Timeless Rhythms

The False Dichotomy Between "Work" and "Home" For Many... Part II:

2012-02-12T13:53:00.000-08:00

Paraphrased from: Composing A Life by, Mary Catherine Bateson, copyright 1989, "A radical rethinking the concept of achievement." -San Francisco Chronical

From my first posting, in September 2009, directly quoting from Mary Catherine Bateson's work, "Composing A Life":

     "As I began to thing about the lives of women in this project, I was struck by the diversity of their homes and the spaces they created to live and work, by these concrete expressions of who we are. Joan is the only one of us who has spent long periods of her life as a traditional full-time homemaker. I have visited the Eriksons in at least half a dozen of their houses across the country. Joan talks about the sense of light and openness she tries to achieve for Erik, and I recognize familiar brightly colored pieces of art and handicraft from one house to the next, but they are always artfully recombined, each object at rest in its new place. Of all of us, Joan has the clearest understanding of how objects that enrich the senses can also enrich human relationships.

     It is possible to create a context of sharing with very simple material cues. This idea is best expressed by the old notion of sacrament. This word has been shaped and often abused by the Christian tradition, but it is still useful express an idea that occurs in many cultures: that the most ordinary materials. like bread and clay, as well as those that are rare and shining, are carriers of meaning, and that the proper action taken with these materials, around the day of the calendar, have a transformative value. The old Anglican catechism defined a sacrament as "an outward and visual sign of an inward and spiritual grace." I prefer the statement that turns up in some Catholic theological discussions: "a sacrament effects what it signifies." *The lighting of Sabbath candles, the giving of gifts, the preparation and sharing of food_ all have the potential to bring about human closeness, as well as simply referring to it.

     When my husband and I visited his family in Beirut on our honeymoon I was frustrated to find that my courteous and highly educated in-laws answered me in English whenever I spoke to them in Armenian. Then, on the fourth or fifth day of our visit, his mother set out to make chee kufta, a dish in which finely ground lean lamb is kneaded at length with bulgar wheat, parsley, and onions until the raw meat simply disappears into the wheat. It's one of those dishes, shaped by their mother's hands. that sons go home to eat. Greatly daring, I went into the kitchen and took over the kneading. After that day, my in-laws began to answer me in Armenian, the kneading of meat and grain and the sharing of what I had prepared having transformed me into a different person, just as the mother of a new priest is suddenly shy with her son after he has been touched with sacred oils, just as desire becomes holy after the exchange of wedding rings.

*Enchiridion Symbolorum: Definitions et rationum de rebus civii et morum, 33rd edition, ed. H. Denzinger. Freiburg: Herder, 1965. Nos. 1606, 1639.

Only 7 more pages, after transcribing 12. 5 pages... to be continued. It won't be as long as 2.5 years.

Hi! I'm Baaaaack!

2012-01-24T20:33:00.000-08:00

Oh my gosh, it's been so long since my last post!

Well enough of that_ the present is what counts!!

Do take a read into my latest invite; consider it however it fits for you, and then leave a comment as that moves you!

Keep in mind, I love getting, reading & AGAIN responding to your comments!

Read on:

I hope this post finds each one doing well in their life endeavors & experiences where you are in this world!

Ok! I am making a target audience inquiry because I am working on a project to bring art & technology closer together in a format that invites non-artists to get more familiar with the inspirational influences/impacts of art in their daily world_

Part of my approach, is to ask each one of you to thoughtfully consider if you will, how it might be to do an interview about your favorite art commission experience(s)?
Some of you are experienced at this sort of thing so you might even have some pointers for me in making this inquiry.
For those of us who have never had this opportunity_ visualize your most opportune moment & paint that picture with me! I would love to hear about it & see it in my mind's eye as I read your projections!

The basic question is this: If you were interviewed and really wanted the world to know some things very specific or particular about your approach(es) to your work/process_ what five questions would you like to be asked that might best allow you to convey this message most clearly out into the world?

Feel free to only respond in part to any part of this contact that appeals to you.

Thanks in advance for your time in whatever form you feel available, again, to respond to this post. I look forward to your questions no matter how many they might be!

Merçi beaucoup!

Two-year Job Search Comes to an End!

2011-07-20T13:13:00.001-07:00

I am elated to finally post that after a grueling two-year job search, I am finally rejoining the ranks of the employed, as a Project Coordinator for an Alternative Wellness Center in my area!

This is a brief post because I am still jumping up and down for sheer joy!

Enjoy the photos from part of my week-end celebration during the local festival in my community. Rain or shine, everyone came out to play!

For anyone continuing to experience the long job search, do not give up, and keep at it unequivocally, no matter what! This IS what I had to do and did.

Nobody can abandon you, if first you don't abandon yourself.
Nobody can betray you, if you don't first betray yourself.
Nobody can despise you, if you don't despise yourself first.
Nobody can hurt you, if you don't hurt first yourself.
Nobody can truly be in love with you, if you aren't first in love with yourself.

Blessings and actively share your joy, because the world is full of people who need what we each uniquely have to share with one another!

Leonora Carrington, artist and surrealist muse, dies at 94

2011-05-29T19:00:00.000-07:00

By Adam Bernstein, Published: May 26

Leonora Carrington, who gained a cultural foothold as the muse and lover of painter Max Ernst and later emerged as a significant artist in works that fused surrealism with the occult and mystical explorations of femininity, died May 25 in Mexico City. She was 94 and had pneumonia.

Surrealism — by turns macabre, sexually overripe, whimsical, subversive and fantastical — suited Ms. Carrington’s creative journey.

She was widely, if belatedly, regarded as one of the most imaginative artists of her generation and one of the last links to the surrealist movement that included Salvador Dali, Joan Miro and Marcel Duchamp. Her paintings fetched hundreds of thousands of dollars at leading auction houses.

Ms. Carrington was born in England to an upper-crust family that stifled her artistic impulses. She went through the motions of being a debutante before managing, at 19, to broker her independence and study painting.

Smitten with surrealism — and its use of art to explore the psyche — she became in 1937 the lover of one of its masters, the German-born Ernst, who was 46 and married.

They retreated to a farmhouse in southern France, where they put on plays and tended vineyards. Guests were welcome, to a point. When surrealist visitors overstayed their welcome, the interlopers were treated to an omelet — of their own hair, which Ernst and Ms. Carrington had secretly cut the night before.

Their idyll in the French countryside was interrupted by the German occupation during World War II. Ernst eventually found sanctuary in the United States — and, once there, married arts patron Peggy Guggenheim.

In Ernst’s absence, Ms. Carrington fled the Nazis and suffered a mental breakdown in Spain. When her parents sent an emissary to find her, she escaped to Mexico, a haven for European emigres during the war, through a marriage of convenience with a diplomat.

In the 1940s, her work was shown in important New York galleries. Her paintings were “heavy with sex and horror,” an art critic at Time magazine wrote, noting a body of images freighted with melancholy: “Feathery, hairy, horny, half-luminous creatures merged imperceptibly into birds, animals and plants. Painted with cobweb delicacy, they conspired and paraded before misty landscapes and night skies thick with floating islands.”

Her artistic reputation was initially handicapped by her relationship with Ernst, said Susan Fisher Sterling, director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington. She was seen more as a muse than an artist in her own right.

But Ms. Carrington remained a vital figure in the art world long after the surrealist movement dimmed in the late 1940s. She bridged the psychological aspects of surrealism with her growing interest in the roles of women as muses, mothers, goddesses and foes of patriarchal oppression.

Her paintings, murals and sculptures, which featured dreamlike images of animals, sibyls, animals and deities, reflected her study of alchemy, Mayan magical traditions, Buddhism and the Jewish mystical writings known as the Kabbalah.

“The strange, enigmatic and subtly humorous anecdotes that appear in her work were the expression of a profound inner world, a mythology of her own making, which although terrifying protected her from the aggressive banality of the external world,” arts scholar Jorge Alberto Manrique wrote in the “Grove Dictionary of Art.”

Ms. Carrington was rediscovered by feminist art historians in the 1970s and ’80s, Sterling said, prompting renewed interest in her work as well as her compelling life.

Elusive about the meaning of her work, Ms. Carrington tired of interviewers who tried to make her an object of fascination.

“Everyone’s had an interesting life,” she told a reporter. “Unless they’re interested in business or something.”

Leonora Carrington was born April 6, 1917, in Lancashire, England, and grew up in a shadow-filled Edwardian mansion called Crookhey Hall. She described her father, a textile magnate, as a philistine who thought that “you didn’t do art — if you did, you were either poor or homosexual, which were more or less the same sort of crime.”

Rebelling at London’s social whirl, she studied art and found a new world when her mother sent her a book about surrealism that featured cover art by Ernst. At a dinner party soon after, they fell instantly in lust and spirited away to Paris and then to Provence.

In her paintings of the era, notably the self-portrait “The Inn of the Dawn Horse,” Ms. Carrington was drawn to images of horses, mostly to depict states of arousal and fertility. Many of her equine-inspired images showed up in a Paris exhibit of surrealist painters in 1938.

The Germans marched into Paris in 1940, and Ernst, whose art had been labeled “degenerate” by the Nazis, was rounded up as an enemy alien and taken to an internment camp.

Alone for months, Ms. Carrington grew despondent and tried to starve herself. She sold her home for a few francs, liberated her pet eagle and drove to Madrid.

“In the political confusion and the torrid heat,” she wrote in her diary, “I convinced myself that Madrid was the world’s stomach and that I had been chosen for the task of restoring this digestive organ to health.”

She became hostile with police at the British Embassy and was committed to an asylum, a period she wrote about in her acclaimed memoir “Down Below.” She was given drugs that caused her to hallucinate and go into spasms.

Her parents sent a guardian to get her, but Ms. Carrington was determined not to return to England. In Lisbon, she escaped by hailing a taxi and asking to be driven to the Mexican Embassy. She married a Mexican cultural attache, Renato Leduc. “It was the only way of getting out,” she later said.

They settled in Mexico City, and the marriage crumbled. Ms. Carrington took up with Emerico Weisz, a Hungarian emigre photographer who had covered the Spanish Civil War. She and Weisz marred in 1946 and had two sons, Gabriel and Pablo. Weisz died in 2007, and the sons survive.

Ms. Carrington counted many European exiles among her friends in Mexico, including surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel.

A former Bunuel assistant told the Sydney Morning Herald in 1997 that when the filmmaker visited Ms. Carrington’s home one day, the artist greeted him.

“You look very much like my guardian at the insane asylum,” she said. She proceeded to step into the bathroom and take a shower, fully dressed.

Bunuel was vexed, but he stared at her, thinking, “After all, I am a surrealist, but at what point does it stop?”

*This article originally appeared in the May 26, 2011 edition of the Washington Post.

Brain scans reveal the power of art

2011-05-09T16:24:00.000-07:00

View on the Stour near Dedham 1822' by John Constable
Photo: Bloomburg News

By Robert Mendick, Chief reporter 8:00AM BST 08 May 2011

Human guinea pigs underwent brain scans while being shown a series of 30 paintings by some of the world's greatest artists.
The artworks they considered most beautiful increased blood flow in a certain part of the brain by as much as 10 per cent – the equivalent to gazing at a loved one.
Paintings by John Constable, Ingres, the French neoclassical painter, and Guido Reni, the 17th century Italian artist, produced the most powerful 'pleasure' response in those taking part in the experiment.
Works by Hieronymus Bosch, Honore Damier and the Flemish artist Massys – the 'ugliest' art used in the experiment – led to the smallest increases in blood flow. Other paintings shown were by artists such as Monet, Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci and Cezanne.
Professor Semir Zeki, chair in neuroaesthetics at University College London, who conducted the experiment, said: "We wanted to see what happens in the brain when you look at beautiful paintings.

Related Articles:

National Art Pass for free museum entry 13 Apr 2011
Art and soul 08 May 2011

"What we found is when you look at art – whether it is a landscape, a still life, an abstract or a portrait – there is strong activity in that part of the brain related to pleasure.
"We put people in a scanner and showed them a series of paintings every ten seconds. We then measured the change in blood flow in one part of the brain.
"The reaction was immediate. What we found was the increase in blood flow was in proportion to how much the painting was liked.
"The blood flow increased for a beautiful painting just as it increases when you look at somebody you love. It tells us art induces a feel good sensation direct to the brain."
The test was carried out on dozens of people, who were picked at random but who had little prior knowledge of art and therefore would not be unduly influenced by current tastes and the fashionability of the artist.
The magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan measured blood flow in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, part of the brain associated with pleasure and desire.
The study, which is currently being peer reviewed, is likely to be published in an academic journal later this year.
Professor Zeki added: "What we are doing is giving scientific truth to what has been known for a long time – that beautiful paintings makes us feel much better.
"But what we didn't realise until we did these studies is just how powerful the effect on the brain is."
The study is being seized upon as proof of the need for art to be made as widely available to the general public as possible.
There is currently concern in the arts world that widespread budget cuts could affect accessibility while also slashing acquisition budgets.
"I have always believed art matters so it is exciting to see some scientific evidence to support the view life is enhanced by instantaneous contact with works of art," said Dr Stephen Deuchar, director of the Art Fund, the national fund-raising charity which has spent £24 million over the last five years helping to buy art for galleries and museums.
Last month, the organisation launched a National Art Pass giving free entry to more than 200 museums and galleries and 50 per cent off entry to major exhibitions.
The Art Fund has pledged to increase its funding by 50 per cent to £7 million a year by 2014 to make up for widespread budget cuts in the arts world.
The charity has been praised by Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt for showing that "philanthropy can be about small as well as large donations".

This article originally published by The Telegraph, on Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Imagery niggling

2011-03-26T15:54:00.000-07:00

I post a collage of some old & new works. Some finished_ others, in-process.

I am reading, "expressive Drawing" by Steven Aimone, and loving how it validates the looking/seeing experience of our individual humanness! You can make anything that you see, the WAY you see it_ your art!

Here too, are some inspirational quotes for today and everyday they serve your own higher functioning:

"Before I go I will remember that there’s someone out there who needs me.

I am living my life so they can find me!" _Someone said a Balinese dancer first said this!

"What you radiate in the world comes back to you!" _Nicholas Bellamy, a wise friend and fellow artist!

The National Museum of Women in the Arts, in Washington D.C.

2011-03-19T00:18:00.000-07:00

In conducting research during my undergraduate studies on women in the arts, I could not find any information locally that gave me enough of what I needed to treat my subjects fairly.
What a victorious thrill it was when I discovered that the NMWA would give me the supportive access I needed to over 250 names for French Women Artists in particular_ since this was my research focus!
I wound up writing two papers for two different projects on my subject, the second of which I wrote in both English and French.

Thank-you very much, National Museum of Women in the Arts!

Beautiful permission-giving inspiration!

2011-03-13T12:08:00.000-07:00

Check out the details to get involved on any scale that fits for you, right here at: Inside Out

I have never felt so finally identified until seeing two projects today of this scale and magnitude by just one person (at least out in front)!

I am looking for this kind support in the world! Who wants to help me be an Inside Out Artist in this world?!

*Leave your comments and contact info here!♡Thanks

Who Are you? Who? Who? Who? Who? I REALLY want to know?

2011-03-13T00:05:00.000-08:00

In my newest incarnation at a local museum, I am absolutely struggling to learn the art of telling people, primarily children, what looking at art is!

That the value of a person's own eyes (consciously) looking at what is called art, is a valuable act. Actively building on looking together, through facilitating each person speaking about what and how each one sees, in an organized, non-judgmental and encouraging manner, so as to empower the act of looking differently through shared conversation, what and how each person sees. Thereby, taking ownership of the art and the experience of looking_ together.

For example the current feature exhibit, outside of the many permanent, residency and visiting exhibits available to see at the museum_ is work of contemporary photographer, Chris Jordan. The exhibit of his work is titled: Running the Numbers.

*Watch the TED video of Chris' talk about why he does his photography, and notice non-judgmentally how you respond. Then, share it with friends and see how you all do!

I thought titling this post after the Who was appropriate. After all in light of this exhibit's message and mirror, who are we_ each one?!!

Then, some partial answers provoked by this particular exhibit's invitation to see deeply into one's own self, and one's own subsequent (lifelong) choices (in some cases), as documented and mirrored back to us by Chris Jordan's photography_ may for some, be found in these quotes that have recently crossed my own radar:

“I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.”

_ Don Delillo

“Love does truly come to those who still hope although they've been disappointed_ to those who still believe although they’ve been betrayed, to those who still choose to love

although they’ve been hurt before, and to those who have the courage to build trust again.” _ Paraphrased from Anonymous, posted to the Internet

Rediscovering Outstanding Women Pop Artists

2011-02-14T18:22:00.000-08:00

*The following article as posted on artdaily.org

Christa Dichgans, Stilleben mit Frosch, 1969 © Christa Dichgans, Privatsammlung, Berlin.

VIENNA.- Rediscovering outstanding women Pop artists, POWER UP fulfills Dorothy Iannone’s combative promise after fifty years. Currently on display until March 6, 2011 at Kunsthalle wien, the show aims at the reinterpretation of an art movement that until today has primarily been associated with male protagonists. Plastic, loud colors, reduced forms, and graphic contours – the nine women artists’ works on display resemble those of their male colleagues in many respects.

Whereas their works appeal to the taste of the masses, these artists, as pioneers of Feminism, have remained belligerent and critical. They reveal the consumer culture’s superficiality, exposing the commodity myth as an empty shell like Christa Dichgans, ironically transforming everyday objects to oversized kitsch objects like Jann Haworth, or exploring mass media clichés and superstar constructions like Rosalyn Drexler. Like Sister Corita, a committed peace activist, they took a clear stand on the sixties’ social and political events such as the Vietnam War.

The exhibition pursues its political perspective in those instances where the era’s current notions of what a woman is are revised by different views: Kiki Kogelnik and Marisol describe the corset in which the representation of women by themselves and by others is caught, while Evelyne Axell or Dorothy Iannone provocatively display the nude body, love, and sexuality, and, like Niki de Saint Phalle, attract the viewer’s attention with sophisticated modes of self-presentation.

The next great moment in history is ours! - Dorothy Iannone

“We choose to LOOK at LIFE all the TIME, and though we realize that they are in one sense adult comic books, they are also full of things that speak…“ For Sister Corita, the world of signs, advertising slogans, and the culture of logos was not just some vast wasteland, but a sphere that supplied her with input for an art nourished by everyday life. Her work, like that of Evelyne Axell, Christa Dichgans, Rosalyn Drechsler, Jann Haworth, Dorothy Iannone, Kiki Kogelnik, Marisol, and Niki de Saint Phalle, stands for feminine strategies of artistic self empowerment during the Pop Art era, particularly in the 1960s. While from an art historical point of view Pop Art is mainly associated with male protagonists, POWER UP – Female Pop Art intends to undertake a revision of this understanding through the presentation of outstanding women artists’ positions.

Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, commodity cult and critique of capitalism, high and low art, the women artists’ works on display in many aspects resemble those by their male colleagues in terms of material, subject matter, style, and working method. Documenting and hypostatizing the prosperity of the postwar era and reflecting upon the superficiality of consumerism, the artists unmask the commodity myth as an empty civilizational achievement like Christa Dichgans or affirm certain items by turning them into oversized kitsch objects like Jann Haworth with her Soft Sculptures. Through the graphic character of their simple language of forms, their use of new materials like plastic, and their choice of garish colors, women pop artists, as feminist pioneers attracting maximum attention with their self presentations like Evelyne Axell, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Kiki Kogelnik, satisfied the taste of the mass and yet remained militant, critical, and exceptional. The exhibition does not postulate some genuinely feminine art, but strives to focus on a number of outstanding women artists’ oeuvres in the field of Pop Art and to shed light on their identity creating practice and their view of women’s role in society which was very much determined by patriarchal notions in the 1960s.

These artists’ approaches have revised the male regime of viewing and such representations of women as Tom Wesselmann’s deindividualized matrices of the female body, Mel Ramos’s picturesque fusion of advertisements with lasciviously rendered nudes featuring as objects of desire, and Allen Jones’s sadomasochistically arranged female sexual companions. Instead, they describe the corset in which women’s self representation and representation by others seemed to be caught in those years like Jann Haworth, Kiki Kogelnik, and Marisol, highlight the attempt to shake off the fetters of domestic life and become visible in public by means of art like Christa Dichgans, and provocatively expose the female body, love, and sexuality like Evelyne Axell and Dorothy Iannone. Painting over newspapers in an iconoclastic gesture, Rosalyn Drexler explores the creation of clichés and gender typifications in Hollywood films as well as the construction of superstars. Open toward the popular culture surrounding her, Sister Corita, in an early act of culture jamming, relied on advertising propaganda for creating new messages which were democratically and serigraphically produced and sold at a low price. Her works, like Kiki Kogelnik’s, Marisol’s, or Niki de Saint Phalle’s, comprise critical commentaries on contemporary events and political contexts such as the Vietnam War.

