find myself re-thinking and reviewing my own training, often wondering, "Hmm, I wonder what would happen if I tried that brush stroke on this other painting I've been working on?" or "What would happen if I used this color palette for my landscape?"  

I have often heard the negative old saying, "Those who can't, teach."  I don't know who first said it but I would like to scold them if I could.  You see, I think it is valuable for those who CAN, to teach!  It's valuable to see making art through the lens of another as they explore what we already know (or think we know) It helps us to become unstuck from old ruts that we tend to stick ourselves in.  It helps us ask fresh questions about the processes and outcomes of our artmaking.  

My students are the best teachers I have.  If you are in the Yolo County area, and have an interest in learning   more about painting, here is my schedule for August.  You might just be one of my next teachers!

Thursday, August 2nd                     9:00 Floral                     11:30 Landscape (the one above)

Sunday, August 5th                         12:00-1:45  In-Store Demonstration of Seascape 

                                                       2:00 Still Life                 4:30 Floral 

Tuesday, August 7th                        3:30 Landscape             6:30 Seascape

Thursday, August 9th                       9:00 Still Life                 11:30 Seascape

Tuesday, August 14th                       3:30 Floral                    6:30 Landscape

Thursday, August 16th                     9:00  Seascape              11:30 Still Life

Sunday, August 19th                       12:00-1:45 In-Store Demonstration of Still Life 

                                                       2:00 Floral                     4:30 Landscape

Tuesday, August 21st                       3:30 Seascape               6:30 Still Life

Tuesday, August 28th                       3:30 Floral                     6:30 Landscape

Thursday, August 30th                      9:00 Still Life                 11:30 Seascape

(All classes are held at Michaels, 2175 Bronze Star Drive, in the Target shopping center, Woodland)

  

Of Hammocks and Harmonicas

The summer has marched relentlessly on, on to triple-digit temperatures, on toward September peering threateningly over August's shoulder.  The summer-long process of creative recovery for this painter, poet, and pie-maker is in its eighth week with just four more after this.  It is only a breath over a month until the fall semester begins and the work of learning by lecture and laboratory resumes.

A couple of things I have learned are worth sharing.  Well, many of the others are worth sharing too, but I want to reflect a little more on those before writing publicly about them.

Of the ones I will share, the first is that the creative needs space, time, and privacy in order to create.  Whether we are encountering the canvas, keyboard, or guitar, it is impossible to listen to our own inner, creative voice when the voices of the world are crashing around our ears.  There's a good reason why we use that word, "crash" to describe the  destructive sound of an automobile accident, or the thunderous clap of an electrical storm, or the falling of a giant tree.  If a tree falls in the forest, does an artist lose her concentration?  Probably.  If someone subjects the writer to constant interruptions, does his dialogue crash and burn?  It's been known to happen.

Distractions abound, and I've discovered that even the friendly sunflowers growing outside my window can be distracting if the inner voice I count on is having trouble being heard.  A thing that helps is to have a room of my own in which to make art...a thing that helps even more is to have that room organized and tidy, straightened so the path to art runs straight and true.  A thing that is critical to success is the stillness that fosters the integration of memories with the intention to express.

That being said, it is not always possible to have a room of one's own.  Sometimes alternative places and moments of sanctuary must be found.  If you need help finding such a place, here are some I came up with that work even better than a closed door.

1.  Backyard hammock.  They have to find you first, and this is the last place they look.
2.  The Silent Room at the local library.  You can't set up an easel, but you can take a laptop or sketchbook.
3.  A camp site in a nearby State Park.  Some don't even have cell phone coverage.
4.  Your neighborhood coffee shop.  Most people don't recognize acquaintances out of context.
5.  A vacationing friend's house.
6.  Get up an hour earlier than the rest of the household.
7.  Stay up an hour later than the rest of the household.
8.  Take a sketchbook or notebook to the local zoo.  The animals don't care.
9.  The bathroom.  No, I'm NOT joking.
10.  The town's park.  Take a lunch and find a shady place. 

