Things are settling down

As you may know from my infrequent posts the past several months, much has been going on in my life. Two months of babysitting my 2 year old grandson, Thanksgiving house clean up, Vestry meeting and dinner at my house which required even more clean up and then the holidays with family gone and family coming back.

During this time I have had difficulty doing much with my art. A series of collages have been in various stages during this time and I have had serious difficulties trying to figure out the next step for them. I have had too many ideas of going in different directions (too many directions) all because I have not been able to focus and spend time on my art.

Well, things have finally settled down. I am back in the saddle again and will spend all day tomorrow at the studio. I have moved all of my silks, roving, wools, and a bunch of yarns down there so I can work with everything at hand with the needle punch machine. I am still trying ti fiugre out how it is going to work for me and what kind of art I am going to do with it.

I have been doing alot of reading about authentic art, finding your voice and creating your own work. Most recently I have been reading "Creative Authenticity" by Ian Roberts. He discussed 16 principles to clarify and deepen your artisitic vision.  I have underlined a number of things in his book but wanted to start off with this one statement that he makes which has really resonated with me:

Page 153, Creative Authenticity:
"I suspect that were are only two ways to deal with the creative process. First, with courage. Just recognize the need for exploration and storm on. Second, with experience. With experience we move the product thinking to process thinking. We still want a good result, but with time we become more relaxed about how we are going to get there and what happens along the way.

Own your creativity. You are a creative being by nature, and your creativity is one with the unending creative energies that flow throughout the universe. The question is not whether you are creative "enough" but whether you will free yourself to rexpress the creativity this is uniquely yours."

I have long preached just "do the work" and it will all come about. I really realized that I am a process person and not a product person when we had a house fire and I lost about 200 quilts that I had made over the years, and some special ones that were just the beginning of my art in quilting. I let it all go very easily as I knew that I would only get better and make better art and create a lot more so, in the long run, it really didn't matter much.  There was no longer a need to hang on to what I had done.

Now, if I could just get rid of some of the pile in my storage room!  No fire, please, but would prefer sales!

I have much to say about a number of things that have been happening and will include pictures as I know we all like the visual goodies but this is enough for today. Look for me again tomorrow!
Thanks for hanging out with me during this time!