Tag: art

Loving Tilted Frames

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Locate a tilted frame. Intend to marvel. We all have one nearby. Some of us are more comfortable letting them be. Before you supposedly “fix it” (DON’T YOU DARE TOUCH IT), sit back, relax, and marvel. MARVEL, yeah, MARVEL, that’s what I said. Quiet the rest of your mind and follow along:

 

Intend to marvel just as the frame situates. Pause and take it all in from a fresh point of view.

 

Find yourself in a comfortable posture, lengthening your spine to channel new energy. Prompt yourself to carry on steady breathing. Do not force your breathing, remember like your artistry, mindfulness is a human practice of let it be not be perfect. From this posture, notice the frame. At first, you may fixate on the tilt. You may want to fix it based on how you’ve learned most others like it should be. Let it be, instead. Stay as still as possible. All you are doing is looking at the frame.

 

Redirect your energy from tilts and shoulds. What else do you notice about the frame? Ornate or subtle design? Smooth or coarse texture? Take a good look at what’s inside the frame.

 

Thoughts, feelings, physical sensations may pull you from your intention. Practice self-compassion and do not judge nor force personal experiences away. However, like clouds, allow them to pass and come back to the intention of noticing the tilted frame. Intentions are the blue sky constant, same as flight, eventually we move through the clouds and clarity returns.

 

The frame is permission not to fix or fixate, letting go of what doesn’t matter, pausing long enough to sit with what does.

by honigjq

Expand Your Artistic Awareness

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Play around with artistic awareness through different types of thinking. At times, allow bananas to be bananas. As a therapist, I often hear my husband say, “just let a text be a text, don’t read words between the words.” Same thing. There is health in simply seeing bananas.

Practice awareness of explicit ideas.

Practice now: just see bananas.

Of course, the brilliance of art is that bananas may also be so much more. In this way, even side-by-side bananas can be sexy, no matter the shade or degree of spotting. For the writer or poet, onion expressions may embody layers beneath the surface or inspiration for bitter tears.

Practice representational awareness.

Practice now: what does an onion mean to you?

Practice now: create a story about the side-by-side bananas.

For the farmer, a relationship to an onion may be quite different than the one that top chefs hold. Point of view affects our experience with anything, including art. Both people may be working with the same onion but very different internal processes. And for those who have never seen an onion, what on earth could it possibly be? (Boobies? my then breastfeeding daughter once said of my mother’s skilled onion still-life)

Practice alternate points of view, expanding awareness.

Practice now: challenge yourself to imagine and see through different points of view, completing the phrases below.

This is not an onion, it’s a  ______________

These are not bananas, this is a picture about ________________

by honigjq

Finding Your Way Back, to Begin Again

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lovely vacation with family, refreshed and beginning again

Getting back on track is within reach. You already have the tools: YOU and THIS MOMENT. Stop ignoring them. Pema Chodron (2009) highlights in her book, Taking the Leap, that the power of “pausing very briefly, frequently throughout the day, is an almost effortless way to do this,” and essentially propels us back onto a meaningful path (p. 13). Pausing is a verb, I like to tell my clients. There is a deliberate action. I pause. In the pause, if we are open and fully show up, we move into discovery with curiosity rather than judgment or immediate reaction.

by honigjq

More authentic art, less arbitrary standards.

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imagining my next move, no matter the confinement

Mindful art is authentic. Authenticity derives from pure sources like personal experiences, genuine physical states, or natural phenomena. Reframing what is within and around us, rather than what should be, art making propels itself into a unique symbol set. Your art is like your unique code. It is inherently beautiful by association. The practice of mindful art making includes:

  • Space and time to get to know your true self.
  • Honoring characteristics that make you human.
  • Curiosity with beginner eyes.
  • Less credit to someone else’s standards, inventing your own.
by honigjq

Terry Gross is my Copilot

As a kid, I operated a radio talk show out of my bathroom. It was the best place for privacy and moments all about me. With my pants down to my ankles, I entered this imaginary world of interviewing. I was the subject and I was also the host.

How did that bike ride go?

Tremendous, freeing, fa la la la la, and then a kid went by me on a yellow bike a little faster. So, I went faster. Oops-a-daisy, I fell.

Did you get back up?

Yes

Wow, I’m so impressed. How did you do that?

I’m super strong and smart.

Anyhow, you get the point. I had a side project on the toilet. Isn’t that normal? Don’t answer. Regardless, I credit those moments with the beginnings of my career as a therapist. I love what I do, mostly because I am so curious about what motivates us as humans and what keeps us going. I especially love this way of thinking when applied to the artistic process.

Yesterday, I had a banner of a day because I happened to drive into the office listening to Terry Gross hosting Fresh Air, and I managed to drive home listening to the same episode during its evening re-air. NPR is an acquired taste, so I don’t expect everyone to know what I’m talking about. In short, Fresh Air is a radio talk show that features the best and newest subjects, showcasing whatever it is these fascinating humans do. Similar to an ideal memoir, Gross finds a way to angle in so that the audience receives the essence of the subject, and I think sometimes, in such an unassuming way that we learn more than maybe Gross (or maybe I) had anticipated.