The ladies of the “Les Années" present strategies of self empowerment, celebrate female sexuality and lust, draw on pin ups, excerpts from consumer culture, and fragments of an occasionally very banal everyday world in a bad girl manner, comment upon social changes, and translate personal issues into political ones in their clearly autobiographically tinted oeuvres. Their proto feminist works counter the affective death of classical Pop Art and its cool and anonymous style. By also employing a traditional female language of forms, using textiles and ornamental elements, and relying on a naïve imagery, their approach idiosyncratically extends the established canon of art. What they share with this style is the humor and lightness of an attitude toward life whose facets and variations are still unfolding in today’s art.

Kunsthalle wien | Dorothy Iannone | POWER UP | Christa Dichgans | Vienna |

Helping a new friend Get Out The Word:

2010-11-24T13:19:00.000-08:00

Let’s make art together…
posted: November 24th, 2010 by Luna

…while exploring our relationship with money!

I’m writing a book called Wild Money: A Right-Brained, Knock-Your-Socks-Off Approach to Loving Your Relationship with Money (working title).
After looking high and low for books on personal finance written for non-linear creative people, I finally realized I’d have to do it myself. I want to create a book filled with the artwork of “creatives” from around the world.

Want to play?

Anyone can participate. There is no prerequisite other than desire. I envision a community sharing our insights and attitudes; histories and dreams of how money has woven through our lives; tales of helping, healing, hurting, reconnecting, disconnecting, saving, destroying and otherwise wildly impacting our tender, brilliant, expressive selves.

I have a short time frame for this project, so I’ll need all artwork by Dec 15, 2010. If you are willing and able to share your art (and maybe some writing if you’re so inclined), please click here for more information.

I’ve only just begun to explore the vast communities on the web and need some help linking-in. So I’d appreciate you passing this on to as many people, lists, groups and social media feeds as possible.

Thank you in advance!

Luna Jaffe, CFP

Lunaria Financial, LTD

7837 SW Capitol Highway, Portland, OR 97219

503-452-7000

Securities offered through KMS Financial Services, Inc.

*This is a post to assist a new acquaintance get the word out on a project that sounds truly inspired; she has also come onto my radar via a reputable mutual acquaintance. Check out the links, roll the idea around in your head/heart & check out the details for yourself. I have already gotten on-board!

New Project

2010-11-21T16:41:00.000-08:00

(Quel réactionism!) *Artist David Black conducts a workshop on Tunisian collaborative painting with League students and artists:

I am beginning a new curatorial project focusing on the collaborative nature of art-making. Hmmmmm, more details to follow in the months to come. Do stay tuned!

(A collaborative work, I co-created some years ago; "An Ode to Gaugin"!)

My artwork presenting at Pegasus Gallery

2010-11-18T13:06:00.001-08:00

My artwork is on view at PEGASUS FRAME STUDIO & GALLERY, 341 SW Second Street in Corvallis, OR 97333
As is the intrique of the Drebing Collection, all featured amid the dense collection of true artistic talent in the Mid-Willamette Valley, in this hometown holiday reception tonight from 6 to 9pm. *Come downtown to join us in a delightful fall evening celebration of the local arts.

Hometown Holiday Season: Drebing Collection Reception Tonight

2010-11-18T09:29:00.000-08:00

"Nearly 30 years after his death, sculptor Earl Drebing is getting his first big show.

Titled “She Brought Us His Gifts,” the exhibition will run through December at Pegasus Gallery, 361 S.W. Second St. The gallery will host a reception from 5 to 9 p.m. Thursday, November 18, 2010.

The show features more than two dozen finished sculptures and a number of fragments.

Drebing, a self-taught California artist who died in 1983, never had a major showing of his work during his lifetime. His sculptures went into storage after his death and only resurfaced in 2009, when his stepdaughter, Corvallis-area resident Jewels Drebing, brought some samples of his work to Pegasus.

Many of the works are highly realistic masks or heads executed from plaster life masks. What makes them unique is Drebing’s artistic process, which he developed himself.

Using the plaster masks as a framework, Drebing would overlay them with a mixture of wood shavings and airplane glue to create the finished sculptures, many of which have large, elaborate bases of carved or inlaid wood.

Drebing’s work was the subject of a lengthy article in the July 18 Gazette-Times and a subsequent documentary film that has aired several times on Channel 29, the Corvallis public-access cable channel. The film will air several times this month, with showings at 2 p.m. today, 2 and 9:30 p.m. Thursday, 10:30 a.m. Saturday, 10:30 a.m. Sunday, and 12:30 and 5:30 p.m. Monday." *This article was originally printed in the GT/Corvallis, OR, Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Bill Shumway, artist & co-owner Pegasus Gallery

"There is no Why!"

2010-11-02T00:00:00.001-07:00

"Il n'est pas du courage, quand on suit simplement la passion d'une personne." _Philippe Petit

The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914-18

2010-10-31T11:39:00.000-07:00

The Nasher Museum of Art on the campus of Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, is hosting this exhibition as of September 30, 2010 to January 2, 2011.

" "The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914-18" is the first exhibition devoted to this Anglo-American movement to be presented in the United States or Italy. It is also the first to attempt to recreate the three Vorticist exhibitions mounted during World War I that served to define the group's radical aesthetic for the public. An abstracted figurative style, combining machine-age forms and the energetic imagery suggested by a vortex, Vorticism emerged in London at a moment when the staid English art scene had been jolted by the advent of French Cubism and Italian Futurism. Absorbing elements from both, but also defining themselves against these foreign idioms, Vorticism was a short-lived but pivotal modernist movement that spanned the years of World War I (1914-1918)."

From ItalianFuturism.org:
"This seminal exhibition is co-curated by Mark Antliff, Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University, and Vivien Greene, Curator of Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. The exhibition will showcase approximately 90 works (paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, photographs and related ephemera) by members of the Vorticist movement drawn from public and private collections throughout Europe and North America. The group took its name from “Vortex,” a term coined by the American expatriate literary great Ezra Pound in 1913, when describing the “maximum energy” he and his colleagues wished to instill among London’s literary and artistic avant-garde. The Vorticist painters created compositions activated by zigzagging, diagonal forms and—in contrast to the Cubists and Futurists—more fully embraced geometric, abstract imagery, while not abandoning three-dimensional space. They harnessed the language of abstraction to convey the industrial dynamism they associated with the “vortex” of the modern city.

Among historians of modernism, Vorticism has been traditionally treated as an insular British art movement. “The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914-18″ will overcome that myth by identifying the movement as a distinctly Anglo-American endeavor developed in 1914 as an avant-garde response to the impact of French Cubism and Italian Futurism on artists and writers in London and New York."

From the Tate Glossary:

"The Vorticists were a British avant-garde group formed in London in 1914 by the artist, writer and polemicist, Wyndham Lewis. Their only group exhibition was held in London the following year. Vorticism was launched with the first issue (of two) of the magazine Blast which contained among other material two aggressive manifestos by Lewis 'blasting' what he considered to be the effeteness of British art and culture and proclaiming the Vorticist aesthetic: 'The New Vortex plunges to the heart of the Present we produce a New Living Abstraction'. Vorticist painting combines Cubist fragmentation of reality with hard-edged imagery derived from the machine and the urban environment, to create a highly effective expression of the Vorticists sense of the dynamism of the modern world. It was in effect a British equivalent to Futurism, although with doctrinal differences, and Lewis was deeply hostile to the Futurists. Other artists were Lawrence Atkinson, Jessica Dismorr, Cuthbert Hamilton, William Roberts, Helen Saunders, Edward Wadsworth, and the sculptors Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. David Bomberg was not formally a member of the group but produced major work in a similar style. The First World War brought Vorticism to an end, although in 1920 Lewis made a brief attempt to revive it with Group X."

*Thank-you for that lesson in art history, the Tate!

**This exhibit will travel:

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice [January 29 - May 15, 2011]
Tate Britain in London [June 14 - September 18, 2011]

What's Happening Now!

2010-10-27T20:52:00.000-07:00

There is a small reception for an "en Plein Air" exhibit at the Pegasus Gallery this Thursday from 6 to 9:30-ish, in which my artwork is playing a supporting role with 5 of my works included in this exhibit. (*Find the address & directions on the website.)
Yet the bigger, splashier reception is scheduled for the 2nd Thursday, same time-frame in November! This is the one show that I would like people to consider coming to, to see my work, as the regional landscape show will play host to the Drebing Collection! Quite the local intrigue. Truly!
*Also of note, is the most recent consignment of a Marc Chagall etching, available for viewing on request at Pegasus Gallery. A heads up for the true print collector!

The invitation design for celebrating turning 56

2010-08-30T22:58:00.000-07:00

In my Ariadne phase here in midlife, I am navigating the Labyrinth from inside the center of the womb of the Great Mother. Dying to the last of the former once deeply internalized, unconscious dependent daughter identity. I am carefully discovering that I am Theseus, following the string back out into the light and the world, reborn.

The Cosmic Dance of Shiva; Who sees/hears these myths literally?

2010-08-25T15:48:00.000-07:00

Listen to this UCSD lecture on: "Neurology and the Passion for Art," given by tenured Professor Ramachandran of the Psychology and Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego, Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute, and the Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition, also on the UCSD campus.

Who is a Synaesthete?

Vilayanur Ramachandran on your mind | Video on TED.com

Successful Art Sale

2010-08-11T15:49:00.000-07:00

I finally sold this beauty of a painting over the week-end!!

*Don't forget to visit Modest Needs and do whatever you can to help on that project, or contact me via email on the top right side bar_ to purchase a painting from me!

Modest Needs, can you help?

2010-07-13T18:36:00.001-07:00

Have you ever heard of Modest Needs?

Even though the link I have provided takes you straight to my particular grant request, you can go to the homepage to check out the whole Modest Needs story from the "Start Here" section on the menu bar. Or really, from the top of any page_ including mine.

My own grant request is modest, as I transition back into new employment, after a recession lay-off 10 months ago. Your donation, of any size to my request, will be ever so appreciated! Just click on the link below and thank-you, very much!!

Application 159557: New Job - Rent Help - Modest Needs®

*Be sure to pass this information on to those you know who may need the kind of help available through a Modest Needs grant!!

I am Finally Rounding the Corner of Coming into My Own!!

2010-07-02T12:31:00.000-07:00

I feel surrounded by it more and more everyday, this coming into one's own. This process of 'something' that is becoming more me that I know I have been building since I was a small child. Building this coming into me since I can remember as a small child, learning to navigate the chaos that surrounded my entire world. Building by navigating and constantly adapting my steps and abilities. Adapting to stay focused regardless of the circumstances, or chaos once forever beyond my control. Building and eventually learning to walk my own path, by every step or misstep, into becoming a young adult. Walking the steps that have led me literally solo for years and years on the path of parenting and art-making when no one, absolutely no one seemed to care to ever notice. When no one ever tried to learn to even care, or come close.

Never-the-less mysteriously, wonderfully, just very lately, positive acknowledgments are slowly finding me! They are true heart-felt acknowledgments reflecting such nurturing and offer unknowingly, such soul-quenching depth of nourishment that I am moved to tears of absolute joy at their coming! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh! Sweet manna from heaven, the nourishment of love! The nature of unconditional love I have always chosen and always will choose over just making money for its own sake! Not that making money is repudiated for its own sake, by me. It has always been the chaos between choosing love or money that I have ALWAYS rejected.

In the struggle of clarifying these dynamics within; in the face of heroically struggling to band-aid together the ability to pay my own rent, with employment that hasn't quite sent me to work that I can be paid for. In the struggle of possibly continued mistiming more hopeful applications-in-waiting for the opportunity to be called to interview for other employment options, more fitting to my long hand-built skills and abilities. Called to share my experiences, reflecting life-long passions in the arts and culture for pay, I am waiting. Waiting for the seemingly endless bureaucratic sluggishness to roll out arbitrary decision-making that may include not just looking at me seriously, but also more aptly for a constructive, long-ever-due change, actually hire and pay me, as a valuable 'member of the team' this time.

In the face of all of these on-going and overwhelming, (needlessly obstacle-strewn) challenges, I have also discovered that some of my images are currently included on the website, homepage banner of an arts advocacy organization in NYC, called Fractured Atlas! The same organization with which I have my fiscally sponsored art project posted, so as to receive funding enough that I might create more unfettered, full-time for a creative, novel change from the everyday responsibilities like rent, bills, etc!

All of this struggling aside today, I then opened this blog to also find one of the most endearing acknowledgments written yet in the comments section of my art blog! A comment written from someone I really admire a lot and who is in my fb network. A comment from someone who I have not always found a natural for me to communicate with, even as I have committed to myself over and over to win this person over to me so, we might become not just women colleagues and allies in the arts, but also friends!!

*Wow! CM! YOU Wow me today!!

And so, from another resource on my path today, I post acknowledgments in the best ways I know how_ by including the fortuitous words of the 17th Annual U.S. Poet/activist- Laureate, William S. Merwin:

Thanks

by W.S Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions.

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
looking up from tables we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

I am a new EI!

2010-06-11T09:27:00.000-07:00

Today, I am posting a small joy being celebrated in this world! At the same time it's really big, when one zooms into focus what joy can represent in one's life on so many levels, and in particular, in no small way!!!
It is a BIG JOY because it does in part, reflect lifelong perseverance of hand-building a dream from my childhood: to be an artist in this world. A dream inside one person, to openly help share and spread truth, beauty and freedom on the soul level, in the creative voice, through creative expression and now, as an Exhibition Interpreter!

This joy came in the mail yesterday by letter, to tell me that I have been accepted into a fairly prestigious program at a local art museum!! Acceptance into 12-months of in-depth training for this important and valuable position. Important and valuable, for the service I can embody in a more public role and certainly, in an additional professional capacity at long last to share my desires, that others know how many ways there are to recognize the value of fine art in one's own world. I am ecstatic to show the art, guide the perception-building abilities of other people, and simultaneously educate how, any person can begin to build a relationship with greater personal depth, to one's capacity for conscious recognition of what value art has in one's own life and world. A depth of recognition no matter what age a person is! From very young to wise and life-experienced, art does hold great value on so many levels, that actively reinforces the quality of our personal and collective lives, in our communities and our nation.
Finally, this news is an invaluable joy to me today, for the long-term benefit a position of this nature has for a hand-built career such as mine, a career that means life to me in so many ways.

I am very proud of this opportunity and of myself, as it has taken almost everything to arrive at a moment such as this. Celebrate with me, small and large joys of personal achievement and accomplishment that are everywhere in this world today! Joys easy to recognize and celebrate if you know where to look_ you will find them!

Women & Power; Our Time to Lead

2010-05-11T08:53:00.001-07:00

My goal this fall is to attend this conference! Meanwhile, I am opening my own doors on a vision; my business as an artist/healer. The time has come. This is empowering work that starts in an intersection in body-centered psychology, nutritional healing and in visual work; expressive arts.
Contact me, starting on the blog here, or via the email address on the top, right side-bar.
I am looking for investors and adding clients_ I hope to hear from you!

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY 2010

2010-05-09T08:25:00.000-07:00

Like a Delicate Wallpaper, Busy Bees Use Flower Petals For Nest

(paraphrased)_ originally written by Kathleen Masterson

May 6, 2010

When we think of bees nests, we often think of a giant hive buzzing with social activity, worker bees and honey. But scientists recently discovered a rare, solitary type of bee that makes tiny nests by plastering together flower petals.

Jerome Rozen/American Museum of Natural History

This nest of the O. avoseta bee, a variety of bee not seen in the western hemisphere, is made of flower petals that holds a single egg.

Each nest is a multicolored, textured cocoon — a papier-mâché-like husk surrounding a single egg, protecting it while it develops into an adult bee.

'It's not common to us to see a bee use parts of plants for nests,' says (paraphrased), Dr. Jerome Rozen of the American Museum of Natural History, of the unexpected find. His team stumbled across the nests of the Osmia (Ozbekosima) avoseta bee in Turkey. Oddly enough, another team discovered the same bee and flowery nests in Iran on the same day. The two teams published their research together in the American Museum Novitates.
Multiple flower-lined nests of the O. avoseta bee are nestled in the ground.

Jerome Rozen/American Museum of Natural History

One mother bee may make around 10 nests, often nestling the single-cell berths near each other.

These nests are a fascinating natural work of art, and they're also key to understanding more about how the roughly 20,000 species of bees live.

"There's a demand for biologists to know bees nowadays," Rosen says. "They are the foremost animal pollinators of plants, and tremendously important for maintaining ecosystems — not only crops but also for conservation."

To learn more, the scientists watched the busy female bees. Building a nest takes a day or two, and the female bee might create about 10 nests in total, often right next to each other. To begin construction, she bites the petals off of flowers and flies each petal — one by one — back to the nest, a peanut-sized burrow in the ground.

Jerome Rozen/American Museum of Natural History

A bee closely related to O. avoseta bites off a flower petal with its mandibles.

She then shapes the multi-colored petals into a cocoon-like structure, laying one petal on top of the other and occasionally using some nectar as glue. When the outer petal casing is complete, she reinforces the inside with a paper-thin layer of mud, and then another layer of petals, so both the outside and inside adhere to one another, in what becomes a potpourri of purple, pink and yellow.

Jerome Rozen/American Museum of Natural History

Peeling back the outer layer of flower petals reveals the paper-thin mud layer.

These meticulous shells are just over a half-inch long and usually will house just one tiny egg. To prepare for her offspring, the mother collects pollen and nectar, which she carries back to the burrow in a nifty part of the digestive tract called the crop. She deposits this gooey blob of nutritional goodness in the bottom of the flower-petal nest. Then, she lays the egg, right on top of the gelatinous blob.

A closeup of an egg, laid on top of nutrients.

Jerome Rozen/American Museum of Natural History

The mother bee lays a single egg in the flowery bower, right on top of a nutritious deposit of nectar and pollen.

At this point, it's time to seal in the egg. The mother bee neatly folds in the inner layer of petals, smears a paper-thin mud layer and then folds the outer petals. The casing is nearly airtight, which helps protect the vulnerable egg (and later larva, then pupa) from flooding or excessive dryness or hoofed animals.

In only three to four days, the egg hatches into a larva. When it finishes feasting on the nectar, the larva spins a cocoon (still inside the shell, which has hardened into a protective casing by this point) and then hangs out. Rosen says he isn't sure whether it spends the winter as a larva or as an adult. But at some point the creature's tissue begins to restructure itself, and it transforms into an adult. Come springtime, the adult bee emerges from its flowery bower.

When the cycle starts all over again.

Continuing A Woman's Worth

2010-04-24T18:11:00.000-07:00

EMBRACE YOUR INNER GIRL

Pain to Power

A Woman's Worth

2010-03-17T01:01:00.000-07:00

I am still searching for reasonable information sources about two creative and independently ambitious women... Séraphine de Senlis and Edith Gregor Halpert. One born in France and referred to as a 'foundling' and the other born into a well-to-do merchant family in Russia; who upon losing everything, migrated with her family to America as an infant. Edith, unbeknownst to nearly everyone, grew up to become one of the most influential persons to shape the very foundation of modern art in this country! Her legacy was at risk of slipping into oblivion, until it was unearthed a few short years ago and written about by Lindsay Pollock. The story of a creative and resourceful life, as Séraphine uniquely lived her own, is still to be uncovered and told to the world! Who will be called to complete the project of telling about Séraphine de Senlis, possibly as part of their own development of becoming?

Along with these two examples of women nearly forgotten, or not recognized at all for their preciously valuable contributions to this world and humanity, I could point to the poverty of detail in my own female biological family history! As far as the impact this reality has had on the quality of my own development into adulthood, it is no wonder that I may be just emerging from my own struggles to find and shape my own sense of worth as a woman and human being. Just emerging into awareness to understand what my responsibilities are, in shaping my own successes in life. Just beginning to clearly envision a life of value for my own self, contributing to the world in which I now live, and understand that I have arrived internally to a calm that I may just leave a legacy of conscious worth for my daughter. Not that any of this knowing or shaping can be done in advance of the doing; in advance of the living it into reality. Yet, in light of the struggle to simply locate records of the value of other significant women's lives, that a general lack of awareness for the value of self has been such a struggle, a struggle to break through the external layers of cultural amnesia caked on top of the prism of personal experience and history, I must ask, do we need to continue this standard amnesia approaching recognition, orientation and familiarity for the valuable in defining human consciousness evolution? I am searching for a simpler, shared language to do this, learn this, to share this!

This post is not a lament of personal difficulties but only a brief comment out loud for the recognition of my own propensity for naïveté. To somehow always expect what is not already in place in the world, as though it is my right that my expectations of life, ought already be so in manifest reality. Yet too, this consciousness which Western societies define as confidence, this consciousness of expectation is in reality, a tricky balance to learn; to consciously cultivate internally. Learning to abandon the ego in the process.
At risk of sounding egotistical this post then, is an act of my own recording for all the world to find. That I am experiencing recognition for the significance to learn conscious, internal self-worth as a woman, as a human being, on a global and microcosmic level today, this week, and I am posting about this recognition for it's own sake at this moment.
My worth, any person's worth is up to me/each one of us_ to define by living that inherent worth we are each invited (by birth), to bring into reality.
The only expectation then, is to truly consciously become all that we can each be. I am recognizing this is my job to do in, and with my life from here on out...