There's one side of the coin.  The other, of course, is engaging in real life, in real community, for if we don't have a life, where will our art come from?  It's one thing to listen to our inner thoughts, but if that's all we hear we get self-centered, boring, and even radical in our work.  Not that radical is wrong in art, it's just that if we want to make relevant art or shape relevant stories or write relevant music, we need to hear the voices of others.

The tragedy of Aurora, Colorado happened just four days ago as I write this.  It's really tempting to pontificate about loners and gun control and all the other things I'm reading about in its aftermath.  But that's not for me.  I think that a thing I've learned about being in community and how it makes us more creative is that engaging in real life alongside others develops our compassion, our feelings for others who may be very unlike ourselves.  It takes our focus and reminds us that the world is a place of infinite beauty and fascination, and that our job as artists is be a lens, a voice, maybe a gesture that helps others connect to it.

I don't know what I will end up doing about the tragedy in Aurora in order to grieve as all Americans grieve right now.  I know I won't pick up a harmonica and blow the blues while riding down the highway.  I know I won't start a campaign to do away with automatic weapons. 

But what I may just do is try to make art that is relevant, is life-honoring, and reminds others of the endlessly fascinating and beautiful thing that this world is.

The picture at the top of the column was the result of the perfect yin and yang moment, reached when the perfect balance of isolation and immersion in community occurred for me during a plein air paint-out at the California State Fair.  I was privileged to photograph the birth of two baby goats in the children's Petting Zoo area, and I realized that the isolation of painting and the community of an event like the fair are the ideal ingredients for artistic voice to be heard.  Artists on their own are considered weird or nutty, usually avoided, and often left totally alone.  On the other hand, if immersed in the surrounding community while something as life-affirming as a birth takes place practically on your shoes, you get the perfect combination of room-of-your-own, plus hearing the lovely voice of the world.

When given that perfect nexus, you can't help but rush to give it words, color, shape, line, or gesture.





"Are we so impoverished that we have nothing to reveal but small talk? Let us struggle for more richness of soul" Frank Laubach

A thing I have not written about until now is the difficulty I have experienced being creative while taking art classes in college.  One wouldn't imagine that creativity would suffer while in the pursuit of higher education especially in the area of studio art and art history.  When I began studying these which I was unable to study the first time around, I thought that the opposite would be true.

I thought my muse would automatically start sending me unlimited ideas and inspiration because I was exposing her to constant sketching exercise, unbroken hours at the easel, and hours of contact with all manner of other arty types each week.  Imagination unleashed!

Silly me.

While assignments, even broadly defined assignments, are valuable for helping a studio artist grow and develop, the sense of inspiration isn't necessarily present.  My technical ability has improved and I earned good grades, so my inner Hermione is affirmed.  Unfortunately, however, I ended the semester with a sense of loss.

I felt I'd lost the ability to paint.  I felt I'd lost the ability to compose a decent, let alone interesting, composition on the canvas.

What I was really experiencing was overload:  plain, old-fashioned burn-out.  This is what happens from too much of even a good thing, like channeling all one's time and energy into completing even the best of professors' assignments.  Painting and drawing became as interesting to me as a term paper bibliography.

That's when I decided to take a breather over the summer months to reignite the flames of creative spontaneity.  I picked Walking in This World by Julia Cameron and will cover a chapter a week over the course of the summer on a self-guided journey of creative recovery.  I'm in week 4 presently, and have begun to see some smoldering going on.  At least, I smell smoke.

I'm interested in doing painting exercises every day but much to my surprise, I also have been dogged by an idea for a book.  One day as I was reflecting on my artistic direction, an idea for a character and plot surfaced nearly fully formed, out of seemingly nothing.

But I know there is no such thing as nothing when we are open-hearted to the Great Creator and open-minded to the ideas that channel through us and flow through our hands into various creative projects.  I fancifully picture my muse frantically war-whooping and dancing around the fire to encourage the glowing coals to once again burst forth in healing flames.

She's a damn pest about it, really, but you get what you pray for when the Universe aligns with your deep desire.  It is then that synchronous  actions take place all round and about you to open doors and line up people and things in support of your project.

