78 and counting…this morning I woke up singing

Posted on January 21, 2021 by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

This morning I woke up singing, grateful for a new day, a new chance, a new hope and a bright future. I am going to try to never look back on the past four years and dwell there, because, at my advanced age, I have learned that if you drag too much baggage with you, you will miss the train. I much prefer to travel forward.

I am re-inspired and filled with anticipation after yesterday’s monumental Presidential Inauguration celebration here in the United States of America. We needed that! Our favorite leaders gathered in one place, able to smile and even laugh together while the newest among them is sworn into office was a sight for sore eyes. Democracy has revealed her fragility in this first month of our 2021st year. It is not the first time for that nor will it be the last. We have come through a firestorm of hot-tempered violence resulting in death and destruction at the very end of four agonizing years of holding our breath with a dangerously wrong leader at a vulnerable time in history. But we overcame and we learned from it. We have learned volumes of lessons, and the difference between cabbages and Kings.

There are always silver linings that reveal themselves long after a storm. Perspective teaches us.

This time we found one of those silver linings almost immediately.

We have a new poet laureate, seeming far too young for such wisdom and eloquence, but it is often the young who see things most clearly. She will be forever etched in our hearts and minds and when we seek inspiration and the correct words for any spectacular occasion we will look to Amanda Gorman, Youth Poet Laureate 2017. She asked us to seek the light, in her speech titled THE HILL WE CLIMB.

See it in its entirety on UTube.

To the rest of the world we have seemed like an immature foolish young nation as we endured the past four dangerous years, and we are. America is a mere adolescent in the overall scheme of things, plodding along at democracy; an awkward, stumbling, inexperienced, gullible rooky at this democratic experience. A poor judge of character, desperate for an insane quick fix is exactly what we have been, in our youthful desire to prove our maturity. It has only been 245 years since we declared our independence from Great Britain. Not even a nano-second in all of time. We are so very young but it nearly cost us our democracy. Thank god for the Constitution of the United States of America as our guiding light and some courageous leaders to follow it.

America’s faults are many but some reside in dreaming big, because that is what youngsters do. We are often impatient to get things right and yet at other times we are far too patient when we should act quickly. We often lose focus on the bigger picture, and we are indeed a huge picture to focus upon with 3 time zones and many regional lifestyles from sea to shining sea. We are proud to be multicultural. We have dialects. Our country is vast and diverse. We have a dense, rich history of immigrants and dreamers and we value that. We are still trying to incorporate all of those components and more into one cohesive whole with liberty and justice for all and for the most part we succeed. Sometimes we stumble, but people do look up to us for our earnest hope to be better, do better, and offer more with our vast opportunities and resources and our warm and welcoming nature. Everyone but the worst of the worst wants America to be successful in doing that. We try to be worthy of the world’s admiration. We seek to succeed at things we have been led to believe are undoable or practically impossible but our hope is to be the shining example. Some of us kid ourselves into believing that we have our problems under control when we certainly do not. We are still very much a work in progress, and we are not afraid of hard work and dedication. We want to mature into the dreams we have for ourselves.

How History judges us will be determined in time, but in my time, and your time here in the USA I hope we remain determined to do our best, the very best we can possibly do, to be part of the solution instead of the problem. We have an admirable new president now, eager to make positive change and bring us all together, but the responsibility cannot be placed on just one man…..let us all do our part and keep the dreams alive. There is no time like NOW.

Jo Ann Brown-Scott, author and artist

Art – http://www.artistjoannbrown-scott.com and ETSY at JoAnnBrownScottART

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78 and counting…assemble yourself

Posted on January 4, 2021 by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

ASSEMBLY is a paper assemblage, 8×10, acrylic, collage on canvas board

Happy first Monday of the newer year! This is not a blog about Ikea, (assembling something to eat or sleep or sit a lamp on). It is about you and me, putting ourselves back together again after a year when everything we thought we knew for sure was turned upside down, lost, broken, bent out of shape, damaged or disrespected.

I am going to try to accept a clean slate this week, on which to re-assemble the things that I will make right this coming year. The things I will cherish, or not…..the habits I will keep and improve upon, or discard. The ways I will spend my precious leisure time in the last chapter of my life, and the frivolous idiotic ways of wasting time that I will now refuse to fritter away on meaningless pursuits. I am going to try and be more discriminating about what I do and how I do it and who I do it with. I want more quality in my days. I want substance. Accomplishment. Pride in what I do with my time and what I produce.