Life lived in pursuit of clear truth, seems to be a process of distilling everything down to its essential nature. Henry David Thoreau is someone whose words I have paraphrased before, where my own path seems in relation to his wisdom in quiet hours. Having just come back across this quote, I add it here where it seems relevant (in my life) again: "In proportion as she simplifies her life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." ~Thoreau, paraphrased

Tokens of well-wishes sent in support of my very first public exhibit, 1988.

Séraphine de Senlis

2010-03-09T12:42:00.001-08:00

This image is (original to me) posted on flickr by, Dalbera

I first learned about Séraphine de Senlis in 1999, as I was beginning to build my undergrad research on French women artists. I chose not to use her work in my research at that time, because there was so little to find out about her. However, I was recently greatly enamored to have rediscovered her as subject in the movie snapshot last fall, about her work, her experience of being discovered as a naif artist & that all too brief time frame the movie covered on her personal life.
My rediscovery of the life and work of Séraphine, occurred through amazing coincidences I was experiencing on line; my own naïve discovery of a phenomenon called blog swapping!
Today, I have decided to renew my (again!) all too brief_ research about this woman and artist, by committing to write more about her, as I unearth the gems of info on Séraphine de Senlis, there is yet to discover!!

Beating the Recession Blues with a little jazz at my RENT PARTY and YOU are invited!

2010-02-01T13:01:00.001-08:00

I invite you to join me in some stylish survival reverie!! As my job search endeavors continue in the face of this daunting recession, I am throwing a Rent Party, the roots of which I discovered many years ago!! Since it went over went quite well at that time, in a whole whoosh of last minute spontaneity, making the rent in a sigh of relief and a lot of gratitude, I want to throw open the doors online to some afternoon socializing! With the caveat that your visit here will add some cash to the pot upon arriving! 'Course some folks, at the first Rent Party or "skiffle" years ago, enjoyed themselves first and then, wrote generous checks upon leaving! Wow! It was such a fantastic interaction of mutual support that I am enthusiastic to again re-create what seems to be a great way to spend a special afternoon with you, your favorite food, and a little offering of some great jazz music! Heck, invite your family and friends and make it a whole party right where you are!! Just don't forget to hit the paypal button below!

In afore said resilient manner, I have posted some jazz music via Pandora, featuring the one and only Duke the-man Ellington, the Count Basie and maestro Art Tatum, plus a ridiculous number of other equally talented names in classical jazz & musical history_ who will just show up on each station, for your dancing/listening pleasure!
The longer you stay, dance and listen to the music with that glass of whatever you like to drink best (to your health!!)_ check below the music to find the paypal button I have set up to make it easy to contribute to my RENT PARTY online, and do donate as generously as you can! Remember it's for a good cause; helping one more person keep their own roof over, in this case, my own head, while I continue searching for work! Stay tuned to my blog for updates on this progress too!

Feel free to leave a comment here if you have any employment to offer, as my skills base is broad! I would love a chance to telecommute in a paid entry-level illustration &/or graphic design intern assignment, for example! Here is my LinkedIn connection. On it I have posted my ideal employment goals, plus my work history background; don't hesitate to talk to me about what skills you may be seeking. Employment-wise, let's network and see how we can get connected!! If a RENT PARTY is good enough for Steely Dan...!

And THANK-YOU very, very much for your support here today!!! Enjoy my Rent Party and please donate via the paypal button below!

As an additional treat to the RENT PARTY, I have created an incentive for donors, to own this painting as the highest bidder, in helping me to achieve the RENT PARTY's informal fund-raising goals! This is in conjunction to the main event I will be hosting here at my house, on the 21st of THIS month! Sunday after next, from 3 to 7pm! Bring a pen, some extra cash, a willingness to socialize, network and share a little healthy mirth in the face of challenges. (*Please note that bids start at $200 on the painting!)
It is February, so spread the love and donate today, as often and as much you can and own this painting, entitled: "Vous Etes Né Comme Vous Etes; Un Esprit Beau!"

* It seems one might need to reference: "Timeless Rhythms Studio" when filling in the donate info after clicking the button! **This is my first time to use paypal for anything (!) so, please share your input if you are experienced and see anything that needs attention. Just leave a comment on the blog, and let me know how you like my RENT PARTY_ thanks!

* If there is only a big blue rectangle (below) with a spinning gear in the center of it, just hit the refresh button on your computer and then give the blue rectangle a few patient seconds_ the music menu will then magically appear!

Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity | Video on TED.com

2010-01-31T13:44:00.000-08:00

Stanford Law Professor and Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity | Video on TED.com

4 years later!

2010-01-27T22:51:00.000-08:00

Four years after posting my art blog, Timeless Rhythms_ my visitor count has hit 6000! Woooooo!!!!!! Hoooooo!!!!!! I am excited! It is nice to be posting one of the intelligent locations on the web that an artist can count on. Count on to find tons of reputable materials about all kinds of resources in the art world. From other artists workings, to galleries and museums world-wide; houses of good quality art and even whimsical works! Timeless Rhythms is place on the net that gives focus to the art produced by incredible women artists of all media, including my own, toot! Toot! There are artist resources including 501 c 3 sponsorship for individual artists, and all kinds of support that other communities and states arts organizations seem to continue to resist creating closer to home; resources in support of more local "revenue streams!". Fractured Atlas is an organization that will support the individual artist learning to fund your project where we each live in America! I don't reveal too many details because I want you to be intrigued by your own searches here! Discover for yourself because yes, everything about creating takes time and you are worth the time it takes!
Even with all this resource information, I am still very much feeling my way in the dark on this path as artist with life! A path that requires all of my confidence in being and doing something that I know am supposed to in this world. Contributing to the world more beautifully, that in addition to my journal entries_ speak visually to freedom, to love, to truth.
Therefore, I continue learning to open my life to this creative process, to healthy creative collaborators and patronage of my work, to new friends and loved ones, deepening my connections to those who are so much part of my life, especially my daughter_ I love you with all my heart!
Thank-you to everyone who stops in to visit this corner of my Timeless Rhythms Studio and Online Journal!! Keep coming back; leave your comments! I love knowing you are out in this river of life with me!

It All Happened inside of Five Minutes_ Literally!

2010-01-23T19:33:00.000-08:00

Tonight, I came home from my weekly check-in with a friend whose shop is not far from my current abode, and thought I would just check the local craig's listings for employment potential. This has become part of my daily ritual for months now. What did my wondering eyes happen to see first, at the top of today's listings, but the following ad title(?):

Reception and Bookkeeping /ART GALLERY/ (corvallis/albany)

I began this quest about 7pm my time and by 7:10pm, the ad had literally disappeared from the craigslist listings all together! DISAPPEARED right before my eyes! But, not before I had done a little digging after, I had responded immediately to the ad.
I was duped; taken in; my personal contact information scooped up and who knows how it may be being used, as we speak.

I did also just contact my bank to cover my back, just in-case. I am also posting it to my blog for everyone to be aware of the level of unscrupulousness that some desperate souls will stoop to, in a recession. BEWARE of all employment ads on craigslist anymore. I am sorry to say this, but it has become a nest of connivers! Not just this ad, but increasingly there are more phantom employment gimmicks posted than actual, local positions for real work!

The ad of such concern in my experience, as it appeared briefly (a couple of hours total from the look of things) on craigslist tonight, is as follows, DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU!!!:

Date: 2010-01-23, 5:40PM PST
Reply to: see below

ART GALLERY BOOKKEEPER

Major contemporary art gallery (specializing in contemporary painting and sculpture), located in midtown, is currently interviewing for a full-time position. This position involves bookkeeping, gallery reception (answering the telephone and maintaining front desk) as well as some assistance with archiving.

The position requires someone who is highly organized, detail oriented, efficient, and quick with numbers, as well as energetic, unpretentious, and personable. The applicant should have experience as a bookkeeper and a strong visual sensibility. The applicant must be proficient with a Windows PC and have knowledge of Microsoft Word and Excel, as well as some experience with databases and the internet.

The work-week for this position will be Tuesday through Saturday during the fall, winter, and spring, and Tuesday through Friday during the summer.

This is a long-term position. After an initial trial period, the Gallery requests a commitment of at least three years.

Please contact Thomas M. Smith at thomasmsmith@gmx.com and attach a resume if possible.

* Location: corvallis/albany
* Compensation: great compensation - negotiable!
* Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
* Please, no phone calls about this job!
* Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

This is a copy of the autoresponder email contents that came back in my emailbox:

thomasmsmith@gmx.com
to me:

show details 6:56 PM, 1/23/10

GMX Autoresponder

Thank you for your interest in the Reseption and Bookkeeping position we have posted through Craigslist. To complete the application process please click on the link below.

To apply for this job click here http://newjobsforlife.com?183466

Thank you
Thomas Smith

This autoresponder e-mail was sent in reply to your message. Please note that additional automatic replies will only be sent once per week, regardless of the number of times you try to contact this recipient.

© 2008 GMX Internet Services Inc.
GMX is a registered trademark of GMX Internet Services Inc.

THIS IS THE SITE, CONCERNING FRAUDULENCE THAT CAME UP, IN A SIMPLE GOOGLE SEARCH FOR THE NAME OF THE COMPANY (THOMAS M. SMITH GALLERY), it came up as a "Money Mule Scam":

http://www.fraudwatchinternational.com/fake-jobs/thomassmithartsgallery/

Thinking about Stillness_ and Noticing

2010-01-11T12:49:00.000-08:00

"Beauty Arises In The Stillness Of Your Presence

What you have just described is something that I have occasionally experienced for brief moments when I am alone and surrounded by nature.

Yes, Zen masters use the word satori to describe a flash of insight, a moment of no-mind and total presence. Although satori is not a lasting transformation, be grateful when it comes, for it gives you a taste of enlightenment. You may, indeed, have experienced it many times without knowing what it is and realizing its importance. Presence is needed to become aware of the beauty, the majesty, the sacredness of nature. Have you ever gazed up into the infinity of space on a clear night, awestruck by the absolute stillness and inconceivable vastness of it? Have you listened, truly listened to the sound of a mountain stream in the forest? Or to the song of a blackbird at dusk on a quiet summer evening? To become aware of such things, the mind needs to be still. You have to put down for a moment your personal baggage of problems, of past and future, as well as all of your knowledge; otherwise, you will see but not see, hear but not hear. Your total presence is required.
Beyond the beauty of the external forms, there is more here: something that cannot be named, something ineffable. some deep, inner, holy essence. Whenever and wherever there is beauty, this inner essence shines through somehow. It only reveals itself to you when you are present. Could it be that this nameless essence and your presence are one and the same? Would it be there without your presence? Go deeply into it. Find out for yourself.

When you experience these moments of presence, you likely didn’t realize that you were briefly in a state of no-mind. This is because the gap between that state and the influx of thought was too narrow. Your satori may have only lasted a few seconds before the mind came in, but it was there; otherwise, you would not have experienced the beauty. Mind can neither recognize nor create beauty. Only for a few seconds, while you were completely present, was that beauty or that sacredness there. Because the narrowness of that gap and a lack of vigilance and alertness on your part, you were probably unable to see the fundamental difference between perception, the thoughtless awareness of beauty, and the naming and interpreting of it as thought: the time gap was so small that it seemed to be a single process. The truth is, however, that the moment thought came in, all you had was a memory of it.

The wider the time gap between perception and thought, the more depth there is to you as a human being, which is to say the more conscious you are.

Many people are so imprisoned in their minds that the beauty of nature does not really exist for them. They might say, “What a pretty flower,” but that’s just a mechanical mental labeling. Because they are not still, not present, they don’t truly see the flower, don’t feel its essence, its holiness_ just as they don’t know themselves, don’t feel their own essence, their own holiness.

Because we live in such a mind-dominated culture, most modern art, architecture, music and literature are devoid of beauty, of inner essence, with very few exceptions. the reason is that the people who created those things cannot_ even for a moment_ free themselves from their mind. So they are never in touch with that place within where true creativity and beauty arise. The mind left to itself creates monstrosities, and not only in art galleries. Look at our urban landscapes and industrial wastelands. No civilization has ever produced so much ugliness." _Eckhart Tolle, The Power of NOW, pgs. 96-98

Image progressions on the current commssion & quality of life musings for the new year

2010-01-05T01:43:00.001-08:00

To start the new year off right, I am posting progressions of my current commission, two studies in chalk pastel accomplished thus far.

The quality of these images is not satisfactory as they were both take with the camera on a cell phone! Someone give me real a camera!

What I also want to share with you is that, I scanned through Oprah's magazine out on the local stands yesterday! Hey! I even look at Martha's stuff occasionally and glean great inspiration there also! These are two women who can put only their first names in google... can you?
Anyway, I found two things in the current issue of "O" Magazine that are pertinent for me, and since I know myself as somewhere in the middle spectrum of humanity in many ways, I know there is stuff in there for you too! Besides in a new year, I want to really put my truth out into the world because I do know the ripple effect this practice has in one's own life! It is time for that effect to be more dominantly positive in my life! I am just the last one to learn how make money from any of those good ideas, which is connected to the second really awesome thing I found in "O" this month! (more on that at the bottom of this post!)

So, the first thing is this survey for all of us outsider job-seekers, focused on the seven most striving skills we all possess in one combination or another! They can also make really good adjective resource material for the résumé, just be discerning in your use of them. Or not, depending on your style! Does that work? Are you successful in this approach?
I am asking because I have no experience with other people enough to know about what I am good at at this point! I know I have a lot to offer in this world!

I also recognize I can no longer do everything alone as I have done for far too long in my life. The fear that an adult survivor of a mentally ill parent carries around with them, is an identity of internalized terror and chaos they hope no one else will notice. Hm-m-m-m... truth is, I am really a sunshiny person temperamentally. I just got buried for a long time_ but you know what they say about finding your way in the dark_ at least I always have, "...in the heart of darkness one finds light." I am that pin prick of light, that mere glimmer and we all know what springs from those faintest of shinings!
So here is what I got back from taking the "Who Am I Meant To BE?" survey on oprah.com: (in case you can relate to my profile, these beautiful survival descriptions are accompanied with employment possibilities too!)

Who Am I Meant to Be?
By Anne Dranitsaris, PhD
http://www.oprah.com

MY SCORES
Many people have two or three strong striving styles, and they can all be important in leading you to the person you are meant to be. If you have a few "highest" scores, read each matching description, and see what rings most true.

Striving to help: 10
Striving to be recognized: 13
Striving to be creative: 18
Striving to be spontaneous: 16
Striving to be knowledgeable: 17
Striving to be secure: 13
Striving to be in control: 14

STRIVING TO BE CREATIVE
You scored: 18
You are an artist: You came out of the womb with a paintbrush in your hand; you're an original, and you know it. Even if you don't have a singular gift, you're drawn to the arts—anything creative, for that matter—and you have a unique way of looking at the world. Your need for depth and authenticity in relationships can lead to both great joy and profound sorrow, depending on whether others reciprocate. You don't care so much about adapting to group or societal expectations; your independence and sharp intuition propel you on your own path.

What to watch out for: When fear of conformity overrides your creativity, you can assume the role of "outsider" or "orphan" and end up feeling alienated. You may even go so far as refusing to vote or pay taxes. This lone-wolf stance might be a defense against feeling vulnerable. Try to be aware that blaming others for your banishment, or pushing away those who want to get close, only makes things worse. Also, dramatizing your emotions can interfere with your creativity.

Looking ahead: As long as you genuinely express yourself, you feel like the person you were meant to be. How you do it is irrelevant. A chef or architect can be as much of an artist as a painter or sculptor. Many advertising and public relations executives are also highly imaginative. Beyond work, there are opportunities everywhere you look to coax out your inner artist: Design your own jewelry line, create an innovative blog, dream up a comic strip. Relationships are another avenue for self-expression.

Striving to be creative: Imagination and personal expression are important to this type, so they enjoy jobs as:
Graphic Designers
Art Directors
Yoga Instructors
Drug Addiction Counselors
Architects
Actors/Musicians/Dancers/Athletes
College Professors
Yoga or Meditation Teachers

STRIVING TO BE SPONTANEOUS
You scored: 16
You are an adventurer: Action-oriented, curious, outgoing, and often technically gifted, you live for new experiences. You are drawn to risk-taking and aren't afraid to fail. Generally restless, you tend to job-hop or choose a field that offers constant novelty. If you had to name your favorite place, it might be the center of attention—you're a born entertainer, and can easily adapt to any audience. While you collect many acquaintances, you're less likely to develop deep, committed relationships.

What to watch out for: When you can't satisfy your thirst for variety and excitement, you may see yourself as trapped, which can lead to impulsive and self-destructive behavior—drinking, drugs, breaking off relationships, ditching financial responsibilities. Try to find value in some traditions; if you learn to appreciate repetitive experiences, you won't always feel the urge to bust free. And when a new opportunity thrills you, keep in mind that just because it sounds exciting, that doesn't mean it's good for you.

Looking ahead: Life will have meaning for you as long as you feel stimulated. That might mean chasing twisters, exploring the polar ice caps, getting a degree in dance therapy, or becoming an astronaut. It might also mean reading new books, attending workshops, or letting yourself get swept up in an intoxicating romance. As a risk-lover with a lot of energy, you're a natural entrepreneur. You'll be happiest if you change jobs every so often and travel extensively. Movement is what keeps you going.

Striving to be spontaneous: These action and adventure lovers are drawn to careers that promise excitement, whether as a:
Coach
Police Officer
Events Promoter
Family Lawyer
Nutritionist
Investigator
Broker
Travel Agent or Tour Operator

STRIVING TO BE KNOWLEDGEABLE
You scored: 17
You are an intellectual: As a leader, you're often ahead of your time. As an employee, you try to surpass the competence level of peers, even managers. Incisive and curious, you're driven to deeply understand how things work. But that's things, not people. Oh, your family and friends are important; it's just that you don't need to spend hours engaging with them. Social validation isn't your goal—you're secure enough in your cerebral pursuits.

What to watch out for: When you can't find a way to be the expert, you may withdraw or simply withhold information, which can make you seem smug or arrogant. If you feel yourself retreating into your own world, seek a friend's help to pull you back. Also balance your cerebral tendencies through physical activities like jogging, hiking, or dance.

Looking ahead: You discover who you are meant to be through accumulating insight and knowledge. So follow your curiosity. Are you drawn to learning Mandarin? Join-ing a philosophy society? Studying and practicing Buddhist meditation? Delving into the complexities of computer programming? Writing a historical book? Pursuits that place you near the leading edge of technology, science, psychology, academia, or business are good bets. But any situation that allows you to work independently with freedom to investigate and innovate will fuel your drive.

Striving to be knowledgeable: Deep thinking and an inventive spirit help this type excel in fields like:
Biomedical Research
Computer Programming
Law
Education
Engineering
Management
Environmental Planning
Telecomunications

STRIVING TO BE RECOGNIZED
You scored: 13
You are an achiever: Ambitious, competitive, and hardworking: That's you. With a clear image of who you are, you work tirelessly to make sure your accomplishments are recognized. Your drive for success extends to your family, and you invest a lot of energy in helping them live up to your expectations. Thanks to your knack for diplomacy and abundant charisma, you often inspire others.

What to watch out for: You are prone to becoming a workaholic, slaving away toward success while neglecting your personal life. Because you're driven to gain approval, you can find yourself performing for others like an actor; if you become overly concerned with your image, you end up feeling superficial. To keep your ambition under control, get involved in group activities that require cooperation. Also practice listening to those around you and think about sharing the spotlight from time to time.

Looking ahead: Any career that allows you to scale the ranks and gain recognition, status, even material rewards, lights you up. Actress, entrepreneur, salesperson, politician—you get the picture. And consider balancing your professional challenges with personal ones: Run a 10K, train for a triathlon, compete in a tennis tournament, bike from one end of your state to the other; or join a debate team, play in a poker circle, enter your purebred spaniel in a dog show. Whenever you can win at something, you're happy.

Striving to be recognized: An audience and a chance to show off their charm suit this type, which works best in roles such as:
Teacher
Newscaster
Real Estate Agent
Publicist
Talent Agent
Investment Banker
Journalist/Reporter
Literary Agent

STRIVING TO BE IN CONTROL
You scored: 14
You are a leader: You approach everything as though you were born to be in charge. Confident, assertive, and decisive, you know what you want and you go after it. You also look out for family, friends, and community—you feel you know what's best for them—and have no fear of confronting anyone who challenges your ideas. Taking the driver's seat, you also generously donate time and energy to people and neighborhood projects.

What to watch out for: When you feel threatened, or others refuse to go along with your agenda, you can become confrontational and domineering, sometimes to the point of being dictatorial. Practice letting someone else take charge on occasion. Also try meditation; it can help you be-come more aware of your controlling impulses and ease the anxiety that may be provoking them.

Looking ahead: You discover your purpose when you take control of your environment. For you, finding a decision-making role is key. That could mean anything from producing a play to spearheading a global campaign for something you care about. In work, you're suited for leadership positions in education, government, industry, finance, religious institutions, or politics. But you can find satisfaction anytime you're given the autonomy to do things your own way.

