Tag: point of view

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

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