Category Archives: art

The Love of Making Art is like the art of making love….

Posted on by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

migrations

Originally posted 3 years ago and brought back by popular demand, in honor of February, the month of love and passion. Happy early Valentine’s Day!

With regard to affairs of the heart, be it your love for people or creative pastimes, it is priceless and rare to find one particular passion that will carry you through all the decades of your life.  I am referring to the profound kind of passion that consistently remains the “bottom-line passion” basic to all of your other activities and interests. It is the foundation for your life. It is your rock, your salvation, your reason to get up in the morning. The attraction, the pull of this passion must be magnetic enough, it must be intriguing enough, it must be changeable and mysterious and challenging enough to keep you fully engaged – hooked – with a tight hold on your heart and soul so that as the years go by its importance is not diminished but enhanced with age. This passion makes you a better person. It gels you into who you authentically want to be, and you would not know how to be anyone else. When you have a love for a creative pursuit to that high degree, it is not dependent upon whether or not it is earning you money or fame – it is light years beyond that. If the money follows it, that is certainly a great bonus, but in the times when it does not, you are no less the lover of that passion than you were before. And you are no less gifted at it than before. You must not allow the lack of an income stream to diminish your confidence in what you do. Your true passion remains alive and well no matter what.

Making art is very much like making love; it is making love in a sense. Art and love transport you; they bring the potential for taking you out of the moment and into bliss. The ritual begins as always but you are never sure where it will take you. You are leaving on a journey. It comes over you like the ebb and flow of powerful waves on a beach you have visited somewhere before in time. You are one with the rhythm of the moon tide. You are traveling on a light breeze whistling through tall lavender-tipped grass on a distant seaside meadow and then you are following a procession of some ancient people winding high to a mountaintop. You have left the confining time of your life and are in a moving sphere where ages and universes overlap and you see the space of time stretching back to the beginning and then coming forward to now and beyond to the ever. You hear nothing but you hear everything. You understand the perfection of life and why snow falling softly on mountain evergreen trees in deep December can make you weep. You understand the loneliness of the sea, why men are still drawn to it and why the aching moan of the wind can move you to unutterable emotion. You sit on warm buffalo robes while Indians chant and their images dance in the firelight reflected on the walls of your tent. In the space of one afternoon you can be gone to everywhere and back to here again, all rosy-cheeked and out of breath. Exhilarated. Renewed. Wondering where you have been.

You have experienced passion.

(Based upon an excerpt from Chapter Eighteen, “The Love of Making Art” in “The Creative Epiphany” by Jo Ann Brown-Scott)

Phew – glad that’s over

Posted on by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

Moroccan Door
It is January 1st of 2013 and I for one will admit that I am glad we’ve opened a new door. A different door. Phew. That last one was a rough one.

It will be nice to begin painting on a clean canvas again instead of trying to make that old canvas into something great. There were too many flaws on it – too much tragedy happened on that canvas…and in spite of the good parts that I certainly enjoyed, last year was just too bad for too many and it will always be tarnished with global dysfunctionality.

I knew someone once, an artist who was a fine watercolorist, who could not bring himself to start the agony of a new painting – the whiteness of the paper, the clean-ness of it, the size of it that he knew he had to cover, and the enormity of staring at a pristine piece of expensive watercolor paper just scared the crap out of him. It intimidated him so much that he couldn’t bring himself to make the first gesture of creativity. Days went by….so he developed a habit of taking the paper outside and running over it with his car, or leaving it out in the weather for a couple days. Then it seemed more inviting and forgiving to his imperfect touch. The pressure was off.

As with life experiences, it pays to revisit past paintings that you were never happy with and see them in the light of a new day. Doing that is a teachable moment in which you learn volumes about yourself and your work. In my Mixed Media Collage class I put aside special time to be devoted to second chances. I call this class DAMAGE CONTROL. I invite students to bring in a couple older pieces that were shoved to the back of the pile and left to die a slow death so that you can save these dysfunctional attempts from suffering and breathe life back into them. You must undertake the challenge of this process on a day when you are feeling like you could rule the world and be the best leader anyone has ever known. You must be confident and in control and ready to see possibilities you never saw before. Whatever you do, do not accept any personal blame you might insist on giving yourself for the “failure” of this sad art. Ignore that inner voice who always wants to criticize. Shake it off and prepare to take some risk. Make painful sacrifices, if necessary, of areas you love in favor of the greater good of the entire composition (I call this Democratic Painting), and then go about covering up/exposing, enhancing/destroying, editing/embellishing and loosening up/refining. I realize those terms are contradictory but in painting it is what we do best.