Striving to be in control: Decisiveness and authority come easily to this type, so they work best in leadership roles:
Restaurant manager
Healthcare administrator
Sales director
Teacher
Political consultant
Marketing manager
Advertising executive
Politician

STRIVING TO BE SECURE
You scored: 13
You are a stabilizer: You are the rock in a storm, the one others lean on. Loyal and com-mitted in your relationships, you maintain a support system of like-minded people whom you look out for. (So what if you do it behind the scenes and don't get credit?) You're careful with money, cherish the familiar, and defend the traditions you care about.

What to watch out for: Rapidly changing environments (like a shaky economy) are very hard for you. As a result of such instability, you can spiral into a state where everything seems catastrophic and you're sure life will only get worse. You can also become over-controlling, rejecting any suggestion that doesn't conform to your idea of the way things should be. To avoid being too rigid, each month try changing one habit. Experiment with clothes, drive a different way to work, initiate conversations about subjects you wouldn't normally discuss. And when the opportunity arises to do something new, avoid the impulse to immediately say no—this may be nerve-racking, but the more you practice, the less anxious you'll feel.

Looking ahead: You find meaning in pursuing safety and certainty. Focusing on family can give you great satisfaction. Also consider planting a vegetable garden, hosting class reunions, volunteering as a lifeguard, teaching at your church or temple. In the work arena, look for positions where you're responsible for others, and for making sure everyone is following the rules. You work well in any environment that is stable and consistent. Careers in government, finance, the military, law enforcement, and product manufacturing are strong options for you.

Striving to be secure: Stable, accurate, and with an unbending attention to detail, this type does well in jobs that have consistency, such as:
Paralegals
Accountants
Electrical engineers
Dentists
School administrators
Public servants
Computer programmers

STRIVING TO HELP
You scored: 10
You are a nurturer: You are caring and supportive in your personal relationships as well as in your job. Unselfish and altruistic by nature, you often anticipate the needs of those around you before they are aware of them. If there is one thing that brings you satisfaction, it's tending to others.

What to watch out for: When you're doing things for people only to feel valued, you can become resentful. And if you sense that your help is not appreciated, you may end up playing the martyr. So before giving your time to everyone else, make sure to take care of yourself (physically, emotionally, and spiritually). And practice waiting until someone asks for help: While you may be able to perceive what a person needs, that doesn't mean she wants you to attend to it.

Looking ahead: It's important for you to be genuinely of service in acknowledged ways. Whether you foster a child, care for an elderly aunt, rescue animals, or support a rock star's career as her personal assistant, look for opportunities where you can help other people or bigger causes. Volunteer work has your name written on it, as do many careers: nursing, teaching, customer service, healing, social work. Don't feel pressured to run the company or lead the project; you may be even more effective as someone's right hand. And you'll likely find working with other people more meaningful than flying solo.

Striving to help: A need to take care of other people is important to this type, who thrives in professions like:
Career counselor
Psychologist
Massage therapist
Development, or Training Consultant
Paralegal
Wedding Planner
Paramedic

The bottom three are on the lukewarm side for me, though I like being acknowledged as a nurturer, just more along the lines of the artist as nurturer_ hey! I AM a good cook!

Now, for a little philosophical or acerbic humor (depending on how you see life!) I have unabashedly borrowed from Hugh MacLeod.
I am smiling today after such a collective bounty of creative wisdom & wit & I have to say how much I love my facebook network!! I LOVE MY FACEBOOK NETWORK!!!

"Sing in your own voice.
Don't worry about finding inspiration, it comes eventually.
Being poor sucks.
Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put here on this earth to climb.
The choice of media is irrelevant.
Start blogging.
Write from the heart.
The best way to get approval is to not need it.
Don't try to stand out from the crowd; avoid a crowd altogether.
Savor obscurity while it lasts.
YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE.
Power is never given. Power is taken.
Nobody cares.
Whatever choice you make, The Devil gets his due eventually.
Do it for yourself.
Beware of turning hobbies into jobs.
Worrying about "Commercial" versus "Artistic" is a complete waste of time.
Merit can be bought. Passion can't."
The mind has lots of questions. The heart has lots of answers.
"When your dreams become reality, they are no longer your dreams.
Allow your work to age with you.
Keep your day job.
IGNORE EVERYBODY.
If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.
Remain frugal.
Dying young is overrated.
If your biz plan depends upon you finally being "discovered" by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.
Never compare your inside with somebody else's outside.
The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not.
Everyone is born creative, everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.
Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.
The hardest part of being creative is getting used to it.
Selling out is harder than it looks.
You have to find your own schtick.
The world is changing avoid the water cooler gang.
Put the hours in.
Meaning scales, people don't.
The more talented somebody is, the less they need props."

And one more, I recently found in a book titled: "Pay Me What I'm Worth, A Guide To Help You Say It, Mean It, Get It" by, Souldancer:
"It is not so much that our friends' help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us." _Epicurus, Ancient Greek philosopher, the founder of Epicureanism (341 BC, Samos - 270 BC, Athens)

Oh! and the second thing I picked up on in my scan of "O" Magazine is this, thank-you Glenn Close: http://bringchange2mind.org/

May this post put a smile on your face in many more ways than one for days to come!

Holiday Offerings: Art Originals

2009-11-18T23:39:00.000-08:00

I am beginning to hear the drum beat of the creative entrepreneurial spirit for the holidays!

Take a look at two examples of what I have chosen to offer for this year's holiday shopping:

Original paintings in a fixed-SIZE range at a fixed price-range, in either a floral favorite of your choice or pet portrait of your pet companion(s). Painted in acrylic paints.

*

* This floral painting is available for sale and it is already framed!

HulaHub Launches in PDX!

2009-11-18T23:03:00.000-08:00

In some places, Santa is early this year!!

Hula Hub Online Cultural Hub is Active...Jump in!

By Pollyanne Birge

Wed, November 18, 2009 4:14pm

"The creative community has been waiting for nearly two decades for an integrated, dynamic, online cultural calendar. We couldn't be more please that the private sector has stepped up to provide this innovative calendaring system at no cost to our region"

--Mayor Sam Adams

Now with HulaHub, Box Office Tickets Inc. (BOT) delivers a powerful social networking infrastructure that arts organizations can use to provide visitors and people in their community with a single consolidated calendar of events, profiles, reviews, ticketing and blogs.

In addition to connecting with audiences, HulaHub makes it easy for producers, artists and venues to collaborate, share services and cross-promote events. For example, producers and artists can search for venues by type of performance space, capacity, and other parameters. Artists and production personnel can post their professional profiles.

People can sign up to be on mailing lists and make donations online. Best of all, HulaHub frees cash-strapped arts organizations to spend less of their time and energy on web technologies — and more on making and promoting their art.

Watch a video from the launch party:

BOT is also launching an iPhone HulaHub application that will engage more people and make it even easier to keep up with events and arts news on the go. HulaHub on the iPhone opens new mobile/arts opportunities.

Box Office Tickets Introduces HulaHub™ Social Networking for the Arts

Free service connects people and arts organizations and creates community

Box Office Tickets Inc. announces HulaHub™, www.hulahub.com —a free social networking service for the arts that helps organizations connect and interact with audiences and others in their community to create new synergies.

"At a time when every penny counts, many arts organizations of all sizes are needlessly spending thousands of dollars on websites and online calendars that too few people know about or visit," says George Domurot, President/CEO of Box Office Tickets Inc. (BOT). "With HulaHub, we’ve created one centralized hub where people can post and find information about local shows and events, reach new audiences and join in on the conversation."

Founded more than 15 years ago as an alternative to ticketing agencies that charge exorbitant fees, BOT has leveraged the power of the Internet in a shared-services business model that enables even the smallest arts and nonprofit organizations to offer their patrons the convenience of online ticketing.

A single dynamic online space for community arts information and interactions

"HulaHub is a tremendous resource," says Jeff Hawthorne, Director Community Affairs, Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC) in Portland, Oregon. "With so much event information in one centralized location, and a great interface for audiences and art lovers, HulaHub is a powerful way to increase the entire community’s participation in local arts and culture. We applaud BOT for working closely with community arts organizations to develop such a comprehensive system. HulaHub is a prominent feature on the Regional Arts and Culture Council's Website."

Creating community, promoting the local economy

HulaHub is a national web brand with a universal login that automatically connects members to their local arts community, while also enabling individuals to browse hubs in other locations, for example, to plan for a trip. There is no charge for listing events in the calendar, posting a profile, or using the blogging and social networking features of HulaHub. HulaHub connects to all types of shows and events, whether paid or free and whether ticketed through boxofficetickets.com® network, through local outlets or other ticketing services.

HulaHub works with local "presenting partners" to set up a calendar and social networking site that matches the community’s needs and share revenues. Revenue comes from feature ads in the Browse and Buy section of the website, web page sponsors, and a small service fee on tickets purchased through the boxofficetickets.com network. BOT provides all its presenting partners and sponsors with reports that track impressions, clicks, and click-thru rates. BOT also donates five cents for each ticket sold through its network back into a community fund, which, at the end of the year, is donated to a local nonprofit.

Portland Metro

Portland, Oregon’s Metro Area HulaHub is a vibrant online community that grew out of a partnership between BOT and the nonprofit Film Action Oregon (FAO) in 2008. Today, there are 100+ presenting partners invested in the Portland Metro HulaHub, with 400+ arts organizations using the calendar service at no cost. Among the features the Portland Metro HulaHub offers members are a weekly email digest, personalized to the individual’s preferences and including timely "Director’s Picks" recommendations by the artistic directors of Portland’s most prestigious culture and performing arts organizations.

"Portland is a city that embraces the arts and fosters innovation," says Portland’s mayor, Sam Adams. "With HulaHub, Portlanders now have even more ways to get involved, take advantage of all the city has to offer, and support a new service provided by a local company."

HulaHub on the iPhone

BOT is also launching an iPhone HulaHub application that will engage more people and make it even easier to keep up with events and arts news on the go. HulaHub on the iPhone opens new mobile/arts opportunities. For example, plans are underway to develop an iPhone downloadable walking tour of the public art in Portland.

About Box Office Tickets:

For more than 15 years, Box Office Tickets Inc. (www.boxofficetickets.com) has been providing ticketing solutions for the arts and entertainment industry. In 2003, the company revolutionized ticketing for small to medium size arts organizations by creating dynamic and shareable content, all at no cost to the organization. In 2009, the company launched HulaHub™ www.hulahub.com, a free social networking site for the arts to help organizations connect and interact with audiences. Box Office Tickets also offers discounts and other promotions to help create new audiences and assist organizations in filling more seats.

The BOT-Bullet, connecting people, creating community, HulaHub, RoBOT, RoBOT StopLight, Social Networking for the Arts, Empowering Entertainment, PDX Cultural Calendar, PDX Ticket Network, and BOXOFFICETICKETS.COM and Design are trademarks of Box Office Tickets Inc. © Copyright 2009 Box Office Tickets Inc. All rights reserved.

Press Contact: pr@boxofficetickets.com

***Come on Corvallis, Oregon, you're hokey poky-ing behind the sleeping wheel, AGAIN!
This is big! It's hot!! Get on this NOW!!!

Why Business Leaders Should Act More like Artists

2009-11-18T17:38:00.000-08:00

From Harvard Business Publishing
(Please note: I have changed the posting options for this post here on my blog so that my holiday post stays at the top!)
5:16 PM Tuesday December 1, 2009
by John Maeda

Tags:Leadership

Stereotypes abound about artists: they range from the mild ("they have fuschia-colored hair"), to the absurd ("they starve,"), to the disturbed ("they do things like uncontrollably peeing in the fireplace as depicted in the popular movie Pollock."). Granted I know artists with wild-colored hair and others who are certainly struggling to make ends meet, but they all choose to use the restroom. I've also met artists who are quite plain-looking and plain-acting CEOs, lawyers, stockbrokers, and scientists.

Even as someone who has worked to weaken some of the sillier stereotypes about creative types, I must admit that I've carried a few stereotypes around myself. In particular, I'd always believed that artists are much like the kind of geeks I grew up with at MIT — passionately focused on their work with little regard to their own physical or financial circumstance, and often more comfortable working as a lone constructor instead of as a collaborative player on a larger team. So when I observed RISD students exhibiting the classic "lone wolf" traits of this kind of "creative geek," my mental model was confirmed. But when I recently spoke with two RISD textile entrepreneurs in Chicago about this stereotype, my mind fortunately re-opened.

The three aha's I received from my conversation with partners Robert Segal and Alicia Rosauer were:

1. Artists constantly collaborate. The example given was the common occurrence of an exhibition with multiple artists showing together, or the so-called "group show." Even in the context of a solo show, the artist works with the gallery owner, the curator, the framers, the installers, the lighting person, the publicist to bring their vision to life. Every exhibition is a collaboration to the nth degree.

2. Artists are talented communicators. The whole point of a work of art is to communicate something — a thought, an idea, a feeling, a vision. More explicitly, the artist frequently gives a talk to explain the thought process behind the artwork. Engaging the audience in a meaningful, expansive dialogue is often critical to the exhibition's success.

3. Artists learn how to learn together. Perhaps the reason why artists collaborate and socialize so well is that they learn in the studio model — ten or more students in the same room for hours on end. Bonded together in a personal space of intimate self-expression, they come into their own through the familial ties of the studio setting. When interviewed recently about the differences in her education at Brown and at RISD, one student who is getting a dual degree from both institutions said, "At RISD there's a lot of learning from your peers. Brown (in the classes I've taken so far anyway) is about listening and note-taking in class."

Whether they explicitly acknowledge themselves as leaders or not, artists often move others to follow them — into neighborhoods, into a new a social movement, or even just a dialogue. They do it through the skills that are inherent in their work as professional "inspirers" and provocateurs. Sure, some artists might be introverts and some extroverts, but through their art, they act as creative leaders in their boldness to often express a point of view as the naked truth.

We've all seen the business world increasingly crave an approach that balances values with profits. One natural way to do this is to adopt an artist's point of view; the honesty and integrity that artists naturally bring to their work will be increasingly relevant.

John Maeda is a world-renowned artist, graphic designer, computer scientist and educator whose career reflects his philosophy of humanizing technology. For more than a decade, he has worked to integrate technology, education and the arts into a 21st-century synthesis of creativity and innovation. He is the author of four books, including The Laws of Simplicity. Since September 2008, he has been President of the Rhode Island School of Design.

Becky Bermont is Vice President, Media + Partners at the Rhode Island School of Design. Prior to her work at RISD, Becky has worked as the Director of Sponsor Management at the MIT Media Lab, a Product Marketer in Yahoo!'s Connected Life group, and a Consumer Research Analyst at Forrester Research. Becky holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Women Artists Marginalized Again in Small University Town in America

2009-11-17T01:55:00.000-08:00

I am posting that in my local home village, where I have tried to support and promote the arts, I have been swindled! In my efforts to locally screen the movie: Who Does She Think She Is?, one local Artisans Market Boutique have partnered with the local University Women's Center to screen the film with no reason whatsoever yet who have pushed me out of the project all together.
No one even knew anything at all about this indy film here until I promoted it. As it was one of my own ads that was found by the A.M.B. on craigslist.
The film ironically is about women in the arts who choose to raise families simultaneously, and how marginalized these collective voices continue to be in the world of art and social culture. It is a poignantly painful film that opens the door of awareness on a group who need the support of community, and to have their works not just seen and heard but valued in the larger arena of the arts.
I am dumbfounded that people who just take from others this baldly are supported at all. Yet, I am afraid this habit is all too common. It's very painful to experience being targeted so others can convince themselves they are well, as they only build false stature.

Papergirl Project 2008; A little Herstory, already!

2009-11-16T21:04:00.000-08:00

Papergirl #3 from Papergirl on Vimeo.

Papergirl

This article on Contemporary Art Sales at Christies & Sotheby's this past Week, in the NYT!

2009-11-14T10:20:00.000-08:00

Full Speed Ahead for Contemporary Works

By SOUREN MELIKIAN
Published: November 13, 2009

Cy Twombly's drawing went for $722,500 at Christie's.

NEW YORK — The auction market is booming and, when it comes to contemporary art, it is charging on at an accelerated pace, as it did before the financial turmoil broke out in the autumn of 2008.

This week, those attending Christie’s and Sotheby’s evening sessions traditionally reserved for the most important works might have briefly thought that there never was a recession. No awareness of it appeared to linger in the bidders’ minds as they ran up paintings, drawings and sundry three-dimensional works to three times the estimate, or more.

It all culminated with the staggering $43.76 million paid at Sotheby’s on Wednesday for Andy Warhol’s “200 One Dollar Bills,” a silkscreen and pencil work dating from 1962.

This extraordinary outburst of bullishness was the upshot of a two-part play in which Christie’s session on Tuesday served as a launching pad to Sotheby’s superior sale.

The sale Tuesday, which netted $74.15 million, leaving only seven out of 46 works stranded, said a great deal about the renewed eagerness to buy contemporary art. It revealed for the first time a deep interest in works on paper, in contrast to the past when contemporary art had to be spectacular and big to do really well.

The session began with a drawing on board done in 1961 by Robert Rauschenberg. This was titled “Untitled,” possibly because it is difficult to find a label for a panel in which a wheel, some wristwatches and various rubbings have been haphazardly jotted down, in the manner of street graffiti. The colors were pale and the size small — 29.2 by 26 centimeters, or 11.5 by 10.25 inches. Christie’s expected the Rauschenberg to be knocked down between $100,000 and $150,000, plus the sale charge. With bids coming in from every side, the sketch ended up at $938,500.

Another drawing followed. The large sheet of paper sprinkled with blobs and dots in black ink was signed by Philip Guston and dated 1953. Its severity and lack of color did not appear to augur well. Yet, lo and behold! The Guston rose to $542,500, more than double the high estimate. It set in the process a world auction record for a work on paper by the artist.

Two more world records were later established for contemporary artists, or artists conventionally held to be “contemporary” even though they are no longer in this world.

One went to a cartoon in the naughty-schoolboy-at-the-blackboard manner of Jean-Michel Basquiat. “Untitled,” as Christie’s called it, the large size sketch, 152.4 centimeters high, brought one of the more astonishing prices achieved this week. At $3.1 million, it tripled the previous record for a Basquiat work on paper that was set in Paris at the Artcurial auction house in December 2005.

Later, a sketch in ink and gouache by Brice Marden, “Untitled with Green,” set an auction record for the artist at $2.04 million. Squiggles repeated in three vertical columns were apparently deemed irresistible.

Other large prices paid for works on paper confirmed that a new pattern was emerging. A typical exercise in random scribbling by Cy Twombly made $722,500, nearly double the high estimate. The sketch does not markedly differ from the nascent bouts of creativity of 4-year-olds expressing pencil in hand their joie de vivre. Interestingly, this similarity to early childhood artistic endeavor has no bearing on the price. Visual aesthetics are clearly not among the primary considerations driving contemporary art buyers.

If any doubts could be entertained on that score, the $1.98 million paid at Christie’s for another work on paper by Basquiat would dispel them. “Untitled (14 Drawings)” describes 14 sheets of paper individually framed. Each one is adorned with a few lines inscribed in block letters. The first one reads “A LOT OF BOWERY BUMS USED TO BE EXECUTIVES.” The attraction presumably lies in the would-be tongue in cheek witticism — if this is the word.

A new interest in austere paintings came along with this willingness to pay top dollar for works on paper that do not appeal to a yearning for the spectacular.

A dark geometrical composition painted around 1980-1981 by Jasper John in predominant gray nearly doubled its high estimate at $4.33 million. Moments later, a virtually black picture in oil on paper done by Rauschenberg managed to sell for $962,500. A kind of crumpled effect is created to animate a surface that would otherwise resemble a piece of black slate.

The double focus on drawings and on uncompromisingly severe paintings revealed at Christie’s on Tuesday suggests that a new gravity now drives some contemporary art buyers.

Yet, no great importance is attached to personal aesthetic creation. In most cases, words and names alone matter. The parodies of Jeff Koons attract as much attention as ever. A “Large Vase of Flowers” perfectly imitated in polychrome wood brought $5.68 million. Those in despair for having missed it may comfort themselves with the thought that it was produced in an edition of three, plus an artist’s proof. Two vacuum cleaners hygienically displayed in transparent Plexiglas casing “New Shelton Wet/Dry5-Gallon, New Hoover Convertible Doubledecker,” which, the catalog cryptically noted, was a work “executed in 1981-1987,” stirred sufficiently deep emotions to realize $3.1 million.

Minimalist art, which offers another variant of limited artistic intervention, was also well received.

Agnes Martin’s alternate bands of blue and white, which could be mistaken for a sample of fabric or wallpaper were it not for the signature and date (1996), thus comfortably sold for $1.31 million.

Figural art, however, was not forgotten. The great success story at Christie’s was indeed Peter Doig’s “Reflection (What does your soul look like)” painted in 1996. That exceeded the high estimate as it realized $10.16 million. Influenced by the 19th-century French school of naturalist landscape painting, Doig’s large picture bore no connection to any of the other works. Eclecticism, or as some might believe, indifference to what the eye sees, was the order of the day.

These trends were all confirmed on a magnificent scale on Wednesday when Sotheby’s took over. It was as if Christie’s performance had released a spring. During the first half of a session that ended on a $134.44 million score, bidders could barely hold themselves.