So far this week, I've begun an outline of the characters as well as a broad outline of the plot.  I'm either crazy (like I have nothing else to do) or right on the track I'm supposed to follow.  I know there will be obstacles like time, money, and interest lagging.  So far this week I've told my son and my husband about it and neither one has suggested I'm crazy.  What I'm considering is publishing serially via my Quiet Woman blog, the one I normally use for sermons.  So, here's where you come in.

I wonder if reading installments of the story over a blog would be appealing to anyone, and, if so, how often would you want new chapters?   Weekly?  Daily?  Or?  What wisdom do you have to share with me?

Unless you want to just tell me I'm crazy, I welcome your input.  Leave a comment below, please.

Thanks!

You Behaving Better Yet?

One of the writers who constantly challenges me to rise to her writing on not only a cerebral level but on a gut-wrenching, vomit-in-the-back-of-the-throat level is Anne Lamott.  Born and raised in the Bay Area, she is perhaps one of the more honest Christians I know.  She is an energetic creative, recovering alcoholic, mother, and sought-after speaker.  She has a grown son and about a zillion cats.

My summer's path of creative recovery which I have set out for myself is in lieu of taking any summer school classes.  I am using two resources by other highly creative and prolific women to guide myself through study, exercises, and creative disciplines.  One is an old friend:  Walking in This World, by Julia Cameron.  The other one is a newly discovered friend:  The Creative Habit, by Twyla Tharp.  I am blessed by both of these works, much as I have been repeatedly blessed by Cameron's earlier The Artist's Way.


Neither Tharp nor Cameron hits with the visceral punch of Lamott, but both have a way of writing truth that sometimes resembles a blow right in the solar plexus.  The punch that stopped me and got me thinking (once I had scraped myself off of the floor) was Cameron's assertion that:


 "Most of us carry what I call 'word wounds'-descriptions of certain qualities that have been conveyed to us as pejorative.  I for example have been called both 'intense' and 'hyperfocused.'  In our culture we have demonized creativity.  We are scared of it and by it.  We tell scary stories about artists and how broke, nuts, crazy, drunk, selfish they are.  In our culture we are afraid of our creativity.  We think it's some nitroglycerin compound that could blow us all up.  Nonsense."


The thing that affected me so deeply was the instant recalling of several "word wounds" that I realize I have been carrying for a very long time-too long, in fact, for them to still hurt as badly as they do and probably too casually tossed at me for me to have taken them as seriously as I have.  


"Disorganized" by a supervisor who did not understand my organizational system.  (I was using Alan Lakein's  system and a Day Timer while still a college student.)
"Procrastinator" by a parent who doesn't get my greed for perfection.
"Klutz" by the other parent who didn't get my lack of mathematics and motion learning styles.
"Moron" and "Little Fat Wife", by an ex-spouse who thought I should be a bookkeeper instead of a pastor.
"Neurotic" and "Hormonal", also ex-spouse language from one who thought I should never get angry.


Finally, since I believe that the Universe always conspires to bring together exactly what we need as we are trying to grow into the Great Creator's vision for us, please understand there are no coincidences.  So, I was not surprised by the responses I got when I asked this question on Facebook:


"Word wounds" Things people say that carve scars in your psyche forever. How do we expunge them? Counselors? Repentance? Confession? Or is that just so much horsefeathers?"


Opinions ranged from my thoughtful brother-in-law's "Thick skin and stoicism helps" (an echo of a couple of art professors' opinions) to variations on forgiveness, a process which I find effective in some ways but usually deficient when anger must be dealt with.

My favorite once again came from my old high school friend, Bill Jacobi, who himself is a writer and artist.  Here's Bill's take:

"If you agree with them it really helps. So, you say... "Yes... you're right. I AM a loathsome scumbag who isn't worth my weight in horse manure... can I get you a coffee?" They will then laugh and realize how silly they sound... and if not you have to have them put to sleep."

Or, maybe I'll just write about them.  Thanks, Anne. 

