mcauleyhouseartists: Ideas to help you celebrate Winter Solstice

Monday, December 19, 2011

Ideas to help you celebrate Winter Solstice

'Winter' By Donna

Winter Solstice is Wednesday, Dec 21st, 2011

Here are a few ideas to honor the day

Gather some Ivy and write prayers for the world on them with gold or silver pens, hang them from your window with some wool or gold thread. Ask friends to contribute. Or give them to friends. Maybe leave them tied to park benches as gifts for strangers to find.

Create a Winter Solstice altar on a window cill or shelf with your favourite statue, stars and ribbons. Light a new nightlight there each dawn or dusk for three nights over the Solstice.

Light a candle first thing each morning and dedicate the new flame to your reconnection with your inner light

Tie ribbons on a Oak branch and make wishes for positive change in the world

Consciously mark the shortest day. Notice and appreciate the returning light.

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.

Art is Our Voice

Monday, December 19, 2011

Ideas to help you celebrate Winter Solstice