Two auction records were set as the first four lots came up. Remarkably, the first record price, $1.65 million, was paid for a picture by an artist whose name, Alice Neel, meant little to the general public. “Jackie Curtis and Rita Red,” a figural double portrait dating from 1970, is broadly painted, with the merest soupçon of Expressionism in the handling of the faces.

The second record price went to the French sculptor Germaine Richier who is well known within a circle of specialists, but hardly rated as a celebrity. “La Feuille” (The Leaf) is the title of a rugged female figure cast around 1950. The severe stylization which distorts the human body and the dark brown surface make the record price, $842,500, particularly noteworthy.

As at Christie’s, Sotheby’s sale thus showed that world fame is no longer an absolute prerequisite for financial success in contemporary art. Neither are bright colors. A Jasper Johns painted in leaden gray as the title, “Gray Numbers” indicates, fetched the second highest price in the sale, $8.7 million.

An even harsher work, a “Large Torso” cast in bronze in 1974, set a world record for a sculpture by Willem de Kooning at $5.68 million. The artist, famous for his Expressionist pictures, is not often associated with sculpture. The price, like those paid for Richier’s bronze or for the gray picture by Jasper Johns, tells us that a search for new avenues to explore is under way in contemporary art.

Works by artists that did not always fare well in the past are now fought over without a moment’s hesitation.

The French painter Jean Dubuffet who is perhaps best described as an Expressionist Naïf did brilliantly with his grinning, rather sinister figures painted in pseudo-childish fashion. A picture in this vein, “Trinité-Champs-Elysées,” dated March 1961, set an auction record for the artist at $6.13 million.

Behind the bewildering diversity of the works that were most enthusiastically received, one constant feature recurred. Most had been consecrated by the passage of time. Of the top 10 lots sold at Sotheby’s only one, Bruce Nauman’s “Violins Violence Silence,” which dates from 1981 or 1982 and sold for $4 million, was less than 30 years of age.

Perhaps buyers willing to spend the largest amounts were not too sure that the art they were looking at was to be taken seriously. The reasoning appears to be that if public acclaim or at least media recognition lasted that long, they had a fair chance of making the right choice.

If doubting Thomases questioned the artistic character of “200 One Dollar Bills” mechanically reproduced by Warhol using the silkscreen technique, you could always point out that the artist’s oeuvre had been sung for half a century. Warhol’s work has actually risen beyond the wildest dreams. The picture that climbed to a dizzying $43.76 million this week had only cost its consignor $385,000. He bought it on Nov. 11, 1986, at the sale of the estate of one of the most famous collectors of contemporary art, the late Robert C. Scull.

Every buyer of contemporary art dreams of such coups, if not necessarily on this scale — it is the most fabulous ever, in any field. If only for that reason, the odds are that contemporary art is set to leap forward for a while.

Art:21- Humor, Season 2, Episode 4

2009-11-11T21:13:00.000-08:00

A Commissioned Artist At Last!

2009-11-08T21:02:00.000-08:00

Tonight I received one of those calls I have dreamed about but haven't allowed myself to wait on, for a very long time now! Life inside this soul has been truly hell for the past number of years, single parenting in financial poverty to find my own way to my soul's calling, clarifying the old history without a life partner or a circle of friends because that work was too much, but had to be done in order to clarify me and step away from the dysfunctional past, and light of my life down the center of it all_ raising one incredibly wonderful human being who is now doing us both proud out in the world, a senior in college majoring in music.

With this belief and investment in my art way beyond needed dollars, I am going to breathe from here on because this is so much more than a commission. So much more. My soul is literally coming back to life! So you nay-sayers and distance keepers, just watch and listen as all of the color, light, laughter and looseness from way down deep, comes all the way back up to the surface! I welcome this flow from the universe with gratitude and all the blessings that come with this one yes shown in my direction. Thank-you! Thank-you! Thank-you! Art is my life, it is what makes me happy. It is how I can be in this world and share what is possible with everyone.

From here there will be fresh imagery as I make that progress, and a solid conversation about what making art is, from this artist's perspective and renewed experiences. Now, you really do want to stay tuned in.

I'm back! I am coming back to me! Happy, free, believed in, befriended, commissioned. Woooooo! Hooooooooooo!!!!!

Anyone else ready to call for a second commission? It'd mean me buying a camera with which to record fresh and original imagery to my art blog!! As I make it! Yeah!!!

WDSTSI- Live: National House Party, Follow-up Event

2009-11-08T09:48:00.000-08:00

Lots of interaction and discussion with the audience in cooperation with Emerging Pictures at the WDSTSI National House Party Event at Symphony Space in NYC, today! "Who Does She Think She Is?," debuts in this forum and we all get to listen in at the !
Unfortunately, I am unable to figure out how to get the House Party event follow-up film code to embed on (picky!) blogger, but I did come up with this link to that event for now, until I monkey around with the code!
WDSTSI Tweets via national participation with the house party event are here!
* Visually, I can embed a (good ole!) YouTube update of Maye Torres, who was unable to participate in the National House Party, follow-up film event in NY, due to two very recent deaths in her family.

Lily Yeh- Barefoot Artists

2009-10-18T12:25:00.000-07:00

Barefoot Artists

Lily Yeh! Who IS she?

Part 2, Part 3 * Does anyone know how to use "DownloadHelper?" How do I use it to download multiple videos (such as this particular YouTube version!), to then make into one video_ so, I can upload a more sane presentation (from my desktop) of ONE VIDEO, to post to my blog? This particular video is too good to watch all chopped up in three segments! If you know how "DownloadHelper" works, to accomplish THIS PARTICULAR TASK then, please leave a comment. Thanks in advance for your help!

OR FIND THE WHOLE (BLOGGER UN FRIENDLY) VID IN ONE PLACE ON USTREAM

Biography Perspectives Quotable Contact

An artist whose masterpiece is a neighborhood transformed in Philadelphia

Inner city communities face obstacles that often feel insurmountable: crime, poverty, pollution, crumbling urban fabric, social alienation, and other tragedies, which can crush the spirit of people living there. Despair becomes the biggest problem as everyone—inside the community and out—loses faith that things can actually change. What’s needed most is a way to crack through that sense of hopelessness.

Placemaking can play that role in hard-hit neighborhoods, by putting the emphasis on improving the place itself rather than viewing it as a morass of dysfunctions, each of which is addressed in the narrow terms of particular issues or professional fields. Focusing on place, which often begins small by planting flowers or cleaning up a littered street, proves to skeptical residents that positive change is possible. The energy generated by little victories builds momentum for major

That’s exactly what Lily Yeh did in North Philadelphia, which among all the struggling communities across the U.S. , stood out as one of the saddest when she began work there in 1989. She gave the neighborhood a new sense of possibility by utilizing the principles of Placemaking—a term not known to her and hardly ever used at that time—to launch a unique and far-reaching project.
Biography

Yeh would seem an unlikely candidate to make a difference in the inner city. She is not a social worker, urban planner, or economic development expert, not a wealthy philanthropist, political powerbroker, or business executive. She is an artist who grew up part of a socially prominent family in Taiwan (her father was a general in Chiang Kai-Shek’s army) and came to the U.S. to attend the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Fine Arts, eventually becoming an art professor at the Philadelphia School of Fine Arts. The tough streets of Philly’s African-American ghetto must have felt as far from her background— Asia, Ivy League, art school—as the planet Neptune.

But as a student, she was inspired by the writings of Gandhi, Martin Luther King and, later, Nelson Mandela. In 1989, she had been in Beijing showing her paintings at the Central Institute of Fine Arts when she witnessed the brave and tragic protests at Tiananmen Square. That experience convinced her that being an artist, “is not just about making art…It is about delivering the vision one is given…and about doing the right thing without sparing oneself.”

But she had already found the chance put this philosophy into practice. While touring a group of visiting Chinese artists around Philadelphia a few years earlier, she brought them to the North Philadelphia studio of dancer Arthur Hall, who asked her help in reviving a particularly grim stretch of the neighborhood outside. Yeh was shocked at the state of the streets—vacant lots strewn with rubble reminiscent of photographs of bombed-out cities at the end of World War II—and didn’t quite know where to start.

But she knew something had to be done. So she began gathering up the trash, which drew the attention of local kids wanting to know, she recalls, what “this crazy Chinese lady” was up to. Soon their parents were watching too, and Yeh realized she had some collaborators for what was to be the most important art project of her life. Soon everyone was involved in cleaning up the area, painting murals, and creating an “art park,” which became the pride of the community.
Perspectives

More than 20 years later, this area is still poor with high unemployment, but hope is returning thanks to the Village of Arts and Humanities. That’s what the small art park Yeh and a group of neighborhood kids started has grown into—a tangible symbol of renewal that covers more than 120 formerly vacant lots with murals, numerous sculpture gardens, mosaics, parks, community gardens, playgrounds, performance spaces, basketball courts, neighborhood art studios, and even a tree farm.

“The entire community seems to take part in the use of the spaces,” writes Kathleen McCarthy, who nominated the Village for PPS’s Great Public Spaces listings. “As we walked down the street, trying to find one of the parks, a man walking beside us directed us to the Ile Ife Park, and told us the history of it and the wonderful artist, Lily Yeh who started the park. He spoke with pride that this was a part of his community. We sat on the benches made of smashed tile and mirror, making wonderful curves and places to sit. Across from us, women sat and smiled, waved. Children ran over and asked us to hide them during a game of hide-and-seek…. I've never felt more welcomed in an unfamiliar place.”

Six buildings have been rehabbed into workspaces for Village projects with local residents getting on-the-job training in the construction trades. A daycare center has been established and abandoned housing refurbished. A new initiative, Shared Prosperity, has been founded to boost economic opportunities in North Philadelphia.

“All this happened under the radar of the City of Philadelphia,” writes Abby Scher in Yes magazine, “whose city planners and social workers were nowhere to be found in the neighborhood.”

Residents now look forward each year to their annual neighborhood theater festival, with plays written by young people drawing on their own experiences in North Philly. Several have these works have been performed as far away as Mexico and Iceland. Fall brings the Kujenga Pamoja festival (Sawhili for “together we build”), which culminates in an elaborate coming-of-age ritual for kids who have spent the summer preparing for the festival and working in job training programs.

“One of the most powerful things I learned,” Yeh told Yes magazine, “is that when you…transform your immediate environment, your life begins to change.”

Yeh’s observation was seconded by James “Big Man” Paxton, who gave up running drugs in favor of making mosaics for Village projects. He went on to teach hundreds of neighborhoods kids both the basic masonry skills and the creative dimension of making mosaics. “I was a lost soul in the community, disconnected from my family, looking for a way back to reality on the tail end of a 22-year drug addiction,” he remembered shortly before his death in 2005, and Yeh, “wrapped her arms around me and taught me to believe in myself.”

The Village of Art and Humanities has changed how residents of North Philadelphia think about their home. As the neighborhood blossomed with more public places where people could safely and pleasurably gather, its community spirit and positive sense of itself has grown. And that changes how others view the neighborhood today. Philip Horn, director of the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts, notes it, “changed the perception of the [wider] community from ‘there’s something wrong with these people’ to ‘there’s nothing wrong with these people’.”

Leaving the project in the hands of local people, Lily Yeh has now founded Barefoot Artists, Inc., which draws on the experience of the Village of Art and Humanities to help other struggling communities in the Congo, Kenya, the Republic of Georgia, China, Ecuador, Taiwan, Italy and the Ivory Coast. She has spent a lot of time in Rwanda, as a founder of the Rwanda Healing Project she works with children to restore peace, joy and beauty in communities ripped apart by the genocidal civil war.
Quotable

Lily Yeh on Art and Placemaking

“When I see brokenness, poverty and crime in inner cities, I also see the enormous potential and readiness for transformation and rebirth. We are creating an art form that comes from the heart and reflects the pain and sorrow of people’s lives. It also expresses joy, beauty and love. This process lays the foundation of building a genuine community in which people are reconnected with their families, sustained by meaningful work, nurtured by the care of each other and will together raise and educate their children. Then we witness social change in action.”

“I never dreamed that I could change things. Even now, it's not on my agenda to make people's lives better, to revolutionize the system. I don't see myself as a social activist. I am an artist. What I am about is sharing that sense of joy when I am creating with many people, with whoever wants to be a part of that process. It's not that I came to make their life better. People say, ‘You improve so many people. You make people happy.’ I say, ‘No, people make me happy.’ I need other people.”

“Around us there is all this unspeakable tragedy that everybody hides: Prison. Murder. Drugs. Abandonment. Men drifting away. All the things that society says are shameful. If people hold these in themselves, eventually they destroy a person. In life, there is the bright and the darkness. Our society hides the darkness. I say, no, let's understand what that is. So our joy is rooted in the depth of our tragedy and challenge and difficulty.”

“We are all dysfunctional; we are all separated from the whole. We are not more dysfunctional in the inner city. We are just more exposed. We can't even get through the day, with basic needs and so forth. But somehow, together, we make it whole. You see the mosaics? It's perfect: taking broken pieces, recreating and making something beautiful.”

The real impact of the Village is on all the individuals we come in contact with, particularly our children. They talk differently. They act differently. Because they went through an environment where they really mattered, they look at the future and they dream.

About Lily Yeh’s Work

“It has given me a great sense of pride to read in the newspapers and see on television people talking about my community in relation to beauty and hope rather than drugs and death.”
— The late James “Big Man” Maxton, a neighborhood resident whose life was transformed by his involvement with the organization

“She is willing to fight anyone for this neighborhood. She believes in me, and I believe in her.”
— John Ballard, a president of the Germantown & Lehigh Merchants Association and a store owner, working with The Village to strengthen the local commercial corridor

“It would not be an overstatement to say the opportunities she provides save lives.”
Philip Horn, Executive Director, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts
Contact Info

More Information on Lily Yeh and the Village of Arts and Humanities:

Village of Arts and Humanities

Barefoot Artists

PPS’s Great Public Spaces

The Omo People

2009-10-16T23:55:00.000-07:00

True living poetry...
Growing up in multiple cultures, I remember as a young child realizing that wisdom, in what our societies have always referred to as primitive_ the wisdom one can find in primitive cultures has much to teach us all, if we are open to recognizing this truth.
Beautiful pigments, beautiful life in nature, beautiful art full identity with one's environment; what good reason is there to grow up?

Sisters on the Path WE are making with our lives!

2009-10-14T11:49:00.000-07:00

This truth is my breakfast, lunch and dinner, my soul food, my breath, my heartbeat. I would not be here in this life at all, if it were not for art first and foremost.
In art is everything; my love for my family, the eyes that hold beauty close to my quaking heart; the passion I feel where injustices continue, the compassion I can express as I wake up to the gifts within this great relationship, that enables me to wake up to all of this life while I am in it; speaking to what I see, feel, touch and by which I am touched...

The director of, Who Does She Think She Is?, Pamela Boll & her three sons:

I am planning to host a showing of this film in my community. I am very curious and interested to connect with other women like me. I hope this is so successful that after the showing there is a natural consensus that we collectively create a place where we can all meet regularly to create community together!
I would like your help to make the viewing happen? I am looking to raise funds to purchase the House Party Kit in time for the November 8th nationwide event!
Contact me here via this post as I check my blog daily!! Thank-you.

*Who Does She Think She Is? Find Them/Us on facebook!

ArtPrize Winner!

2009-10-10T13:04:00.000-07:00

Let me just say, if you are just now finding this whole concept: ArtPize, hence just discovering the event that only ended JUST today then, I want to say: YOU MISSED IT!!

An incredible social/cultural experiment that has been going on in Grand Rapids, Michigan, of all places. No offense to Grand Rapids yet, this IS how real change happens doesn't it?! The event actually started months ago and was envisioned as the biggest art and sculpture exhibit, taking over an entire community as the gallery and allowing the public to vote on what is good art. No museums, galleries, artist's reps, yadda, yadda, yadda... The winner took a $250,000 cash prize home! How much art could YOU make with that many clams?

Check out this year's inaugural event winner: Ran Ortner! Congratulations Ran!! The artist's own web site is here.

ArtPrize! I dare you to check out the web site. Learn all about this idea and start preparing to participate next year!

Who You Gonna Call?

2009-10-05T14:06:00.000-07:00

Who Does She Think She is?

2009-10-04T21:18:00.000-07:00

As the energy in my body slowly winds down into a cold, my spirits about life and employment possibilities following suit, I puruse my facebook page one more time before calling it a day. Lo and behold if another woman artist in my fb network, hasn't posted a link to the very thing that lifts my courage-in-general! Thank-you Dana!!

Who Does She Think She Is? is catching fire! Debuting on the 17th of this month across the country. It is a high time documentary on the areas of my and every woman artist who has ever said: "Yes! I Can!", about our own lives, families and careers in the arts_ a long time ago!
It's just in the meantime, this creative-family-centered frontiering path on mass scale, has taken many of us off into the hinterlands without compass or map. However, I think this film: what I am calling a mirror just from what I can tell from the previews, holds up a light! A beacon; a beautiful and powerful reflection back to us all! A lighting up of the many, many incredibly, undeniably precocious pathways within this vast & spacious territory of art, explored by fearless women artists with families, in America!

Don't take my word for it; I am coming down with a cold! Go here and take a look in this mirror, letting the light of recognition shine just for yourself! If you are a woman artist with a family, there are allies looking back at, and talking with you! In my entire life, I am beginning to sense the timing within my own natural rhythm may actually be coming into alignment in the big picture, for a blessed change that is for the better... I think it is quite possible that we are all on the verge of becoming a profound, national territorial network of creativity in family life, with the impact of this movie!!

ArtPrize- Have YOU Heard About It?

2009-10-02T14:28:00.000-07:00

ArtPrize - Sep. 23 - Oct. 8, 2009 - Grand Rapids, MI

Eyes on the Prize: The Future of ArtPrize
October 2nd, 2009

Nicole Caruth is a freelance writer and curator living in New York and frequent contributor to the Art21 blog. She’ll walk around ArtPrize, observe, listen and write about her experience here. Nicole’s thoughts and opinions are her own and in no way represent an endorsement or objection from ArtPrize toward an individual artist or venue.

Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, Sept. 23, 2009. Photo: N. Caruth

There’s still so much to write about ArtPrize, but the time has come for me to say goodbye. By the time you read this I’ll probably be passing through Detroit on my way back New York. I leave you with some general thoughts, hopes, ideas, and suggestions for the future (at times knowingly contradicting myself):

Don’t try to define art. Something or someone will always get left out that shouldn’t be.

Don’t complain about there being too much art to see. There’s too much of everything right now — ArtPrize reflects our larger culture. Too much art is a good problem to have.

Don’t let the conversation stop with ArtPrize. Keep it going year round. The discourse is larger than any one event. More talk will (hopefully) lead to more informed votes next year.

For sure, there is a direct relationship between location and votes. I don’t know if that’s something that can (or should be) solved by ArtPrize.

Artists: Now you know what you’re up against, so do what you do best and be more creative. Turn it up a notch (without compromising your craft or message), collaborate with other artists, and win this thing next year. As one artist commented this week, “If you can’t beat them join them.” Start planning for 2010 now.

Winning is not everything. I applaud artists who recognized from the beginning that ArtPrize is about more than the popular vote and prize money.

I’ve followed the top 25, 50, … lists since day one, and some days I’ve appreciated having them as a gauge. But they are indeed distracting. I hope ArtPrize will hold these numbers back next year until voting ends. I am certain the conversation around the event will sound quite different.

Criticism is valuable and necessary, but so is enthusiasm. Og Mandino said: “Every memorable act in the history of the world is a triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it because it gives any challenge or any occupation, no mater how frightening or difficult, a new meaning. Without enthusiasm you are doomed to a life of mediocrity but with it you can accomplish miracles.”

There’s been a lot of talk about conventional exhibitions and events that ArtPrize should model itself after in order to enter the “serious” art world. Don’t look to the ivory towers, make those people look at you. They need change more than ArtPrize.

An event like ArtPrize would be extremely difficult for most museums to pull off, because of the bureaucracy of institutions and “high brow” thinking that governs all that they do. Grand Rapids is lucky to have a free agent like Rick DeVos that has taken an interest in art. (I swear he did not pay me to say that.)

Embrace your inner circus/state fair and set up cotton candy and ice cream stands. Offer a food map next year (with bakeries in bold). Okay, that’s totally selfish.

There is always room for improvement. But, all suggestions aside, I fear that ArtPrize will make too many changes in years to come and start to look like another art fair or biennial. We don’t need any more of those — they push communities out more often than they bring them in. What makes ArtPrize radical and fresh is its openness. I hope you don’t lose that.

Thank you Grand Rapids, Paul Moore, Rick DeVos, Bill Holsinger-Robinson, Jeffrey Meeuwsen, and everyone else at ArtPrize for having me. I can hardly wait to see what happens next year.

Posted by Nicole Caruth in General

4 Responses to “Eyes on the Prize: The Future of ArtPrize”

Jordana Dickinson says:
October 2, 2009 at 3:55 pm

It has been great to have you blogging about Artprize Nicole. I feel totally honored just to be a apart of this awesome competition. Even though I didn’t make it in the top 100 I am already energized and am working on my project for AP 2010. Go Artprize:)

Kim Boynton says:
October 2, 2009 at 4:00 pm

I agree…we don’t want ArtPrize to become like other “high brow” art events. I also agree that venue may have played too large a role, but clearly 1200+ pieces needed a lot of space. Love the state fair/food map addition…maybe I should open a downtown bakery before next year.