Blah Blah Blah, you might be saying. Well, ok. I will do my personal best. It might not be perfect but I will raise the bar higher than it was before. At this over-70 age, urgency is a common condition for you and me. If the entire past year has gone by, with everything crammed into it, without it seizing our complete attention and without us feeling that it should be used for some deep introspection…then perhaps we missed a very large boat. This was a damn serious year. Certainly it occurred to you that while you were cooped up and restless, feeling like a caged animal at times, it might be a good idea to look inward and become a better, more self-aware person. Might be a good time to go deep, since we could not go wide.

I want my shot! That line is repeated in the hit stage show HAMILTON quite a few times and has its own song as well, but with a much different meaning. All of us do want our shot at life – we want our rightful chance to do something meaningful. Something that will make a positive difference. The year 2020 was your unfortunate excuse to not take your shot due to the multitude of unforeseen circumstances. This year will probably be different. Once we are all out from under covid it will be as if life has given us a Get Out of Jail Free card. A whole new chance for doing good things! A blank canvas upon which to create a bright new color scheme, a fascinating composition and a focal point of great meaning. Age is of no importance whatsoever – never use it as an excuse for not taking another brand new shot at life.

The new parlor game – “What will be the first thing you do when you and everyone else in your circle of family and friends have had your vaccination?” You can begin to assemble yourself right now. Get yourself ready for that new day. Make some plans and begin to dream some dreams. Put your parts together in a brilliant new way and go for it. Life is not just one more shot – it is a series of opportunities. Step right up and accept the next one!

Jo Ann Brown-Scott – The art above is priced at 75.00 including shipping

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Say his name. George Floyd.

Posted on June 5, 2020 by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

Say his name, his family repeats…George Floyd. Say his name. Not even 9 minutes of time that changed the world.

Little did George Floyd know that he was destined to change the world in less than 9 minutes of tragic suffering. He paid the ultimate price; he had no choice in the matter. But he found his place in history through the hatred of a man whose name I choose not to remember. George Floyd is forever the hero of a movement that could easily be the pivotal point, the tipping point, the moment in all time when the history of mankind’s racial hatred toward each other would be forever changed. People have had enough.

Even those of us who proudly claim not to be racist have had our claims put to the test. We still have lessons to learn. We still need to feel the pain of racism on a deeper level. My personal bar of being not a racist is raised considerably higher during this time as I watch night after night of peaceful protesting from people who care enough to put everything else aside and walk for days and days. I feel the pain in the eloquent words from George Floyd’s family as they plea for peace and ask for the violence to stop, because he would not have wanted this. The amazing grace…the deep love….the understanding….the compassion…displayed in their words were like a prayer. Those words were holy.

If you are not asking yourself some questions during this monumental movement then something is missing inside you that needs serious attention. Go deeper. Personalize it. What if George Floyd was your friend, your brother, your child? What if he had done something valuable for you? A simple favor? A big favor? Saved your life? What if he had saved your child’s life?

Maybe he actually has saved your child’s life with his legacy.

Would his blackness make you any less grateful? Would you still feel hatred for him?

Well, George Floyd has done something for you – he has given you a wake up call. An epiphany. A reason to change. He has possibly saved all of our lives with his sacrifice.

In the words of John Lennon – IMAGINE all the people.

People are taught to hate by seeing that behavior in the people around them who want them to learn it. Our children and their children must witness a change and be taught to carry the change forward with pride of knowing that the change began with them. For the people who are fiercely carrying the heavy burden of hatred as adults, you need to find help. Open your mind to change, and if you cannot, then the laws of the land will eventually find you.

George Floyd will live in my heart forever. His name will now become a noun that means I am not a racist, I am George Floyd. Say his name.

You Know What I Think?