And, while I pretend that she reminds me of my kid self on the toilet – getting to the heart of the matter to inspire – now, I listen to be both entertained and schooled in a master class on conversing throughout the onion layers.

As I listen to the timbre of Gross’s voice, my body lights up. She’s steady, wonderfully present, and capable of timing that question for Stephen Colbert or Jake Tapper, just as she asks a question about their own sense of timing.

She’s a mindful wizard. And I think I admire her most because she appears so comfortable with who she is that we are blessed to bear witness to authentic energy bringing out authenticity in others.

I believe that the brightest among us allow the rest of humanity to shine more brightly.

Driving home last night, I turned the dial back to my local NPR. Good, I thought, this is the interview I wanted to hear again. W. Kamau Bell was talking about a latest project he’s glistening the world with. It’s on geneology. He said something like he was told growing up he wasn’t as black as others and when his 73% to the average 75% African came back to him in a report, he thought that explained it all. Gross warmly chimed in with something like, that’s just margin of error. And Bell bantered back with a delicious response on how, rather, that two percent validates his whole developmental narrative.

I laughed as I listened. Somehow, the show took me to a higher consciousness, once again. What I gathered then, most importantly, is something beyond a skill: I learned about the humanity of others, and because I remain the center of my own universe too often, I learned about my own.

Part of me could reach out and hug Bell, thanks to Gross. His blackness, maybe like my jewishness, has its overlaps. Blond haired, small nosed, parents interfaith with the occasional Christmas tree, I was often told I wasn’t jewish enough. But, in the United Shades we live in, those things that make us feel different – a little darker, a little less christian, a little off trend, make us stand out. In that moment, Fresh Air did what I revere art may sometimes do best, it connected fragmented parts into a new beautiful whole. Someone’s life, quite different from my own, reached out and touched me, hugged me really.

It’s a gift of shared humanity that Gross gives us, and I am lucky to have her company – her guidance, really – as I drive to and from work.

Beyond boxes and percentages, I think of the only word I know to be true of me: relativist. Despite that point of view, I cannot help thinking I better understood a truth last evening: it is certain that Terry Gross has a talent for opening up both subject and audience, and the broader world.

As a kid, bathroom time was my sacred space where I could close a door, get away from broader stimulation, and have a heart to heart. Now I close my car door, drive, and trust someone else will ask the important questions.

by honigjq

A Fresh Path for Art Making

 

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The next time you think you’re stricken with artistic blockage or trapped with only snobby teacher voices to keep you company, dig just a wee bit deeper. Do just one subtle thing at a time. Become aware: notice the space and time in which you are situated plus identify thoughts, feelings and sensations. Swallow water and take a few deep breaths, then choose what inspires you to create in this moment. Connect with your tools. Apply yourself and the tools to something purposeful. Let go. Move along. Show back up. Repeat. It is now safe to unlock the limbic seatbelt, roam around uncharted neuropathways, and accidentally bump into new artistic approaches.

 

by honigjq

Art Pollution v. Mindful Art

We cloud ourselves with unproductive messages, most of which fall under categories like expectations, memories, and judgments. These are responses to the past, future, or other people’s standards and have little to do with who we are, right now. Think of the past, future, and someone else’s point of view as art pollution.

 

 

Art Pollution: Rigid beliefs over intuition

Mindful Art: Playful and inspired by our true self, nature, or available materials

 

 

Art pollution gets in the way of healthy art making. Instead, seize whatever you have, now, in fresh ways. Look up at the ceiling or observe nature. Regather a sense of what’s going on with your own being. Combine compassionate ways of noticing and experiencing your world to dilute art pollution.

Maximize this unique point in history to create art-whatever! Mindful art deserves more influence than anything that a particular school of thought or social trend provides. Mindful art means that it is authentic (ie, from a pure source of personal experiences, honest physical states, or natural phenomenon), and it is inherently beautiful by association.

by honigjq

mindful art making 101

 

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What do I mean by mindful?

Awareness and engagement in the present moment.

Aka, show-up. All of you, show-up! And pay attention. Showing up and paying attention are the key ingredients to mindfulness. Rainbow sprinkles would be the compassion, and I like to add a dash of humor, too. Lucky for you, we are living in an era that values mindfulness. You were meant to be alive, right now, after all! You were meant to make art, right now! The art world often leads the path of modernization and is just the place for mindfulness to build its nest. Many artists do it without labeling it, and many stuck artists could benefit from its application. Artists crave mindfulness, despite and maybe because of the social media and highly subjective world in which it situates, despite and maybe because of too much reactivity and terror of our current world. For many, mindfulness may feel like a foreign language at first. Remember how you learn a language? Basics and practice! Immersion.

by honigjq