This event reflected our city’s culture very well…homey with a little bit of sophistication! It makes me proud to be a Grand Rapidian. I applaud Rick and his crew for giving our city the most fun I’ve seen in a very long time! I know there are those already plotting for next year and I am excited for what is to come (and it isn’t even over yet).

Heather Miller says:
October 2, 2009 at 4:10 pm

I really agree with what you have to say here. Thank you for writing it.

Kristen Roberts says:
October 2, 2009 at 5:12 pm

You know…I’m not sure I’d change a thing. This felt fresh and young and surprising–you seriously never knew what you were going to see. Rock on, ArtPrize!

This has been one incredible event and nowhere have I seen, read or heard that ANYONE else is reporting about this cultural happening outside of Grand Rapids, MI. Why IS that? If you have heard about the 2009 ArtPrize (an event that has some history in other states, in previous years!)_ leave a comment! I would like to build national momentum in favor of ArtPrize traveling the country, popping up all over the place for the benefit of artists in their communities, AND communities also!!

Favored Dark Horse of Art Prize, Grand Rapids 2009, Public Cultural Event!

2009-10-02T13:34:00.000-07:00

Sorry, Young Kim
October 2nd, 2009

If you are following ArtPrize on Twitter, you may have noticed the new hashtag #sorryyoungkim.

The creation of that hashtag comes from an outpouring of affection for one artist and grief he did not make it into the Top 10. It is one of the most remarkable stories from the first week of ArtPrize, how Young Kim from North Carolina went from obscurity to the talk of the event over the course of a few days.

Young Kim is showing his piece, salt & earth, at 47 Commerce SW. It’s a beautiful, vacant one story space that is perfectly situated for the piece. However, it’s perfectly situated in the middle of a mass of construction. Roads are closed and construction crews are working on the block to the north, to the south, to the east and to the west. As traffic flow goes, it’s a venue in quarantine. Add to that Young Kim is not here promoting himself like so many other artists are, and you start to see the odds were stacked against him from the beginning.

But the piece speaks for itself.

Saturday night, I went to 47 Commerce around 9:30PM. There were maybe five other people in there, but whispers had begun that it was something to check out. Sunday, Brian Kelly posted the video embedded above and the buzz about Young Kim started to catch fire on Twitter and Facebook. Monday came with cold weather, rain and high winds battering the city. That evening, one of my coworkers walked over to 47 Commerce in the rain and said it was packed out.

Above, you can see the flow of votes for the front runner (unnamed here) next to votes for Young Kim during each day of the week. Kim’s votes trickle in while the front runner starts strong. Then, when the cold and rain hit the city, the front runner plummets while Kim holds the line. The final 24 hours was an all out sprint. And if it’s any consolation, Young Kim, it was very close.

Over the next week, a lot of stories will be told about the Top 10. For the tens of thousands who have come to ArtPrize, I hope you take the opportunity to dig around and find pieces like Young Kim’s that are tucked away all over the city.

Listen to Michigan Public Radio’s story on Young Kim (and Tanglefoot) today during All Things Considered and here.

Posted by Paul Moore in General

It's like discovering the work of Wolfgang Laib, and the moment everyone realized that Maya Lin, a young architect student from Yale, was winner of the Vietnam Memorial!!

You have a career Young Kim and there are no apologies needed for THAT. Congratulations!!

I HAVE to post this all over the blogosphere!!

2009-10-01T13:02:00.000-07:00

Materialists WILL and are decry/(ing) this movie, like well-trained DOGS!! Yet, if materialists will go here and learn about the cycle of reusing materials in more healthy ways that ARE being developed, then maybe slowly, the average materialist will begin to understand stuff is still possible to attain, just the way your little pavlovic-driven unconscious is addicted!! WooHoo!! Sorry, I couldn't stop myself from the initial criticism of the reactionary...! Get over it and LISTEN until your neuro-transmitters make the connection!! Sorry!

Severn Cullis-Suzuki

These stories of stewarding national consumerist habituation, are NOT perfect, yet, they ARE beginning the change for the better! Can YOU help? Add to this? Come up with a BETTER way?? Then DO IT! The world needs your contributions too, NOT reactionsm which is so CHEAP anyway!! Listen to your own fundamental human values and learn to recognize them in other people "across the isle" from you. We aren't in a competition to win! What? Life on the planet... you stay... you go...?!! Whose death panels? Whose grandmother gets it in the chest?!! Come on, CHEAP, HABITUAL REACTIONISM IS what is DEAD!

The False Dichotomy Between "Work" and "Home" For Many...

2009-09-20T11:24:00.000-07:00

Paraphrased from: Composing A Life by, Mary Catherine Bateson, copyright 1989, "A radical rethinking the concept of achievement." -San Francisco Chronical

"One of the things that haunted me while I was at Amherst was the different meanings of "work" and "home" that hide behind what is becoming a false dichotomy for many women and men. The daily walks back and forth between my office and the college-owned house where I lived and the effort to harmonize my work in each made the notion of homemaking newly mysterious and provocative. Amherst College has a committee that is responsible for deciding many issues, including making decisions on tenure and promotions. During the fall semester, this committee is always overloaded, meeting for four or five hours at a time. These meetings were especially burdensome for me, since as dean, I had the responsibility of recording the deliberations, getting up at five the morning after a meeting to prepare the minutes before the rush of boots and oatmeal and the escaping school bus. Eventually, the committee would be driven to the evenings; then, I would find myself at odds with my colleagues who preferred to take a two-hour break at home. I preferred to share a quick working supper that might allow us to adjourn at ten rather eleven at night.

My main concern was not when the meeting ended, but with the oxymoron for me of going home to relax. Going home for most of my colleagues meant putting up their feet, relaxing with a cocktail, having a meal served to them. Going home for me meant dealing with domestic emergencies and desperately trying to help with Latin homework in the kitchen while preparing a meal. For most women and for increasing numbers of men, home was a workplace, often for a second or third shift in a single day. It is still immensely difficult for a woman with a family to make the moment of walking through the front door a moment of release. There is the real work involved in housekeeping, in providing food and shelter, but even if we learn to minimize the mechanics of these jobs, the tasks of homemaking cannot be eliminated for their value goes beyond the mechanical. We enact and strengthen our relationships by performing dozens of small practical rituals, setting the table, making coffee, raking the lawn_ giving and receiving material tokens, even in a household of servants. I entertained steadily in that house in Amherst, as if the passing of wine and cheese could repair the erosion of trust and intimacy that had happened at the college during the previous decade.
Marriage creates work, far beyond the apparent practical need, in order that work may create marriage. Couples rely on real tasks and shared effort or, lacking these, they invent endless elaborations of unnecessary tasks to assure themselves that their relationship and their need for each other is real, to knit it together from day to day. Women living alone, men living alone, even women and men heading households with young children get the practical chores done, but they do less housework than women living with husbands. If you compare statistics on different types of households, you find that the presence of an adult male means more additional work for the woman than the presence of a child under ten, even when the man believes himself to be sharing the housework equally.* What is not usually pointed out is that it is aggregate work that is increased by marriage. It is not that males generate more laundry or dirty dishes or exude far more than their share of the fuzz that accumulates under the beds but that new tasks are created by standards and expectations.

*Heidi I. Hartman, "The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle: The Examples of Housework," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society 6(3): 366-94 (1980).

My husband and I live in an apartment in Cambridge, but increasingly I do my serious writing in our studio in New Hampshire, a single room with a loft, perched above a stream. When I am working alone, I throw together a meal and eat it in a half an hour. My husband does the same thing when he is alone in Cambridge. But when we combine forces, working in the kitchen side by side, an hour is not nearly enough- it will be two hours before we have finished our meal. It's nicer and it's a better dinner, but we don't seem to be able to control it; as a result, both of us prefer to be alone when we have intensive work to do. The high points of Johnnetta's life have been the weekends spent with her sons or the time spent in courting a sweetheart in Washington, but she wonders out loud whether she could possibly live her present life if she were making a home for her menfolk day in and day out, even with domestic help."

It's hard to define the minimum needed to provide a sense of home sufficient to sustain relationships and growth, especially in this society of material opulence in which we generate endless hours of needless work to cancel the savings offered by technology. I struggle to be a homemaker without being drawn into the wasted labor of most housekeeping. Many people have pointed out that the introduction of computers in offices, though it may increase productivity, does not tend to reduce labor. This is not news; the pattern has been obvious for over fifty years, ever since the mechanical washing machine was used not to reduce time spent doing laundry, but to make it possible to change sheets and clothing two to three times more often. In the past ten years, the pressure has been rising to use up the gains of convenience foods by elaborate gourmandise. We are a restlessly busy society, with little capacity to loaf in the sun (though we work hard at getting tans) or to laze in bed (where "joy" is a serious obligation). We are bullied by the obese Sunday paper as our New England ancestors were by two-hour sermons. There is some hope that even as the traditional distinction between home and work, which was elaborated to justify sharply divided gender roles, gives way before new kinds of family life, the distinction between work and leisure will also shift. The maintenance of relationships and refreshment of spirit associated with home and leisure are surely frontiers for the world of work, while more and more kinds of challenging effort find their way into off-duty hours. Increasingly, during the years of being a working mother and searching for quality time with my daughter, I have become convinced that the best times actually occur in the kitchen or the car, when some simple task like shelling peas or getting to the supermarket defines the time and space in which to strengthen our communication.

Relationships need the continuity of repeated actions and familiar space almost as much as human beings need food and shelter, but it is not clear how much food and shelter must be elaborated. I have always been moved by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas' description of the temporary homes the Bushmen build during periods of frequent moves through the Kalahari Desert.* As is true anywhere, there is a need for shelter; desert temperatures may drop below freezing at night. This need is met by a shallow concavity scooped out of the ground and lined with grasses. There, body warmth can be sheltered from the wind and conserved by a piece of hide. But shelter cannot be considered a home, even for a night, unless it has a hearth and an entrance as well as space to lie. The alignment of these establishes the internal order needed for privacy and propriety, and distinguishes the woman's side of the fire from the man's side, to keep elemental forces sorted out for the health of the community and success in hunting. For the Bushmen, a curved branch, leaning sideways, one end embedded in the ground, is the necessary minimum to define entrance. The arrangement of concavity, hearth, and doorway orders the common activities of a household; it defines the home. When people live together, the high purposes of that common living, including the binding and the freeing each, become expressed in very concrete details. The details vary, and we can experiment with changing them as we wish, but material tokens are a necessary part of those relationships.

*Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Harmless People (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), 40-41, 196, 221.

All huma groups share food in one way or another, often using different kinds of foods differently. The Bushmen share the roots and nuts gathered by women within the household, while they divide the game killed by the men among the larger community fo the band. But not all human groups use the ceremony of eating together to establish and maintain relationships as we have tended to do in the Western Tradition, and as we have elaborated in our Eucharists and Seders and wakes. The Passover Seder is an elaboration of the institution anthropologists call "commensality," eating at a common table. The rituals of the Seder echo the function of other family meals in defining relationships and reaffirming and passing on tradition, but this is not true for all cultures. A young American woman who went to Manus Island in New Guinea with my mother was scandalized to see her taking her meals alone and not inviting the villagers to join her at her table, convinced she had discovered evidence of racism. But my mother explained that even a traditional Manus feast did not involve eating together, but rather offering gifts of food to be taken home: families and friendships were not defined by shared meals.
It was not necessarily ominous that the formal family dinner is declining in many households or becoming limited to special occasions. We might be better off if we could separate food as nourishment and pleasure from food as the currency of care that leaves so many women laboring long hours to prove affection in the semantic muddle called nurturance. There is the splendid lesson to be learned from the elaborate labor involved in infant feeding during the forties and fifties- the sterilization, the equipment, the rigid schedules- before the rediscovery of the simplicity of the breast. The ideal is to find simple forms that can be elaborated for delight or turned into art rather than onerous obligations. But the giving and receiving of these simpler material tokens of caring will still be essential.

To be continued...

The Great Blog Swap Experience, Featuring: Carrie Ure

2009-09-14T15:34:00.000-07:00

From The Feminine Mystique to the Female Mystic, A New Feminism Dawns
Athena by Carrie Ure

I'm accustomed to riding the autumn breeze like a blown leaf, content to rest in the rich hummus only when my pretty colors have faded to quiet earth tones. I suppose that's how I arrived here. Serendipity landed me on an artist's blog, with it's colorful moving feast for the eyes. I've temporarily drifted from my own stark white canvas and Times New Roman font just long enough to experience lift-off and magic. In the process I've come to understand just how much the Mystic and the Artist have in common.

The story of my collaboration with artist Kerrie Wrye begins with our virtual community of networked bloggers. Several weeks ago Sarah Rahman, a young college blogger living in Pakistan, came up with the idea of a swap to shake things up in the blogosphere. Before I can say "shiver my soul," Sarah pairs me with my alter-ego, a woman very much like me in many ways. Kerrie is near my age, a mother, free-thinker, cultural creative and yogini. Our first names are synonyms. Our last names are eerily similar. We live within a few hours of one another in the Pacific Northwest and we're both juggling our craft with the need to find paying work.

Yet it takes another synchronicity to uncover a commonality much deeper. Within a day of meeting Kerrie via email, my sweetheart takes me to see the movie Séraphine. Later on Facebook, Kerrie happens to catch my endorsement of the film.

"That's funny," La Femme Artiste comments, "I studied her in college."

Cherchez la femme!

Kerrie and I immediately recognize our common karmic link to a new movement I'm calling the Way of the Female Mystic.

Séraphine, the 2008 French art film co-written and directed by Martin Provost, beautifully depicts the life of a feminine mystic, the true story of Séraphine Louis of Senlis, France (1864-1942), a self-taught painter of the Naive movement. Yolande Moreau's César Award (French equivalent of the Oscar) winning performance only heightens the major question of the movie: how could such an artistic genius, compared in her day to Picasso, Rousseau and Van Gogh, have escaped worldwide notoriety?

Much as in the United States today, the first half of the 20th century was a time of great chaos and reordering in Europe. Séraphine's lifetime, spent in the countryside outside Paris, spanned unprecedented cultural changes stemming from the industrial revolution and two devastating world wars. She embodied the uneasy transition between a faith-based, patriarchal, religious moral order and a new society emboldened by economic progress and mobility.

Every epoch has its mystics, those individuals who don't quite fit in because they see God in the people and processes around them. Sadly, Séraphine, the mystic artist, lacked the skills to adapt to the rapid societal changes around her. She had only the humble survival instincts of an uneducated, unmarried woman with few economic advantages. Once discovered and exposed, her remarkable gifts awed art dealers, but her unconventional lifestyle frightened her provincial community. Like female mystics from every age, Séraphine was banished to the insane asylum.

Indeed, few female mystics from any era become household names, let alone thrive with a room of their own.

The story of Séraphine captures the imagination of this modern mystic, because it so poignantly illustrates the passionate marriage of art and mysticism. Besides being visionaries and saints, a high percentage of female mystics have been writers, poets, artists, and musicians. Psychologists theorize that woman are able to communicate their mystical experiences more easily than men owing to the feminine brain's more numerous left-right neural pathways. And yet, throughout the ages, those female visions, whether poetry, prose, music or visual arts, have been undervalued.

In the fascinating sacred feminine spiral that is "herstory," it turns out that Betty Friedan graduated from Smith College in 1942, the same year Séraphine Louis died in France. Friedan would eventually survey the women from her graduating class in preparation for writing her seminal (can I say that?) work published in 1963, The Feminine Mystique. The book incited a generation of western women, bent on reversing centuries of despair over their material condition, to march in the streets with a new battle cry. This was not a philosophical or spiritual stance, but rather an action-oriented demand for material parity with men.

In her 1998 book, At the Root of This Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst, Carol Lee Flinders contrasts the feminist and the mystic:

"Spiritual seekers must learn to be silent, restrain the ego, resist desire, and remove themselves from the world. But the feminist credo is just the opposite: Find your voice, know who you are, reclaim your body and its desires, and move in the world freely, without fear."

If the devil is in the details, God lives in the paradoxes. Surely only the Divine could sort out the apparent oxymoron, "mystic feminism." Yet this enigmatically feminine paradox is precisely how I would describe the New Feminism.

In a short history of female mystics written over a decade ago for New Renaissance Magazine, Mary Devlin predicted the rise of this new feminism. She made the point that we were entering the solar or energy age, and there would be a resurgence of female energy to match. This has indeed been the case. Since the days of the bra-burning 60s marches, women, especially many in the industrialized west, have gained some material ground, it's true. But we have not attained anything resembling equality as movers and shakers in finance, business or government. Where has female leadership energy gone?

In the past few decades, women have disproportionately ascended to spiritual rock-stardom, with the likes of Marianne Williamson, Joanna Macy, Tsultrim Allione, Pema Chodron, Caroline Myss, Louise Hay, just to name a few. Unlike every previous period in the modern era, the hegemony of the religious patriarchy has developed some large cracks, and women have filled those gaps in large numbers.

You don't have to be a hippie to notice that we've entered a New Age, a time when the very survival of the human species here on earth depends on larger-than-life solutions. As the institutional hallmarks of our male-dominated, fossil-fuel driven, materially-based western culture seem to collapse one by one under their own weight, we're called to abandon those paths that have lead to the destruction and degradation of humanity through war, greed and political injustice.
In our age, just as we've begun to value global and local community, there is a renewed search for a sense of belonging; an eye toward healing and sustaining the earth; a movement toward personal choice and away from the reliance on the corporation ("The Man"); a call to a government beholden to its citizenry; a demand that children be the first to be fed, clothed and healed; a shift from entertainment to education; an embracing of history and lineage. This looks to me like women's work.

And if these sound like fighting words, listen closely. The fighting has been necessary but it has only brought us so far. If we're going to solve the world's problems we're going to have to drop our insistence on dualistic notions of us against them and instead adopt a wholistic approach. We need a global feminism that attracts men as well as women, one that surrenders to inclusion, connection, love.

In this new world order, the mystic and the artist, the feminine and the feminist become one. Transcending cultural, political and gender differences, Séraphine Louis and Betty Friedan, march side by side, the spiritual and the practical merge.

We have entered the golden age of the Female Mystic who is happy to link arms with La Femme Artiste, for the enlightenment of all.

Carrie Ure is a freelance writer, editor, spiritual companion and mother living in Portland, Oregon. She writes about everyday mysticism on her blog, A Modern Mystic.

Find my post on Carrie Ure's blog: A Modern Mystic, here!

Artists, Community & State Arts Organizations MUST assertively advocate direct quality of cultural presence in communities/country!

2009-09-02T11:41:00.000-07:00

Arts Groups, Artists Face Second Year of State Budget Cuts

Faced with declining tax revenues, many states are slashing their arts funding for a second consecutive year, dealing a serious blow to arts groups and individual artists, the Associated Press reports.

According to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, states reduced their arts funding by 7 percent on average for the fiscal year that began July 1. However, the figure jumps to 14 percent when Minnesota, which this year nearly tripled its arts budget to $30.2 million, is excluded. In financially strapped states such as Arizona, South Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, Louisiana, and Florida, arts budgets fell by at least 30 percent, while in Pennsylvania and Connecticut, lawmakers are considering eliminating their state arts agencies entirely.

Indeed, over the past two years, arts budgets nationally have fallen some 20 percent, compared with 38 percent between 2001 and 2004 and 28 percent during the early 1990s, said NASAA spokeswoman Angela Han. This year, states got a bit of a boost from increases in National Endowment for the Arts and federal stimulus funding, but many state officials say the new funding won't make up for what they had lost. While states are responsible for just 2 percent of total annual arts revenue in the United States, according to Americans for the Arts, organizations often use those funds to leverage money from local governments, match federal funding, and attract private donations.

"[The cuts are] really going to have a devastating effect," said Terry Scrogum, executive director of the Illinois Arts Council, which saw its budget fall by 51 percent this year, to $7.8 million. "We're going to try to maintain as many of the operating grants as we can. They're obviously going to be at a reduced level. Others will be whittled down or suspended."

Twiddy, David. “Arts an Easy Target as Many States Cut Budgets.” Associated Press 8/29/09.

and this reader's comment: "Maybe we should just stop taking state and federal money and dispel the illusion that any govt. in the US significantly supports art or artists. Maybe then the public would stop complaining about misuse of tax money and take responsibility for funding art on themselves."
9/2/2009 10:17AM

A Room of Her Own Foundation

2009-09-01T00:07:00.000-07:00

A Room Of Her Own such an incredible commitment this non-profit has, to the works of women writers! Discovering the founding women of AROHO and their work on behalf of women writers is enlivening for me! The discovery of my own tribe; women who think and act as I do and as I would like to in the world. I have spoken this dream for twenty years to my daughter while I raised her and made my own art!
Today, I received a notification from the Associate Director, Tracey Craven-Gras that my work will indeed be hanging in the AROHO cyberspace gallery amid the company of women artists already featured there! It is my privilege to post this recognition and invite you to visit this online resource for women in the arts. Consider making a donation while you are there! (Scroll down until you see my name: Kerrie B. Wrye, under the two images of my paintings that are included in the gallery there_ thanks!) Spelling details on my name and the paintings' working titles to be added soon!

