Tag: inspiration

Avoiding Your Artistry?

 

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Vent in need of cleaning? v. Black hole of rediscovery?

If You Currently Avoid Art Making:

Allow nature, just as it is, to inspire. A blade of grass has masterpiece potential. Refrain, respond, or repurpose nature for simple avenues back to creativity.  Allow for imperfection throughout your artistic and non-artistic moments. Cheer yourself onward through coffee spills,  painting smudges, or social snafus.

 

 

Breaking News:

We are humans, and by nature of being a human, we are imperfect. Mistakes do not make us less valuable. Rather, they affirm exactly who we are, with all our natural human potential. Feel inspired by mistakes, as often as possible. Mistakes are teachable moments or discoveries in the making.

 

 

Allow impermanence to remind you that every moment ends and leads to a new moment. As mindful artists, we do not have to feel trapped by any one project or style. Lessen the pressure on any one moment and, subsequently, quiet the avoidance meter.

Allow incompleteness to guide you back to previously abandoned projects. Or take a break from a project deciding at some future moment if it is beautiful just as it is or needs some TLC.

by honigjq

Join the INTENT…

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View from my 1st and only hike (so far).

 

Very big into intentional living and thinking, lately.

The more we place our attention in the direction in which we intend to go – for the next minute, weeks, years, or lifetime, powerful energy awakens. Mallika Chopra, the elegant original thinker – and yes, the daughter of Deepak Chopra – developed strategies that follow the acronym: INTENT.

INTENT, as per her Living with Intent: My Somewhat Messy Journey to Purpose, written in 2015 and featured in adapted from in Time’s Special Edition on Mindfulness: The New Science of Health and Happiness includes:

Incubate: pause, quiet your mind to begin again, and ground into who you are, now

Notice: pay attention and recognize the surrounding world

Trust: confidence building through intuition and compassion

Express: share with the universe and create accountability

Nurture: cultivate and honor that growth is not linear; coping with ebb and flow

Take Action: show up, show up, show up (yah know, my familiar chorus!)

 

I am drawn to the way Chopra walks me through a process, so that an intent is less an abstract notion in the moment, and rather, evolves into a companion throughout the lifespan. Go forward, today, creating and inspired by INTENT.

by honigjq

Avenues to Expand Abstraction

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surely, i am a sucker for natural wonder, but these frozen leaves amaze me

 

Abstraction is a vehicle toward a beginner’s mind and expanded creativity.

Be abstract:

  • Emphasis on making something rather than defining what you are making.
  • Hold your chosen tool, face the thing you have selected to engage the tool with, and begin again.

 

Absence of Mind:

  • Quiet the volume on thinking through each step.
  • Allow the tools before you lead your expression.

 

Imagine it so:

  • If your tool can create it, so it exists.
  • Care not what it resembles, care for its originality.
by honigjq

Pause with a Purpose

 

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Find Clarity with a Purposeful Pause

The more we practice pausing, the better equipped we are in an artistic moment of need. Take my cooking as a parallel universe. A decade ago, I cooked almost every night. I’d carve out thirty minutes from the rest of my schedule and labeled the time, “cooking.” Cooking is a form of pausing if you grant open space for its cause. I liked what I made, then. A few (perhaps lying to be polite) recipients even said they liked my meals. My pausing paid off.

Life happened, work picked up, a kid arrived, and I’d blog or hit the gym while my husband started to cook for us. He likes to cook and is great at it. Hallelujah! He enjoys pausing, in that way. While I didn’t mind the call of duty, I found I preferred to pause at the gym or via art making. My cooking skills went out the window. When I recently tried to make a meal for us, I couldn’t even come up with a menu. My mind had fallen out of the practice of making space for cooking. When I did try to cook, my husband hovered, reminding me to pay attention to an active burner and pan. It was more fire safety than micromanagement (that’s what he said). By this point, I had removed myself so far from the cooking pause that my personal experiences swallowed the meal I made long before it hit the table. I’d think about what to write about next or grab a few extra push-ups while noodles burned to the bottom of pans.

The more often you automatically check your Twitter feed while I’m trying to talk to you on this blog, you can bet you are doing a similar kind of burn. And if you usually review social media screens while art making, you more than have priorities wacked, you have your head wacked. Your frontal lobe short circuits, and the rest of your brain needs some loving. How may you recalibrate? Practice intentional pauses.