What you get after a day or so of doing this might astound you. In a good way! When everything is finished, let it sit for another day in a room where you cannot see it at all, and then one morning allow yourself to walk in on it unannounced and LOOK. Really LOOK, using someone elses eyes to “see” the results because you do not want to be judging with your same old raggedy stuck-in-a-rut eyes. Wake up and drink it all in as if you never saw it before.
I predict you like what you truly see. And so a new day has begun with you and the paint.

Some would argue that today is the same as yesterday and January 1st means nothing. But I happen to value life’s demarcations, thinking if something is official then it carries importance and I can track my life by the changes that come with those red-flagged days on my calendar. I say this – let’s open the door today to life’s fresh offerings. Let’s boldly open it – not just peek around it as it remains mostly closed. We are going to see and do things this year that we have never done before. You need to believe that most of what happens will be better than it has ever been. Some of what happens won’t be pleasant or positive but all of it is the life-force flowing through us and as long as we have a pulse we should embrace it and walk directly into it so that we can came out on the other side.

Seldom do you get a second chance, a re-do, an opportunity to tweek what has kind of fallen flat once before. But with art, and sometimes with life, you do. Let the new games begin.

The Creative Epiphany – Is Your Rorschach Stuck?

Posted on by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

seachange
We see films where the patient is being asked to tell the therapist what he sees as a series of Rorschach images are flashed before him. Ambiguous ink splats are seen as images that consistently reveal the patient’s view of life in general – revealing how he interprets life and what he thinks constantly about. Typically his proclamations for the subject matter of each image are slanted in the direction of violence, witches, sadness, loneliness, sex, butterflies, sex, flowers, or bugs having sex. Results can be funny to watch…or sad.

And so I ask myself sometimes if my Rorschach is stuck. It is a fine question to ask yourself. I certainly don’t want to see things in a consistently stereotypical way. Creatively speaking, as an artist and writer, it is a common problem to get stuck in a rut. You become comfortable. Life is hard so you crawl into your studio seeking refuge and a quiet place to hide. You escape into your world where you see things the way you prefer to see them. You do what you have always done because perhaps it brings you accolades and sales and peace of mind and quick therapy and an easy way to express your creativity, and an escape… You use the same tired techniques; you construct your subject matter, or your abstractions using consistently predictable methods that bring you to the quite similar results of the day before. Your artistic destination seldom changes. Your journey of creativity has dropped off imagination, experimentation and innovation somewhere along the bumpy road.

We all see things through the lens that is uniquely our own – we observe and gather inspiration, either externally or internally, in order to decide what to create and we attach our own moods, prejudices, preferences and peculiarities to those observations. It seems logical that if you are in a creative rut it might be the result of a narrow lens through which you are observing the world out there and the world in there. They say that you ARE that which you think constantly about. So if your days are spent in constant review of the past or the unsatisfying history of your life and how you have always seen things and how you have always done things then I believe you will get what you have always gotten, speaking creatively.

People who live their lives creatively are my favorite kind of people. They don’t have to be artists of course! In the words of Jack Kerouac:
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…”
That is a bit extreme and difficult to find all in one person (and sometimes you will find those kind of people in prison) but occasionally I find glimmers of it all in a person roaming the world freely and doing great things, and those are the people I am drawn to.

This is why travel and culture and broadening your horizons can never be a bad thing. This is why film and theater and concerts and reading are essential to staying alert and stimulated creatively. We all meet people, and I mean all kinds of people in all walks of life, not just artists, who never pick up a book, don’t travel, can’t get into films, don’t even cook much, seldom read the news…and can’t even decide what their favorite color is. When that happens to me I take it as a pretty big clue that sooner or later I will run out of things to talk about with that person. And if we don’t know by now that creative muscles need to stay toned for best results, then we lose out. Creativity requires exercise – use it or lose it. You cannot be aware of and appreciate alternatives to your tried and true predictable (and sort of pathetic) creative efforts if you close yourself off and see only what you have always seen up there on your personal Rorschach screen.
Title of Mixed Media Collage – SEA CHANGE

The Creative Epiphany – What is a creative epiphany?