This incredible event just in, from art:21!

2009-08-29T10:51:00.000-07:00

ArtPrize: An Experiment in Decentralized Curation and Competition
August 27th, 2009
by Kevin Buist, ArtPrize

Maya Lin’s (Season One) “Ecliptic” in Rosa Parks Circle, Grand Rapids, Michigan. (Production still from the Art:21 episode, Identity, © Art21, Inc. 2001.)

There’s been a fair bit of talk lately about how the recession is affecting artists, the art market, and art institutions. And with good reason, pocket books are tight everywhere, and most art, no matter its intended relation to market forces, can’t exist without some kind of capital. It’s not a coincidence that this is also the era of the rise of social media. Facebook, Twitter, and the like are facilitating massive realtime networks that are free (as long as you’re connected). These networks become a conduit of exchange for new kinds of goods, and value is now being measured in new ways. Stock prices still matter, but Google rankings are starting to matter, too. Content is aggregated by algorithms that calculate value from the unconscious input of millions of users.

How does this new method of exchange and valuation affect the art world? If social networks naturally become markets, placing value on instantly exchanged bits of info, what would happen if we gave that value a monetary correlation, apart from a traditional marketplace? I’ve been working to help develop an new art event that seeks to do exactly that. ArtPrize is a radically open art competition. The annual event will run September 23 to October 10 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Hundreds of artists from around the world have created online profiles, which are a cross between an artist bio and an open-ended proposal. Hundreds of property owners, institutions, and public spaces in downtown Grand Rapids have volunteered to open their space to artists. We’ve built ArtPrize.org to enable these artists and venues to connect to one another, without a central curator or jury. If that weren’t unorthodox enough, the winner of the cash prize (currently the world’s largest, at $250,000, with additional prizes for the rest of the top ten) will be decided by public vote. Anyone can come to Grand Rapids, register to vote for free, and rank each entry with either an up or a down vote, online or by text message.

ArtPrize is an experiment that seeks to utilize the connectivity that social networking allows to build an art event from the ground up. We could have made an online art contest, where everyone uploads a .jpg and users click to vote while in their pajamas. We did not want to do that. We believe that the true value of most works of art are experienced during a physical or social encounter. Incentivizing these encounters in the city of Grand Rapids has tremendous civic value. Artists are tuning in to the possibilities inherent with this level of direct engagement with the city and audience. There are exciting projects coming that push the boundaries of how art interacts with social structures, architecture, and an overall sense of place.
Jimmy Kuehnle, ArtPrize participant. Stuffed Full, installation in Kyoto, Japan, 2008.

For those who can’t make it to Grand Rapids this fall, there will still be plenty of ways to track the event online. During the first round of voting, which takes place in the first week, visitors to ArtPrize.org will be able to track which artists are taking the lead. On October first, the top ten from the general vote will be announced, and final the winners will be announced October 8, after the second round of voting. To keep up during the event, be sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and our blog. It’s important to us that the event is grounded in a physical location, but we’re also eager to see how the discussion spurred by ArtPrize spreads across the web.

The idea of an incentive is central to ArtPrize. The prize and the vote primarily do one thing: they deliver an engaged audience. To many, this is a scary prospect. Who are all these people, and what do they know about art? Who are they to say what’s good and what isn’t? The voting audience will certainly be diverse, ranging from experts to complete novices. The event will likely create a vacuum of critical art knowledge, people may not have the language, or the art-historical context, to process what they’re seeing. The great thing is that this vacuum can be perfectly filled by educators, artists, and critics. Experts work tirelessly to supply cultural capital, we’re looking to create a demand. We’re working to produce educational programming and resources, but we’re really excited to see what pops up on its own. How will artists advocate for their own works? How will critics make an argument for what should get votes and what shouldn’t? What happens when friends go to the bar after looking at art and argue about what they voted for and why?

Kurt Perschke’s RedBall Project, shown above from the June 2009 installation in Toronto, will come to Grand Rapids for ArtPrize. (Photo by Flickr user inastral.)

ArtPrize has been the target of some criticism, and that’s not surprising. Some assume that putting on an art contest without a jury is a referendum against traditional art world practices, or even an affront to the very idea of curation. This is not the intent. Curators, juries, galleries, and other art institutions are playing a large role the formation of the event, each presenting a collection of entries that reflect their own sensibilities and expertise.

There are two interrelated questions that drive much of the thinking behind ArtPrize. One, how do works of art create and maintain value given the current state technological and cultural progress? This is a question Walter Benjamin began to ask with his 1936 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. We’re way beyond the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, but new versions of the same question keep coming up. And the second question, who decides what that value is? What, or who, is the art world, if such a thing can be concretely defined? And who is the public? How do social media technologies, with their ability to level all users to a single node in a network, affect these distinctions? ArtPrize doesn’t claim to know the answers to these questions, but we are doing everything we can to energize the debate.

Kevin Buist is an artist, freelance writer, and Director of Artist Relations for ArtPrize, he lives and works in Grand Rapids, MI. He received a BFA from Calvin College, and attended the New York Center for Art and Media Studies. He has written about film for SpoutBlog and co-produced FilmCouch, a Webby-nominated podcast. Before helping launch ArtPrize, he ran Calvin College’s 106 Gallery in Grand Rapids, MI. He can be found on the web at kevinbuist.com and on his blog, The Porcupine School of Poetry.

How might you reproduce this idea in your community?

Why I Make Art!

2009-08-23T10:28:00.000-07:00

Art has been my lifelong companion/catalyst supporting the wellbeing of my soul; I was seven years old when this very refined alliance first occurred.
Later in my early thirties I revisited this peculiar, childhood epiphany again, to examine specifically, the relevance that art truly has in my own life. Even more specifically, what value my life has to the whole of humanity, identified as artist! And as a result of looking back, to ask what kind of artist, may have been meant in that early childhood epiphany.

With greater understanding for the value of nurturing my soul and developing my own identity through creative expression, this gifted refined ally is now a deeply integrated internal resource, out of which I can envision facilitating, creative somatic-centered healing empowerment with others, in the not-so-distant future. How did this parallel of disciplines occur, you might ask? Therein lies this solo artist's lifelong journey thus far! Do ask.

For me, the first step toward the goal of creative somatic-centered empowerment work with others, is to apply to an MFA program that fits me.
How does a somatic-centered direction of pursuit, fit into a soul's well being in art_ again, you might ask? Ah-h, put that way, things may make some sense intuitively, and therein lays this solo artist's lifelong journey thus far! Really, it’s ok! Do ask.

Keeping a steady focus on current practical steps that I see are needed, I invite you to examine the thesis project I take into the MFA environment of study. Find it posted to Fractured Atlas, under my member account/project page; Timeless Rhythms.

Can I share with you that lately, from what I read in the media, it's time for those creatives such as myself to co-lead what solutions may come from looking differently, into what is possible for our country from here.
I propose that journeying through the personal toward an inner clarity and stability, plays a creatively empowering role for individual solution-building; a creatively empowering role in overall health and well being in this life in general, and in the imminent times ahead for all. Journeying the path of personal examination, playfully experienced through creative Somatic Psychology, can be a most solid way for kinesthetic types to show up to life: with inner coping skills that are creatively developed! We all have to do some training in this life for what we are called to do, yes?! Why should appropriate self-examination at the right time in life, be any different?
Intelligently playing with the prospects of a self-commitment of this nature and magnitude, is what I am reaching to offer and facilitate with others, who resonate with an examination of the intuitive intelligence of their own physical medium, over the long-term of life!

In the interim intent-of-accomplishment of these (partnering) goals (art and somatics), I invite you to support this artist-with-life's study at this time, with a tax deductible donation to my project.

What questions do you have about the future in general? How do you see yourself getting there? Dialog with me; let's see what comes of the contact!
I invite you to stay in contact with my progress over the duration of reaching the overall goals of combining Somatic Psychology practices with the empowering expression of art. The first personal step to getting there, is through the portal of the creative. Empower yourself; follow my progress!

L'art brut

2009-08-20T22:23:00.000-07:00

Josef Hofer, People; Mixed media on paper 2006; 42 x 30 cm

A cool video about this art form on Bablegum can be found here! Do check THIS out!!

WOW!! keep up! The boom of the Artist is happening NOW!!

2009-08-18T12:59:00.000-07:00

Fractured Atlas (Liberate the Artist) has just launched a hosted web-channel through YouTube's Non-Profit Program. As you peruse the Fractured Atlas webpage, find my 501c3 sponsored project here, scroll down to: "Timeless Rhythms," and donate, tax-free, online, directly to my project! Thank-you!

Red Hen Press Interview

2009-08-18T12:57:00.000-07:00

Take a listen!

Support what you like in the arts; stop being afraid of culture!

2009-08-16T10:34:00.000-07:00

Sweating for the Arts
Adam Forest Huttler | Aug 12, 2009 11:48 am

Never let it be said that Fractured Atlas is unwilling to go the extra mile. To prove it, this September 27th we’ll be going 105.3 miles in a publicity stunt campaign to raise awareness about the importance of supporting arts and culture.

fatriheader450
Into the Belly of the Beast

This September 27th, the Fractured Atlas staff, Board, and membership will be participating in The Belly of the Beast, a triathlon in Lebanon, NJ. We’ll be fielding a total of three teams across two events.

TEAM A will be doing the Half Ironman distance as a relay:

1.2 Mile Swim - Elizabeth Errico (my wife and the most dedicated non-employee in FA history)
56 Mile Bike - Tim Cynova, Deputy Director
13.1 Mile Run - Adam Huttler, Executive Director (that’s me!)

TEAM B isn’t really a “team” per se. It’s our fearless leader and Chairman of the Board of Directors, Joshua Lindland doing the Sprint distance as a solo effrort:

1/2 Mile Swim - Joshua Lindland, Chairman
13.9 Mile Bike - Joshua Lindland, Chairman
3.1 Mile Run - Joshua Lindland, Chairman

TEAM C will be also be doing the Sprint distance, but as a relay:

1/2 Mile Swim - Phillip Stearns, Member
13.9 Mile Bike - Juliana Steele, Program Specialist
3.1 Mile Run - Emily Watts, Program Director
You Can Make an Impact

But this isn’t really about a bunch of arts administrators making martyrs of themselves on a triathlon course. That’s just to get your attention. The truth is that you have an opportunity to ensure the continued vitality of the arts and cultural sector in America.

This art business has always been a tough racket, but today the field is threatened in some pretty scary ways. Funding for arts organizations has been decimated by the economic downturn, resulting in severe budget cuts and even the extinction of some important institutions. Meanwhile, the arts are increasingly being scapegoated in an apparent resurgence of the culture wars.

In this tough environment, artists and cultural organizations need reliable, affordable infrastructure more than ever before. That’s what you can provide. Your donation to Fractured Atlas will have a sweeping impact on the arts community. And since 96% of our spending goes directly to programs and services, you can rest assured that your money won’t be wasted.

So here’s the deal: we’re going 105.3 tough miles for the cause. You can join in by contributing a little bit for each of those miles:

If 50 cents per mile is more than you can manage, enter whatever amount you’re comfortable with in the field above. On the other hand, if you can afford to give a little more, then this is a chance to amplify your impact.

An Inspired Idea

2009-08-14T16:40:00.001-07:00

A WORLDWIDE REQUEST:
''CALL TO ALL THE CREATIVE SPIRITS FROM AROUND THE PLANET''...

It is time for you all to be part in creating a truly momentous and inspirational piece of art that will fuse together countries, continents, races, skin colours, languages, dialects, beliefs and religions. This ground-breaking global art project is entitled WE ARE ONE,' and will involve thousands of artists who, each using their artistic individuality and talent, will unite together to produce a truly enormous, inspirational and worldwide piece of art... (a single yet collective masterpiece that bridges and bonds the world in which we all live).

''WE ARE ONE... is not about individual artists creating toward their own success or financial gain... this is purely about creating a GLOBAL CREATIVE HARMONY, and collectively producing an AMAZING HISTORIC PLANETARY WONDER''.

The concept is to prove to a wide-eyed world audience that through art, positivity and creative unity, we can all collectively illustrate a history making and inspirational message to every single person on planet Earth. It is now time to illustrate on a vast global scale that creativity is the new world brotherhood and sisterhood.

''WE ARE ONE... is when thousands of single voices speak together at one point in time to produce a truly beautiful sound of globally epic proportions, and with a GLORIOUS FUSION of WORLDWIDE CREATIVITY we will all resonate together as ONE GLOBAL SOUL''.

We are requesting that each person of any age produce one piece of art and then simply upload (*) a digital jpeg file of it to the organisers. Then, a very select creative team will assemble this truly exciting, breathtaking global and history making piece of art. It will be created in a way that each individual artwork acts as a inspirational visual building block, fusing together how great is the strength of human positivity, alongside the truly global union of art, artist and creativity.

This awe inspiring masterpiece of world art will be assembled and housed in a location of worldwide creative importance... (to be announced soon); all dates for submission of work to be announced (*).

IMPORTANT MESSAGE... everybody unite and spread these 3 simple words to the four corners of the Earth... ''WE ARE ONE''... and be part in changing art forever...!!!

Contact Info, Email: nicholasbellamyart@live.com
AND: check out THE W A O facebook link.

Signs of Hope and Responsibility!

2009-08-11T10:47:00.001-07:00

Philanthropy News Digest

Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation Awards $1.4 Million to NYC Arts Groups

The New York City-based Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation has announced grants totaling $1.4 million to help fourteen New York City arts organizations continue their programming during the recession.

All the selected organizations are past grantees of the foundation's arts and enterprise program and have pioneered important cultural initiatives and established strong roots within their communities, despite lack of access to well-heeled donors. The grants will be used for a variety of purposes, from sustaining educational programming at the Weeksville Heritage Center in Bedford Stuyvesant to making possible an ambitious schedule of sixty performances at Harlem Stage.

"Over the past several years, we have had the privilege of supporting a unique constellation of cultural institutions that not only reflect New York City's continued relevance as the world's cultural capital, but have also delivered the benefits of our emerging creative economy to some of our most vulnerable neighborhoods and citizens," said Gary Hattem, president of the Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation. "These grants will help preserve these institutions as important community assets while allowing for their continued leadership in furthering community revitalization."

For a complete list of grant recipients, visit the Deutsche Bank Web site.

“Deutsche Bank Supports New York City Cultural Organizations With Arts and Enterprise Stabilization Grants.” Deutsche Bank Press Release 8/06/09.

Souccar, Miriam. “Deutsche Bank Throws Lifeline to the Arts.” Crain's New York Business 8/06/09.

Primary Subject: Arts and Culture
Secondary Subject(s): Economic Crisis
Location(s): New York

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Lee Garrison

2009-08-09T16:23:00.000-07:00

A painter, whose work(s) I found roaming through cyber-space yesterday! I invite interested people, to click here, in order to look at the beautiful film of her working life_ that of a fellow painter!
I find her work loose and free, qualities very attractive to me on many levels. The more of her work I saw on the film, posted on her website (click on the link on her name), the more I really loved the spirit of the work.
Today, (August 11, 2009) I had my second chat by phone with this lovely human being, a sprite really, as I picked up on the lilting joy in her giggle because she was speaking about her path as the artist! It was a contagious conversation. I am a lucky person for having made contact directly, seeking permission to publish the image you see above, so I could share it here on my left coast, artist blog!
Tell me what you think!

Prayer II

2009-08-09T16:20:00.000-07:00

Interested?

This 36" x 48", simply framed, oil painting is for sale.

I consider it the pièce de résistance of my entire working oeuvre as an artist.

To contact me about it, please find my email address located on the top of the right sidebar.

Thank-you.

The Blog Swapping Project Gets Underway!

2009-08-08T10:31:00.000-07:00

So far on NetworkedBlogs, we have attracted just about half the projected number of participants desired_ yet, sometimes good things just can't wait!

We begin swapping/writing on one another's blogs, on the 23rd of August, (2 weeks from this Sunday, 8/9/09!). Click here on "this event" to register for this great and exciting, creative social collaboration_ experiment!

Swapping blogs for a day!

2009-07-26T09:56:00.000-07:00

This is an invitation to all interested parties in the world of blogging!
Sarah, a blogger from Pakistan has hit upon a growing trend in the broader world of blogging: that of exchanging your blog with another blogger and vice verse for a day!

I thought that it sounded creative, collaborative and exciting_ so, I am helping to promote this concept. We can kick off the project with a minimum of 28 people. Each person is then paired with one other individual, to let the blog swapping begin for a twenty-four hour period!

I am discovering that people who have already done this, are discovering just how small the world of like, shared or just plain in common traits between them really are!!

To participate with this blog swapping adventure you can contact me here or, contact Sarah (the originator of this leg of the blog swapping trend) directly at this link! (I added the discussion page. Look for thisicon at the top of the page to find Sarah, the blog swapping idea originator for this group!)

Meanwhile, this quote from T.S. Elliot's poem: "In Four Quarters" is a fitting reference to this project as well_ I found it here, on the blog of another "swapper!"

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
- T.S. Elliot, Four Quarters

James Turrell

2009-07-25T16:09:00.000-07:00

The work of James Turrell has intrigued me since I read about it in an old edition of ARTnews. I was recently glad to see he was one of the featured artists in the PBS Series, Art:21, Art in the 21st Century, part 1.

Fractured Atlas

2009-07-24T22:50:00.000-07:00

Business
Fractured Atlas Puts 'Biz' In Show Business

by Neda Ulaby

Listen Now [18 sec] add to playlist | download

Morning Edition, March 11, 2009 · Fractured Atlas founder and Executive Director Adam Huttler never intended to create an arts service organization. As a freshly minted Sarah Lawrence graduate, Huttler moved to New York City to start his own theater company and put on plays.

"That lasted for about one show," Huttler admits. "I realized I was OK as a director but really better at the business side of things."

So Huttler transformed his company into a not-for-profit that teaches arts organizations to function better as businesses. Eight years later, Fractured Atlas boasts a $4.5 million budget and supports 7,500 arts organizations and individual artists nationwide. It helps with low-cost health insurance, fiscal sponsorship, professional development, technical assistance and liability insurance.

"We try to help [artists] be in a position to focus more exclusively on making art," Huttler explains.

Fractured Atlas' services helped the Catalyst Theater Company in Washington, D.C., obtain unemployment insurance for its part-time actors and staff. Artistic Director Scott Fortier says he plans to take advantage of Fractured Atlas' free online classes in fundraising and accounting, especially during a moment of declining donations across the arts world.

"Once you start actually acting like a business, I think that your donors are happy, your board is definitely happy. It gives us a grown-up feel," he observes.

Most Fractured Atlas members are individual artists. They can get basic memberships free or pay $75 a year for more programs and services. For example, Fractured Atlas can help documentary filmmakers get errors and omissions coverage that protects them if they are sued by their subjects — and is crucial for scoring distribution deals.

Another Fractured Atlas member, Christian Oh, helps run the DC Asian Pacific American Film Festival, which annually brings over 80 independent movies to Washington. Oh says Fractured Atlas helped his organization expand to the extent that he may not renew his membership: He says the film festival has learned how to take care of itself.

"It's almost like a parent and child," he says. "You know, we've been a child of theirs for a while and we realize that we're growing up and we need to move on."

Huttler says that means he is doing his job. The recession has not hurt Fractured Atlas' membership. In fact, Huttler says that since October, it has gained about 300 new members a month.

"Artists will keep making art, no matter what," Huttler says.

And, he adds, they might as well have health insurance while they do it.

I am in the "child" stage as my 501c3 sponsored project is something I am still learning at my own pace, how to promote, how to solicit funds and resources for, and all that comes with staring fear in the face, in order to get on with creating my first sponsored art project.

The affordable health insurance for artists part is not quite out west yet, but I am looking for it!

* To locate my fiscally sponsored project, scroll very near the bottom of the page in the link to "Timeless Rhythms." Thanks!

My Kid Could Paint That

2009-07-19T10:36:00.000-07:00

I checked out this video from the local public library, as support for my own transitional return to self. Recently I have experienced an end to full-time, single parenting the last twenty-one years. Prior to that, I was living life instinctively and intuitively developing my artistic self; an extension of a moment of great epiphany that had happened at age seven. During childhood life really wasn't safe for me, to develop the open vulnerable nature I came into this world to express, in order to share for well-being within and in all receptive contact. Consequently, a truly light-filled innate happiness got layered over in negative conditioning. Now after many years of hard work to understand historic chaos more clearly, and to learn to take greater responsibility for my own responses to living my own life_ I more consciously recognize innate wholeness that is always within us_ we NEVER lose it. We do however, move into rigid forgetfulness!

I say all of this because watching this video personally surprised me in this way.
I thought it would be a very different kind of film, instead, I found one is confronted with the complexities of being human! Yet, I don't believe the film-maker even knew he may be asking us to notice so many things about ourselves, that for me point to the nature of being more & more consciously aware of the nature of awareness, (especially) in this world of form.