I needed to pause and show up to cooking if I had any chance to get back on track. Well, I didn’t. The further I removed myself from pausing in this way, the further my cooking focus and interests dissolved. When we pause in productive ways, in directions that matter to us, our lives become more fulfilling. Otherwise, you risk chronic distraction. Practice pausing in ways that interest you.

LIST THREE INTERESTS:

 

 

 

 

SPEND AT LEAST 30 MINUTES PAUSING WITH THESE INTERESTS, WEEKLY

TRY THREE TEN MINUTE INCREMENTS OR A 30 MINUTE INDULGENCE….PAUSE!
by honigjq

Refrain, Respond, Repurpose. Art as friend to the Universe.

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cigarette in sidewalk snow, boston, ma 2009

 

Mindful art making expands our eco-awareness. The conscious choices for our art making, now, mirror the same choices I try to practice regarding the natural and material world that we all share.

Take a walk outside. Locate a displaced object or slice of nature.

Before doing anything else, PAUSE! Be with whatever you have selected to get to know  more fully. Allow the natural inclination of things – impermanent, imperfect, and incomplete – to be noticed and embraced.

Practice quieting the volume on unrelated thoughts, other places you need to be or what should happen next, and allow yourself to be with this memory, picture, or object for a minute. Go ahead, with steady breathing and a lengthened spine to welcome fresh energy, elevate your awareness. In honor of all ways of life, I invite you to join me – as I try to do myself, about once a week – to reflect on the natural state of things.

Elevate awareness of what you have chosen to notice through your senses and lessen distractibility. After pausing choose from the following: refrain, honoring things just as they are; respond via an original point of view through conversation, journaling, poetry, essay, memoir, or storytelling; or repurpose the thing into a hybrid thing.

by honigjq

Find Your Artopia

 

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I prefer the imaginary places. Maybe that is apparent to you after reading my philosophical blah blah blahs.

My mind longs to go to places to which neither plane nor train can transport.

I imagine kindness as a core currency and what makes us different makes us beautiful. Thoughts of global compassion fire me up. Imperfection is sexy. And I hope these angles come through as distinct elements of my art making. For those elements are true to me and therefore belong to my true art making. Every artist will be different, as will every artistic moment or decade in a true artist’s life.

But what makes mindful art original is the awareness of the creator to be able to identify their personal, community, worldly, and imagined sources. With such awareness, narrow aesthetic values inherently erode, replaced by broader options, because no two people, no two places, no two moments in time could ever be the same.

If you are aware of what it is you like or what is unique to you, act on that impulse regularly. In time, those with appreciation for similar impulses will gravitate toward your work. Your audience may grow. But start with you, you are the base and the original audience to please.

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

Art’s Natural State of Grace

 

Natural v. Nurtured States of Beauty

Art is not only décor or ambience, it frames everything as it is, as it is not, as it should be, and as it never should be again. The artist decides the stuff that matters based on their impulses.

Think about nature by comparison, for a moment. Are you aware of or value its authentic states. Is there a difference, for instance, when you walk through an overgrown path of woods rather than a manicured Italian Garden that you’ve paid admission to see? Is one really more valuable than the other? Applying a mindful artist’s outlook, I propose not. Yet, one is more typically viewed as majestic or artistic. If the Italian Garden persists as the essence of one’s aesthetic, well – that’s all fine and good.

However, I encourage expanding your angle on nature, like your angle on yourself, shifting into equal regard for polished and inherent states. Think of your local woods as a representation of you, yourself, as a natural muse. Just as nature may be: overgrown, thorny, dark at times, yet lush, so may you be. Awareness of who you are, organically, and where you situate, now, we access a broader toolbox. I could have never succeeded as a choreographer, let alone demonstrated the movements desired of my dancers, if I hadn’t adopted a turned-in foundation. My twentysomething knees and alignment would not allow me to prance like a ballerina anymore, but – dang – I could romp a riot with my feet facing one another.

Artistry breathes more freely when our beings, like our planet, are honored, tended to, and appreciated rather than polluted or overly manicured. Fuller awareness, and the acceptance of this awareness, expands artistry from the source. YOU are YOU, WOODS ARE WOODS, and both are bold, beautiful collections of things just as they situate.

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