Posted on October 10, 2017 by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

Above photo of this giant prayer wheel was taken at the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple in Singapore, 2016

Wow, it has been a long time since I woke up in the morning not worrying about what might have happened overnight. These days I am already agitated about what I missed overnight as I am reaching for the TV remote, bracing for what will be rolling across the bottom of the screen and the images I will see… More often than not it is disturbing news that starts the day which is repeated endlessly for the next 24 hours, only to begin again the next morning with a fresh batch of reasons to feed my anxiety. Some people used to say that I – we – should just let it roll off our backs and have faith that all will work itself out and be fine in the end – there is nothing we can do about it anyway. Who says that anymore? Better in what end? When? Will things be better in our lifetimes or our children’s? I am a positive-thinking person, optimistic even, but certainly no pollyanna, and because we are all family now with the proverbial loose canons who are allowed to undermine rational thought, we take two steps back for every one forward. There is no longer any “your people” and “my people”. There is less than 6 degrees separating us, more like 2, since the onset of the internet and the speed of traveling. I know what happens in some remote areas faster than the residents who actually live there do in many situations because news travels at the speed of light. I breathe and I cry and I bleed for everyone. It is one common planet that unites us, and the domino effect is in full swing all the time. What knocks you down comes back around and eventually takes me down too.

Unless you are numb or dumb with misinformation, in denial, simply uncaring and/or too lazy to read and inform yourself properly you have no escape from the constant noise of the news and as much as I like to think that the good news out-numbers the bad, there is still an unusually large tidal wave of bad news now. If you believe, as I do, that the earth is a living breathing organism that depends upon our ecological maintenance and our so-called intelligent expertise to keep it healthy then you know we have let Mother Earth down quite miserably. The health of Big Blue and all of her inhabitants (in every category; botanical and animal) is not only dependent on our efforts for being ecologically responsible, but I believe that the collective mental health of us all carries tremendous clout toward the well-being of the planet. Right now it seems the world has lost its mind and we are giving almost all of our attention to wackos in high places. Why don’t we stop this adolescent behavior? Why is it taking so long to rid ourselves of this ominous influence? Is it because we thrive on chaos? Are we just that bored?

We must bring a whole body wellness to the table in order to evolve and flourish. We must learn to effectively filter our thoughts and allow less time for the daily drivel we are fed. We are one with this planet and we are not holding up our end of the universal plan. Some other societies and indigenous people seem to understand this symbiotic relationship far more deeply than we do, unfortunately with far fewer resources than we have to use toward their dreams for a better earth. In spite of our resources we are not such an enlightened country in comparison with others. In many ways we are our own worst enemy.

I for one feel powerless to make change happen…and that is the sad truth.

Merry Christmas

Posted on December 15, 2015 by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

children

My photo was taken in the countryside around Siem Reap, Cambodia; where clean water is scarce and children have peace on their minds. 2015

This is a call to the living,

to those who refuse to make peace with evil

with the suffering and waste of the world.

This is a call to the human, not the perfect,

to those who know their own prejudices,

but who have no intention of becoming prisoners of their own limitations.

This is a call to those who remember the dreams of their youth,

who know what it means to share food and shelter,

who care for children and those who are troubled,

to reach beyond barriers of the past

bringing people to communion.

This is a call to the never ending spirit

of the common man, his essential decency and integrity,

his unending capacity to suffer and endure,

to face death and destruction and to rise again

and build from the ruins of life.

This is the greatest call of all

the call to a faith in people.

Algernon D. Black, former senior leader, The New York Society for Ethical Culture

The Anticipation of Travel

Posted on April 15, 2015 by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

You know how I feel about creativity and stoking the fires to keep it smoldering – always awarding yourself with fresh experiences – feeding the creativity beast gourmet delights so that it will return to your work table and want to spend time with you. Travel is, to me, one of the finest sources of creative stimulation. Travel is a luxury we can all afford if you define it as a departure from your normal routine that takes you out and away from your home headquarters. Therefore a trip down the block is travel, an excursion to a nearby city is travel, even a hike in the woods or watching a movie is a version of travel. You just need to get out of your own mind for awhile and experience new visual surroundings. I do all of that and more…..it is part of my job description as an artist and writer.

But this time I am headed to more distant horizons. I am traveling to the far regions of southeast Asia – Singapore in fact – for the second time, and my side trip during this trip will be to Siem Reap, Cambodia for three nights to visit Angkor Wat. I am traveling with a dear friend, also an artist, so I am going to experience double happiness. We will stay with my daughter and her husband who live in Singapore ( http://www.compassandcamera.com ) and therefore we will have a resident guide for every move we make, and we will be making some major moves.