It's the time of year when flowers are ready to riot in the garden, so I thought I would post this image of my 2011 oil painting, "There is Room for All in the Garden" in honor of the Seeds of Hope N.A.M.I. Sunflower Art Show.

This year is very special for me with regards to this show, as I will again co-teach YoloCanvas students, most of whom are N.A.M.I. clients, in a four-session art class.  New this time is a focus on artist trading cards, which all the participants can collage or decorate in any way they wish.  We will also create a class entry comprised of artist trading cards from class members as an entry to the Sunflower Art Show.

Classes are open to all, at the Cesar Chavez Plaza Community Room, 1220 Olive Drive, Davis, CA. the first four Thursdays in May:  May 3, 10, 17, and 24 from 10:00 AM to 12:00 Noon.

All creative persons are invited!

(Note:  Class is $40 for the whole series.  Scholarships are available.)

Poached Eggs and Mint

This is a dinner I made yesterday from a recipe published in the New York Times, e-mailed to me during the day by the wonderful husband I cook for.  Usually our meatless meals, which I try to do no more than once a week, are based around plant proteins and whole grains.  This collection by the Times suggests creative ways to use the bounty of fresh eggs provided by urban laying hens in New York City.

Okay, if I can imagine something as eggstraordinary as chickens in New York, I'm sure I can imagine making poached eggs seasoned with a combination of garlic, mint, chile flakes, and paprika.  But it pushed me I must say.  However, the afore-mentioned wonderful husband and I have been talking for some time about raising chickens ourselves, and one of the big questions is how we would deal with all the eggstra bounty.  So, just for the sake of argument, I thought I'd whip this up.

The other reason eggs are so much on our minds is the annual only-in-Davis bike tour of some of the town's most innovative, beautiful, clever, or inspiring backyard chicken coops:  The Tour de Cluck. It only comes around once a year, and I always paint something to donate to their silent auction.  It benefits the Davis Farm to School Connection, which gets fresh local food to our school kids.  I like doing it, although it's a
pretty kitschy event (think chicken suits at the Farmers Market).  We ride bikes from coop to coop, as many as 22 or 23 sites-you can do a shorter tour by covering just one or two quadrants in town, but the most intrepid do the whole tour.

Anway, I'm not worried about the cholesterol or anything.  Loving the Tour is a pre-eggsisting condition.

God is in the Details

On this, the 126th birthday of the famous international architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, I'm celebrating by thinking about creativity.

I have often made the claim that everyone is innately creative, not because everyone can paint like Picasso or sculpt like Donatello or build fabulous buildings like Mies van der Rohe.

Rather, human beings are creative because it is the spiritual imperative of all human beings to create.  This is a theme I have been exploring as a recovering creative and as a person who coaches others in creative recovery.

Claiming our own creativity is key to living a whole life, as it is just as much a part of our existence as our occupation is, or our relationships, or our families.  People make very complicated arguments for this or against it, but I believe that the desire to engage the creative process is so strong that we can take very simple measures to jump-start it.  It lies not far below the surface.

In honor of Mies van der Rohe's axiom, "Less is more", here are some simple suggestions to spark your own creative process.

1.  Think of a boring task you do routinely.  Ask this question of yourself:  "If I were interested in this, what part of it would interest me?"

2.   Buy a fruit or vegetable you have never prepared before and learn how to prep/cook/serve it.

3.  Consider a vexatious problem or dilemma.  Promise yourself that it will be solved, but that at the moment your job is merely to relax and breathe.  Walk around the block, take a hot shower, or soak in the tub.

4.  Consciously choose a different route to work or school every day for a week.

5.  On a plain sheet of paper, draw or just make marks with your non-dominant hand.  Do this non-judgmentally and without worrying about results.  Breathe deeply.

6.  Look through a kaleidoscope.  Notice the colors, patterns, and changes.

7.  With kiddie crayons, color in a coloring book, using unconventional colors for familiar things-blue hair, red trees, etc.  Color outside the lines if you want.!

So that's one to try for every day of the week.  I don't claim these will turn anyone into Picasso, but they will make you feel more like smiling and just might put you one step closer to realizing your creative potential.  Happy birthday, Mies!