Posted on by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

80834_coverI was so fascinated with the creative gene and the creative process and the intuitive realizations that sometimes accompany them that I wrote a book. I was not only interested in the personal creative process, I wanted to know what types of enlightenment and inspiration and guidance creative people experience while trying to find their particular paths within their creativity. Creativity often tugs people in multiple directions and they find it difficult at times to know which area to concentrate on, or how to be successful at a selection of things without diluting it all into nothing of special significance. I invited dozens of people of high creativity who had actually experienced what I define as a life-changing  “creative epiphany” to contribute chapters. I interviewed dozens of people at great length, sometimes across states just by phone, who I either knew personally or who had been recommended to me as having particularly fascinating stories to tell.  My theory was that if they could tell me, in their own simple conversational vocabulary, without being preachy and arrogant, about a startling life-changing personal experience where they felt that a light bulb had been turned on in a previously dark corner of their minds that shed its light and inspiration, revealing a solution or a path to be followed or a missing piece to the puzzle of their creativity, then I would ask them to write a chapter for the book.

And it worked. Nineteen writers including myself wrote chapters for my second book titled “The Creative Epiphany – Gifted Minds, Grand Realizations” available on www.Amazon.com and through various other distributors. One story from a gifted southwestern painter, Randy Pijoan, who had a near-death experience followed by a major epiphany during his recovery and was forever changed not only in the way he painted but in realizing he was brought back to do something meaningful, tells how he proceeded to found a non-profit organization called VENTERO OPEN PRESS. Google that and you will see what he accomplished, and read about how it really happened in my book. Or a college graduate of CU in Boulder, Regan Rosburg, who was an extraordinary fine art major but had not the confidence or self-esteem to pursue that avenue, choosing instead to become a stripper in the Denver area. A great stripper! A legendary stripper. But still not an artist of the kind she wanted to be. Through an epiphany  – a sharp and instantaneous one awarded to her one evening – she realized she had to paint and would no longer compromise her gift. Google her and you will see just how far her epiphany has taken her.

The book is not just about artists because I believe that creativity is often manifested in simply an extraordinary life well lived, or in discovering how to creatively twist adversity into a life-long calling that will change other lives. There is a chapter written by a lovely and accomplished gentleman, now deceased, which explains a simpler way to read music. I edited the chapters myself because I did not want to call in an editor who had no personal knowledge of the writers and who might be inclined to edit the living daylights out of them, losing the personal conversational style and unique vocabulary of the people who wrote them. The men and women are from many fields of life all woven together with a common thread of gratitude for their creative gift and their desire and passion to consistently and enthusiastically accept the gift as they go through life. They are a fun and rowdy bunch.

Epiphanies can arrive with a whisper or a shout and all points in between. You see, some epiphanies need time to reveal themselves. They percolate up from the deep recesses of your mind through layers of your consciousness and gradually begin to arrive to the area of your brain where one fine day they are “suddenly” so very apparent. You wonder how you could have been so blind, but that is because you needed time to “know”. Other epiphanies happen like an earthquake – the sharp, loud ones that rattle your brain. They grab you, stop you cold in your tracks and shake you like an 8.5 on the Richter scale – they fill your mind with instant illumination as if a light bulb was just turned on, accompanied by a call to action. You have been struck with a brand new way of seeing things. Your blind spot is gone and you know you have just received a message from somewhere deep within your soul. And your authentic soul voice will never give you the wrong message – it has only your best and truest interests at heart. That’s why you need to keep those paths of communication open to your soul, and that is accomplished by paying attention and living in the NOW. By being aware. Be being open and at times quite vulnerable – but present. You must be present to win, as the saying goes. Life’s prizes go to those who are full participants. Showing up is half the battle.

To quote from the book, “A creative epiphany brings discovery, illuminaton or new understanding to your creative endeavors. It often provides a tidbit of vital information or an intuitive realization, delivered with a high degree of life-changing  power and strength that enables you to more clearly define and utilize your special gifts of creatiivty.”

In my Introduction to the book I talk at length about creativity – defining it as I see it, playfully personifying it, comparing it to other gene-gifts, and talking frankly about its positive characteristics and downsides. Yes it does have those downsides. But if you are a creative person who chooses to acknowledge your creativity – because everyone is born creative in some way – acknowledging that gene and acting upon the positive components of that gift is the part that takes courage and an adventurous, risk-taking kind of mind. It is not always easy to embark on a life-long gamble with creativity, but the rewards are well worth the risks. This book takes the time to ask about the process and inquire about the rewards. A Creative Epiphany will reassure you that in discovering your life’s purpose you will reach fulfillment and understanding; knowing without a doubt what your unique creative contributions must be in your brief lifetime here on earth.

Epiphany.

Read about them.

Recognize them.

Listen…

Have one.