I will love seeing Singapore again through my friend’s eyes – the spectacular cutting-edge architecture, the glitz and sparkle of the immaculate, well-mannered Singapore, along with its quaint and colorful shop houses in the older sections of Chinatown, Arab Street and Little India. Then on to the massive ruins of Angkor Wat , one of the ancient wonders of our world, now overgrown with gnarled tree roots and steeped in mystery. This is my favorite vacation contrast – the precious against the poor – the opulent compared to the common. It rounds everything out and gives you a conscientious balance. It jolts your senses and keeps you humble, seeing what has gone long before and what is happening now. You can’t have one without the other.

Creatively speaking, this makes for a rare and wonderful experience. The last time I traveled to Singapore I came home and painted a body of work based upon my trip, capturing my visual, sensory, auditory and olfactory impressions of how it felt to be there. I was on such sensory overload that I could not sleep. Remembering the sights, smells, noise and food aromas of just the wild and wonderful Chatachak Market in Bangkok, for instance, fed my creativity for days on end.

Travel is the closest we can get, as human beings here in the 21st century, to time travel as it is explained by physicists and scientists – living backwards or forward in time, almost in a parallel universe to our own and finding it remarkably exotic and foreign to your senses. Yet confined to this one planet. The big blue one. I highly recommend it for your enlightenment, your creativity and your fun.

November Version of the YEAR LONG CANVAS

Posted on November 7, 2014 by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

What nine months of attention does for an embryo, forty early mornings will do for your gradually growing wholeness….Your intelligence is marvelously intimate. It’s not in front of you or behind, or to the left or the right. – Rumi

Hello everybody! Here we are well into November and as I woke this morning I was in a great frame of mind due to absolutely nothing in particular. I had not even slept well, but something lit a little fire in me. After a long, crisp walk in the morning air the time was right; I was ready to apply the latest shock therapy to the canvas. The additional changes just happened, in less than fifteen minutes, to the Year Long Canvas that Homare Ikeda offered to me as a challenge and an assignment way back in March of this year. I would say we are in the home stretch now, but who ever knows when it will be done, or mostly done, or perhaps even continue? For those of you arriving late to this project, the objective is to continue to paint for a solid year on one particular canvas, adding layers and layers of new work on top of the old. It is an exercise in patience, confidence, acceptance of change, and testing one’s ability to focus over a long period of time on one constantly changing image. Of course I am painting other canvases as well, and finishing them, because I have a tendency to be quite task oriented. I like a feeling of accomplishment.

If you compare this version to the others in my blog archives about the YLC you will see that I am letting myself go more with each passing month, slinging the paint around with more abandon, opening my heart to more drastic change and actually having more fun with it than I did in the beginning. My loose and free-spirited attitude is picking up speed as I work through the months. I barely even try anymore – I just work mindlessly. It is my arm but something else is guiding me. I feel it arriving from over my shoulder, it comes through me and lands on the canvas. It is as if I am not even here. I am just an instrument. I do believe I am in the flow.

Obviously I use layers of paint both thick and thin, building texture and depth, a characteristic color palette that I enjoy, a linear emphasis, a roundness in some area, darks against lights and lights against darks. I am working vertically right now, but it started out being horizontal; I work all around it, turning it in all orientations as I paint, because in abstract art you have to do that. You might choose to see the suggestion of a landscape, or not. Purely abstract is fine too.

This painting could quite easily go in the direction of enormous simplicity and minimalism, by covering up almost 90% of the composition with washes of gray, black or even white, allowing just slivers and shafts of colors to reveal themselves as if you are looking through an opening to something underneath. That seems to me a rather easy, chicken way to end the whole thing.

I actually prefer the challenge of complexity, depth and mystery. But you probably already knew that by now.

Year Long Canvas #12 – SheTakes a Whimsical Turn

Posted on May 27, 2014 by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

YLC #12, copyright Jo Ann Brown-Scott, not yet titled

“You breathe; new shapes appear, and the music of a desire as widespread as Spring begins to move like a great wagon. Drive slowly, some of us walking alongside are lame!” Quote from Rumi, born in 1207, Afghanistan

Of course it has everything to do with my mood. The day was gorgeous, took a long walk, ate some great food, listened to some upbeat music and there we were – arrived at a brand new place from the scariest storm experience of my life just 2 days ago (see the previous blog about Mutha Nature).

Let the games begin….

