Art outside the box

We are blessed to have the internet and so many artists who are willing to share ideas with us, such as how-to's and ways-to-recycle-these-and-those. And we are cursed with this same vast network of resources as well, as I discovered after developing an idea for a new and unexplored focus on collage yesterday. I even took notes: what are the parameters of this focus, how can I share this idea in a new class next year here at Studio 745, what is the best way to present the finished collages. It seemed to me to be art outside the box.

Then, for some unknown reason, I googled the name I had given the collage focus: haiku collage. And yep, it's been done. The name is there. And yes, perhaps everything we can think of has already been 'thunk of'. So now the project grows a bit: how to think outside the box someone has already been drawing inside of.

I'm both sorry I looked at what others have called haiku collage, and encouraged by it. The development of  haiku collages I have in mind differs somewhat from what the two or three other people online have done. But it's more difficult to not think of the color green after someone has said the word than to "think up" what the color green just might look like. I won't look again at their versions of haiku collages. It was somehow the opposite of "inspirational" for me.

Wishing you inspiration and realization in your art.

ABCs (Artists, their Blogs and Creativity)

Image by Georgie Sharp via Flickr

There seems to be, always, something new to learn. Artists are eager for their electronic muse(s)' input on unfamiliar techniques, materials and permission to play outside their comfortable past achievements in creating new pieces of art. A search for mixed media techniques takes me from YouTube to links on artist bloggers' sites to other artist bloggers. I could easily become a couch potato, eyes on the screen WATCHING other people MAKE art.There soon comes for me not enough hours in the day...it's a good thing I'm "retired" or I wouldn't have time for all the new things in my life (like painting on water....check this one out below!).

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Who says blogging isn't creative?

Looking for Dotee Dolls on google, I found a blog site that included the words "create a blog" and I followed the lead. Setting up a blog site it easy...blogging itself is not something you are born with, like sight (or second sight) or hunger. After CCC was named and in place, I was asked if I wanted to "manage" my blogs, and that's when I found out this was not my first blog site on blogger but my third: first was "Tea & Poetry" with no entries (I write poetry), then "The Buzz" with no entries (I am a beekeeper). So the blog site stops here. If I can't contribute to a blog (if I create them, will "they" come to read them?) of my own making, then why set them up. So being said, here is first attempt at keeping up at blogging.

Having read some really fine blogs, I have a tendency to want to be as great as they were (don't remember their names, however). That's what happens when I try to journal...it has to be worthy of saying before I say it. Except that's not what keeping a journal is all about.

That reminds me of the last level I got to in Toastmasters...the one where you are to put away your notes and give the "speech" from the comfort of the speech that's in you getting out. I objected. The words I wrote were each and every one (or so it seemed to me) important, chosen for the best word to use, selected for literary value, weighted for just the right impact. I couldn't possibly give my speech "from memory" or from letting go and letting it out. So ended the toastmasters phase of my life.

At 66, a lot of phases of my life have ended, or at least seem less important than whatever is going on at the present time in my life. Like waiting for Ann so that we can go do the bees. I think that's her now.