Watching this video at this moment in my own life experiences, I find a sensitivity about Marla's freedom as a child that I want to guard. Would if she could just be a child without adult agenda interdicting what is naturally developing in her; developing into what is (to be) her own turf? Wouldn't it be incredible, if everyone hungry to recapture within themselves, what is clearly capable of naturally expressing within Marla herself_ the self-discipline, the self-awareness, the self-love and respect, to let go completely and just watch with no agenda? To watch while she grows up doing what she does, and very simply let her lead this natural expression unfettered, without adult interpretation first?

If I just let go of all the adult agendas I witnessed flying around this little girl, a little girl who is growing up in the most intimate ways in front of a camera_ I can begin to touch something that is shared within each of us. That which is beyond describing! I invite you to try to stay with this consideration in the best way you may understand it.
The only thing "weird" about this consideration or what Marla Olmstead is accomplishing quite naturally, is really the lack of common unawareness in many adults.
What I am saying is that in each moment of our lives, we all have the opportunity to more consciously witness life in action. What does this even mean?
Just consider that if, watching can occur as a conscious experience in each one of us; watching closely one's own responses to what is being seen, specifically here as Marla paints, what might we each come to understand?
The experience of consciously recognizing Marla as a child within each of us, developmentally taking action instinctively_ before thought, concepts, or mental layers of any kind take over. To additionally become aware of what we internally layered adults, unconsciously make the contents within this film (for example) out to be, beyond Marla just painting. Waking up to this kind of realization about our unconscious habits within ourselves is powerful to consider. To wake up to recognize that we are Marla in our own unique ways, is powerful to consider. Is this life really that we have to lose parts of ourselves, to traverse through the journey while we are here?

If not, and we can begin to recognize that as well-meaning, never-the-less commonly unaware adults promote the contents within the film, contents that have become more and more removed from Marla simply painting, and more and more about our collective unconsciousness acting out just that_ THEN, what might happen?!
If we could begin to ease risking our recognition for the sweetness, the preciousness of childhood, and instead wake up to childhood that can be nurtured to grow more consciously, aware of its own self_ we might begin to gain in the evolution of conscious self-recognition.

Unto her own self Marla seems to me, to represent the combination of innate individual openness and balance within her immediate environment, thanks to her parents nurturing attention. (Just don't forget about Zane, cognizantly recognized as a capable individual, away from his sister's endeavors.)
In parental evenness, consciously parenting in non-attachment Marla's own instinctive lead, her own development into puberty and young adulthood_ could support the development of a very evolved human being, as she chooses. Contributing as I say, while she is still very young, it might be equally important, as choices may reflect her parents understanding_ to do their own personal work to awaken within.
I write none of what is posted in this article as judgment, interdiction or personal attack of any kind; the contents of this article are firm suggestion only.

Having said so thus far, there is no esoterism inferred that one cannot very simply access. Access in the course of personal self-inquiry and access as active exploration, the nature of unconditional love within us all. To access consciously knowing oneself more fully, to the extent one may be naturally attracted to a path of self-inquiry, as we also live honoring a parallel life in form. This is part of the personal journey I find my own self living, reflective in this transition from a path of healing past family history, to one of ongoing inquiry about waking up to the present moment as I choose how to function in the world now. As a child, I instinctively felt that trying to figure out how to live somewhere between past and future always seemed too narrow, too claustrophobic, particularly in a house riddle with complex layers of chaos. At age seven, the idea in any event, of "becoming an artist" seemed to hold the liberation I sought, in order to know myself more intimately. Capable of living a life of simple happiness for its own sake.

If the adult world were the result of early natural internal nurturing, through the support of balanced external environments (and I am not talking about unreachable potential)_ what might we continue to learn about waking up, over the course of life, about our own inherent nature consciously being in this world of form?

This is a very stirring film that has provoked within this blogger good food for thought. See this film if you are a mind, and consider with me.

M-m-m....

2009-06-20T14:25:00.000-07:00

I just had to post this recording of just one of my favorite musical divas_ just for father's day_ just for us full-time, single moms!!

Happy Father's Day all of us full-time, single moms who have done the work well!

***The irony of the song itself is its own coincidence_ art and life/life and art are like that. That's the sweetness and the grace after all.

Support for a local Art Event!

2009-06-17T12:23:00.000-07:00

From: "Chris Tymoshuk"
Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 9:40 AM
Subject: springdale school shows

The last Springdale school weekend may turn out to be the beginning of a regular monthly art sale.
If you are interested in showing, please contact me via e-mail Tymoshuk@xprt.net
This e-mail is checked daily.

The next sale will be Aug. 8th, 10-5pm. The cost is $25.00 + 5% donation to the Save the Springdale fund.

This fee covers advertising, but it is your job to send off e-cards to your network of friends/family.

You must have your own canopy, and hanging system, tables etc...You must be set-up by 10am and you must stay till 5pm. You also must be present to show your work, unless you have made special arrangements with me ahead of time.

I will be printing up cards again, if you would like to be featured on the card send me pics asap. I would like to have them printed up in July.

The Key to this being a success is getting the word out. If you can help me do that, your assistance is greatly appreciated.

Also, if you are in some shows and would like the network to get the word out send your show cards and I will send it out to this network.

Attached are some show cards, please come visit me if you can. (I have emailed her to send me some images, as they weren't actually attached. Busy lady!)

Thank you,
Chris Tymoshuk

Any questions about this event or how to contact Chris, contact me here and I will forward all inquiries on, as appropriate.

WOO! HOO!! You are the first 5000!!

2009-06-04T08:04:00.000-07:00

Thank-you! Thank-you! Thank-you first-time & returning blog visitors & supporters!! In a little over two years since it's inception, Timeless Rhythms Studio online journal has logged in it's first 5000 views!!

I have taught myself a lot setting up my first blog. This adventure has been my way of staying active in one of the most significant areas of my life, as I transition from what was to what will be!

Watching my world become more connected to the whole wide world is terrifyingly wonderful!! Very powerful and very empowering!

I am most grateful for everyone who continues to silently come by to keep tabs on my path, even when my fields of productivity appear to lie fallow for a time. Even in silent times, the under-surface is ever renewing, gathering up energy to begin again.

Sacred Under the Sky, after EC, Prisma Color

Quietly Transitioning

2009-05-16T12:19:00.000-07:00

I am living quietly these days. Listening to the rhythm of transition that is marking my life now. Noticing how noisy the mind has become, noticing fatigue, surrendering.
I am struck by the quality of local women farmers' produce. I am listening to teachers who trust human beings deeply as a spiritual path...
Occasionally, I scribble a little here and there, but mostly I am listening, observing.
Someone recently asked me if I had plans for the week-end? I said that in this state of transition everything is simple pleasure. She just looked at me.

My Latest Housing Search is Over at Last!

2009-03-29T10:19:00.000-07:00

Celebrate! Celebrate! Dance to the Music!!

I am incredibly happy about having found my own place to live yesterday!! This finally comes after two years of transition from small town living to try life in the nearest big city and on some significant fronts, failing badly in the effort!

Funny how sometimes you can leave home seeking fame and fortune in the wider world, only to return to find it was all here the whole time! I have learned a lot and I look forward to just exhaling for awhile. Then, gently putting into action what I am learning still. I know this process of re-defining my life isn't over. Just for now, it is in some revision of better planning as well as greater internal clarity, for as long as that takes!

Below are a couple of "before" pics of the inside of my new abode!

My OWN place in which to grow, to soak in what internally has been germinating as well as on hold, for a very long time. My own place from which to learn how to bring my inner purpose into clarity with greater effectiveness out in the world!! I'm 'cited with anticipation and wisdom!!

Professionalism Mirrored Back

2009-03-24T12:33:00.000-07:00

Hi!!

I am so-o-o very pleased, proud, and very excited to write and share with you all my newest, professional affiliation with a collaborative project debuting during Women's History month in Washington DC, this month!

If you click on the link "gallery," on their website you can find one of my paintings at the bottom of that page. If you scroll through the menu bar to the side of the page, click on "WAWH Biographies" and again scroll to the bottom of the page to find my very simple bio statement.

I cannot begin to tell you what this affiliation means to me!! Yet, I will start by saying that it represents my first alliance after sixteen to twenty-one years of working in isolation on the healing of my FOO needed in me; developing the creative process in tandem every step of the way. (The time difference represents my parenting and painting paths.)
A healing process that leads to one’s own ability to express a new voice of autonomous value; a voice that no one can ever take away again; a voice, an inner identity to consciously choose to pass on. A creatively intelligent voice in solidity and clarity of personal courage; becoming the embodiment of work one empowers oneself to bring into this world in order to share for the benefit for everyone attracted specifically to what I do in art, somatic psychology and alternative nutrition, for their own benefit; raising my daughter as first beneficiary. At this brief moment of transition, I consider my daughter is this fleeting vitality merging into her own sense of self.

It is my wish to open this new door to Woman Artists/ Women Healing with you, as I begin this part of my journey and professional life, in order to share what my whole life has been about with greater clarity: to come to an inner place in this world where I belong as I am_ an artist, a woman, a daughter healing family inheritance that took hold in me in the womb; an inheritance of abuse and abandonment in their universality that have always deserved an appropriate liberation process within everyone who seeks it for their own unique healing processes.

I cannot begin to put into words right now, the feelings I am still skyin' over, when I read the first email response to my contact with the Women Artists/ Women Healing facilitators! I suddenly felt my professional self mirrored back to me in very powerful feelings that continue to buoy me; my gratitude for this experience of peer recognition is boundless.

Emily, Oil, 36"x 48"

Clear Voices of Women Artists/Women Healer-Allies, at Long Last

2009-03-17T11:58:00.000-07:00

First, I must thank another blogger whose posts I am following here_ I am most grateful for your dedication to the arts and especially to women in the arts. Thank-you!

Welcome

February 4, 2009 by ironcuttermedia

Women Artists/Women Healing: Multicultural Artistic Narratives of Trauma and Survival is a five-part narrative series featuring literary readings, performances, exhibitions and facilitated discussions.

Gathering women artists, healers, veterans, and survivors from across cultures and disciplines, the series showcases the resiliency and expression of the human spirit, seen through the lens of female artists and speakers.

Join us every Tuesday evening in March from 6-9pm at CentroNía in Washington, D.C. as we explore the connective tissue of humanistic themes that entwines us all.

Interact with the artists, performers and panelists to learn how lives are transformed through artistic, creative and personal expressions. Listen to voices of survival, be it the ravages of war and strife, or crime, poverty, and oppression and find out how faith, healing and empathy are entry points for promoting justice and healing from within and beyond one’s own personal experience.

In celebration of Women’s History Month, each program begins at 6pm with a light reception, art exhibit and performance, followed by a facilitated panel discussion at 6:45pm. Audience interaction is encouraged.

Women Artists/Women Healing is produced by Elizabeth Bruce, author of ‘And Silence Left the Place,’ stage actor, playwright of ‘Sheila’s Iron,’ and educator. The series is associate produced by Alivia Tagliaferri, author and documentary film-maker of Ironcutter Media, and Timothea Howard, political activist, visual artist and program manager of CentroNía’s Community Schools Program.

Women Artists/Women Healing is funded in part by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, an agency supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, and hosted by CentroNía (1420 Columbia Road, NW, Washington, DC 20009). The series is also funded in part by the Readings & Workshops Program of Poets & Writers, Inc.

How Did I Enjoy Them_ Should You Ask? And You Have!

2009-02-26T09:52:00.000-08:00

I went to the opening performances of this year's PDX Jazz Fest 2009, on an auspicious Friday, February 13th, as a winner of our local NPR station_ KLCC's ticket give-away. I was thrilled to go and hear the music, and also because this year was a particularly top-flight jazz event!! I really wanted to go because PDX was host to one of only three WORLD-WIDE performances of the seventieth anniversary of Blue Note Records, who wisely chose to showcase their jazz artists in traveling/performing diplomacy of American music and culture. It feels good to support independent artists and those organizations whose roots are independent in their support of the variety of arts movement in our world.
For those who don't know, Blue Note Record's historical inception came out of a personal passion for jazz starting in Germany! (Check out the link.)
Gonzalo Rubalcaba's musical family background comes directly out of the height of Cuban Mambo/Jazz that really caught fire in this country during the 1940's! Some of Cuba's musical legends were regular guests in the family home where Gonzalo Rubalcaba grew up.
After hearing this concert, it is clear to my ears that he is a musician with jazz flowing in his veins; a solid performer in his own right and truly a noble opener for what was to come later that night!
I like to call the jazz performed by the humble Mr. Rubalcaba and his band, 'impressionistic abstraction.' For me, it is a musical encounter that allows the mind to soar on layers of color while the body rests in a rocking rhythmic understructure. Gonzalo Rubalcaba's piano virtuosity is playful in a thinking manner. Touching down on solid earth as it leaps freely back off again into an acrobatic, grooving, gliding air dance of color impressions! WOW! I will be looking for more of his solo and en groupe musical tracks and performances after this heady night of my very first exposure to jazz with Cuban roots, Rubalcaba-style!
After the performance, I chose to take home their CD titled, Avatar. I refer to Gonzalo Rubalcaba as humble because meeting him in the autograph line after his show, I found his demeanor very much the diplomat. I am still enjoying savoring the night's performance all the more, each time I turn my copy of Avatar on to listen again and again!

More commentary on the performance of Terence Blanchard and his band and the accompaniment of the Portland Jazz Symphony to come, as well as, my separate musical encounter with world renowned performer Evelyn Glennie, (not a BlueNote musician)... stay tuned!

Next week, it's this astonishing performer!

2009-02-13T11:03:00.000-08:00

Eugene Symphony: Drum Roll Symphony

Thursday, February 19 at 8:00 pm

Presented by Eugene Symphony

Composer Jennifer Higdon returns with a West Coast premiere and her colorful Percussion Concerto played by magnetic audience favorite, Dame Evelyn Glennie.

PDX Jazz Festival starts tonight and I have an extra ticket!

2009-02-13T09:29:00.000-08:00

The opening performances for this year's winter Portland Jazz Festival are, Gonzalo Rubalcaba performing Cuban Jazz piano:

AND

Terence Blanchard, performing his Requiem for Katrina! Here is an excerpt:

Mid-week, I won two tickets to see this performance. I will arrive a little past the start time as I work earlier tonight. Yet this represents the beginning of a new life for me so, I am going no matter what! And, I would love to have a second person join me in this top flight experience this evening.

Seriously if you can attend and would like to join me with my extra ticket tonight, make contact here. QUICK!

Alright, ALL you artists_ SHAKE IT UP!!!

2009-02-09T12:19:00.000-08:00

Today, I thought I was going to write about being so incredibly isolated by ignorance and resistance to know the truth about one's self and the world we each live in. About being the daughter of a parent who has always been mentally ill and never had the where-with-all to investigate this fact for and about her own self!
I thought I was going to bemoan living in a house of people, so resistant to knowing the broader world around them and to more openly sharing any differences at all that over time, sharing living space has begun to feel to me like being entombed alive! Yet instead, right now, what I believe I am recognizing is a greater call for me to outwardly express the compassion that is within me with a lot less fear. Even so, it isn't any easier to write than it is to put into action! I am shaking as I write this recognition.
Even in the recent past, I can attest to being totally uncoordinated about how to go about addressing this inner recognition_ but today is the first step to doing, being with and in life all differently. Differently, I do dare say for all of us human beings really!
I am an artist and I know that out of chaos comes creativity. As a human being I know I can come across as not being friendly-like in the soft and fuzzy ways of say, the mainstream mothering female archetype. My own daughter grew up saying, "I am the only one who knows how nice a person you are!" Call it the successful conditioning of fear. I am still a social geek even after all the years of therapy. Twenty years ago, I needed what crazily turned into too much social isolation, to start this big work in my own life in order to feel safe within from the former terrors that were childhood_ he-e-e-y!
To this day my sibs seem to only remain emotional enemies; resistant to mutually clearing up mis-defined family "reality" that only continues sadly instead, to be fierce. Pride dies hard, hard, hard.
Yet, even as I have hooked your curiosity to the universal commonality in my story_ I turn instead, because it is more important, to walk out onto this US socio-economic landscape to testify. I believe that in the bigger picture of life, my social return to community is timed right! My child is doing a fine job in the world even though there were many time that I was treated as though kids raise themselves! You know, grow up in a vacuum for crying outloud! Afford your own sense of recognition is really where we are going...

The real point in writing today then is about:

I - M - A - G - I - N - A - T - I - O - N!

I know my fair share about imagination and how to continuously use it well, as my life has been nothing short of endurance (like the races) without the support of commonality from family and friends for over twenty years now! As a result, I offer a sensitivity that allows me to see how soft many folks have become; how much the mind/intellect has been allowed to run rough-shod over "reality." Reality, you do know this one too when you let yourself! It's the stuff that shows up at the front door of your life without an appointment. Life, not appointment calendars filling up the years of living. No! No! This is not a cliché! In the big picture, I am pointing to TRUSTING your own self to be good enough to be loved, that you are already loving and that we each really are loveable.

In this economic fallout right here in the good old U.S of A., love really is the heart of the matter now! So, I am talking to everyone like the artist. Don't walk away, don't even steal this idea. Let your vanity retire from believing it is in charge. Really, now is the time to self-examine_ not to be targeted but to truly, undeniably hear our own individual and collective truths.

One truth being: we have more in common with one another than not! One of the great truths that has been run over and left for dead on our community and national social highways. MORE in common WITH one another, THAN NOT!
For example, we all really do have more of our basic humanity in common with the mentally ill, the socially ignorant_ plainly, plainly, plainly then, there is more to learn from one another. MORE to observe, taking sentimentality out of observing as much as possible_ only, as much as possible. Sometimes it is simply not possible_ this is part of what makes us human. We are connected... we are connected. We are all connected. No one is left out. No one. Can you really hear this yet?
Artists of all stripes, are you hearing me?! Right this minute I am saying: speak to your truth. Stand naked in this world! Lift everyone up by your commitments to truth, love and freedom. Make art that does not only sell, but rather art that also openly risks telling us again what our collective truths are, about love and freedom! We are a country of human beings who have the greatest opportunities to advance, to evolve in many, many spontaneous, subtle, nuanced, empowered ways! Speak to these truths_ NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE, OR WHAT YOUR CIRCUMSTANCES_ speak to your own capacity to speak in trust of your best possible self_ using the medium that you love best!
Weave our differences together now in new harmonies, in new color combinations, in more poetry, theatre, dance, sculpture, paintings, movies, books of risk! Do what the great predecessors of our industry left to us_ to show others what they resist doing for themselves: to see! To hear! To taste! Touch and be touched in self-respect and safety. Speak and be spoken to, in self-respect and safety! We all flourish like the flowers_ with enough sun, clean soil and flowing water. Dig deep within all you artists and show us this! In this land of the free we have been very free to whine and fight like the spoiled brats this nation has allowed itself to be portrayed by_ long enough!
The mentally ill have dignity. The socially ignorant have dignity_ there is human dignity in all; great capacity for polish, for development_ to embody our own possibility. Reread, "The Agony and the Ecstasy!" Remember Martha Graham’s great quote, about each doing one's own work in this world while we are each alive here?!

What does it take for us to be brave enough to know we are alive while we are here? Many will talk a blue streak about being alive but are nonetheless still asleep for one reason or another. Wake them gently. Ask, what does it take to reach each human being where they are? Put the ego to the side to navigate this set of creative considerations. Then who is actually left out of the call to consider how to respond? Artists show everyone how. Then each one can look inward and collaborate, to creatively speak to what human challenges are at hand in her and his own best ways_ together!

This is the time of artists of all stripes, all mediums and all considerations.

So, we believe that we do not have money in the same ways we are conditioned to believe in currencies of exchange_ create new conditions for transaction! Create new community currencies! New inter-community currencies! New national currencies!! Come on now, all you artists! Shake this up! Examine value! Examine self-value! Make people happy! Make the environment around you friendly. Lift families to feel safe. Let the children tell us what we are missing; what we are not paying enough attention to! All is NOT doom and gloom_ ask what are you agreeing to?!!! Choose! Choose! Choose! You are free to choose! You are free to slow down! Eat more homemade! Make more homemade! Share! Potluck! Visit! Consciously notice!
Ask yourself, ask each other what (you) are really doing? Really listen now. THIS IS truly more a time to relax_ to reconsider. This is a great time to back up and re-access what is working and what collectively and individually we can afford to shed now.
All of our young people need time and space. They are missing that and many do not even know this! Let them make mistakes in order to learn and develop their own creativity!! Let them have their own creative time and space to grow and develop! Remember having this kind of wealth?! Space and time.
No more isolation for anyone!! Shake it up! Mix it up! Talk! Dance! Make music! Move your body! Write! Tell us poems! Show us theatre! Show us movies! Be openly, self-respecting every step of the way! Reveal new ways of being non-reactively courageous in this life!! OF MOVING BEYOND REACTION CONSCIOUSLY.
For the truth in all this economic downturn is: there is a new paradigm of creativity in seeing, in thinking and in doing in this world that is upon us all.
YA-ho-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!!!