mcauleyhouseartists: Art Dolls Come Alive

Friday, October 28, 2011

Art Dolls Come Alive

I am a passionate creator of art dolls. I've been teaching classes on doll making for many years. Today was our first doll making class at McAuley House. The class started with a table of empty wine bottles, a large collection of fabric, beads, ribbon, polyfill and a bit of encouragement. I did a brief teaching segment on tying off the heads and attaching it to the top of the wine bottle. The artists picked up the techniques right away and began creating their individual dolls.

Myths, archetypes, and rituals are adult explanations of psychic realities we've experienced in our earliest years. I've noticed that by creating dolls as adults our imagination will play again in our childhood house and perhaps create a future we hadn't imagined. Our dolls can lead us on a new creative journey full of many possibilities. The dolls the artists created came to life before my eyes. We were all really inspired by our new creations and look forward to making more !

Indio's Doll

Indio at work

Linda's doll and painting

Teacher Appreciation ??

Donna's doll

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About the Art Program

5 Ways to Grow as an Artist

So how would a Cassatt or a Henri or Picasso approach painting differently than we do today? How might this heartfelt fear of others controlling our painting process impact our self-understanding as artists? Here are five possible answers:

1. Making a successful picture is not the goal. Think of periods, such as childhood, when we grew, our self-understanding changed and we became more of who we are. There was an endless stream of events where we expressed ourselves and slowly began to discover the things that pleased us. As with the sense of freedom characterized above, the entire payoff was growth. The events of life when we grow are the things that happen along the way. Making art should be exactly the same. Paintings are just the series of events or steps we take. Let them go. Keep moving. Or as Henri implored, “Keep living.”

2. The painting process is always a beginning. As soon as the freshness evaporates (we are bored or lost or acquire interest in something else), stop. Do not think in terms of finishing. Picasso lectures eloquently on this. Finish is the death of our work because it means we are painting an expectation or “to be like” and that puts the brakes on painting to see and feel more deeply. Every beginning is a new prompt, a new point of departure. Begin everything. Finish nothing.

3. Ignore non-artist authorities. Juries, the grantors, the gallery, the direction from above are just so many fingers in our pie. All external measures are dangerous because they not only push us to performing, as opposed to creating, but their sense of worth takes over our own. This is precisely what Parisian artists fought against.

4. Get into a prolonged creative process. Have dozens of paintings in your studio that have been abandoned for one reason or another, left in various stages, unfinished but always complete as expressions of who you were at that moment. Work on several paintings simultaneously. You are not making shoes.

5. Furnish the world with your beauty, let the world see, touch and feel who you are. Scary I know. It is so much easier to hide within safe fortresses, the sources of praise and dignity that we can count on by pleasing our audience. This is the dreaded condition called style. We cannot be free to be who we are if we are not always risking being who we are in front of others.