Lots of minor changes were made, but larger ones too, such as Lady Magenta making an appearance, dancing across everything just for pure fun, and a second (or third?) sun showed up in the unexpected sun color of purple….that’s what you call artistic license, but of course you knew that. I first took artistic license when I was in kindergarten, and teacher instructed us to finger-paint a tree. My tree was purple and she had an absolute fit, being the realist that she was. Even at that young age I knew she was dead wrong – how could she know anything at all about art history and object to a purple tree!? I have been getting her back ever since, sinking at least one “artistic license” thing in painting after painting for many decades now.

I am here to tell you that abstract art does not have to be profound and serious. Since I am working on this canvas for a solid year, I felt free to be light-hearted and free spirited. I can always get dark and brooding at some future point if I so desire. The changes made in this work session were begun with an eye for balance. The upper left area needed some action to be weighed against all the color and motion in the upper right. What to do, what to do. Circles seem to be a repetitive feature, so I thought I might just capitalize on that. Another sun, in PURPLE, could get attention. Not tooooo much attention, however, or the focal point on the right side would be severely compromised. Where is Homare when I need him? I am going to have to fly by the seat of my own pants this summer.

The changes made today were accomplished in less than an hour, and I used my fingers while wearing a latex glove. I seldom use paint brushes anymore – preferring plastic palette knives and oddball kitchen tools like a plastic BBQ sauce “mop”, scrapers and other stuff I find. I often use the dried acrylic paint that has globbed around the top of the paint tube, picking it off and pushing it onto the composition for texture – you can see one of those in about dead center of this painting, sticking out almost like a button. I love bumps and wrinkles, and I like to use acrylic very thickly but I also love to thin it down with lots of water and paint like a watercolorist which is how I first learned to paint. For Homare’s classes in advanced contemporary art I used purely paint, without any exotic collage papers or mixed media techniques, or matt medium to build up a textural affect. I am a mixed media artist at heart but I wanted to go back to my roots and see what happened there. That was a good decision because I have enjoyed it and found that I am still able to paint without any of my favorite bells and whistles. The method in my madness of returning to the classroom was to see what I was made of – to rediscover my earliest training. Doing that could only be for the good, I thought.

The YLC has a journey ahead. She will be thick with paint by mid-Fall and difficult to deal with. Unruly and short-tempered from all the indecision and abuse she has endured. She will have screamed at me to leave her alone. Making anything good happen will be a huge challenge, because everything that has gone before will have been sacrificed and lost and I will mourn those versions. I will be sick and tired of re-inventng her. She will be fed up with me as well. It will be like any other relationship!

But of course you probably knew all that.

Year Long Canvas #11, and a thread of artistic wisdom.

Posted on May 20, 2014 by Jo Ann Brown-Scott

Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better. Sydney J. Harris

Today’s last class was bittersweet, since many of us are not attending any classes for the summer, and although 3 months is a freeing and enticing stretch of time it is also a deep void to fill. And filling the shoes of Homare Ikeda ( http://www.homareikeda.com ) is an impossibly tall order – he is a gifted instructor; wise yet playful, firm in his experience yet always open to new ideas, serious about his art yet secure enough to be whimsical at times, free spirited yet always grounded in the process. Having access to the mind of the master on a weekly basis will be greatly missed.

He spoke to us at the beginning of class about artistic dedication and what a luxury and privilege it is to be able to afford the time and have the talent to paint well. Not just to paint but to paint well. He said we are truly fortunate and should never take it lightly. He said, in so many words, that we should not squander that privilege. We should not deny it or disrespect it or take it for granted. It must be honored and given expression. But he was careful to add, after several minutes on that subject, that with summer at our doorstep, he had one final assignment for us….

We were instructed to PLAY. We were told that our summer must be spent in a sort of artistic abandon – we should give ourselves the freedom and the fun of being loose, experimental, random and playful. We should absolutely have fun this summer. We have been given permission and instructed to do so.

Well alrighty then. I am all for that. Hope I have not forgotten how….to relax, to play and be silly. To be young again in spirit. To make stupid mistakes. To learn from them. To make other mistakes. Then to occasionally create something brilliant, born of enjoyment and fun.

When the class began I had not been inside a classroom, as a student, for several decades. I had just come from 3 years of teaching mixed media to adults in northern California, moving back to Denver after 6 years away, and I felt very strongly that it was time to get my own mojo working again. To paint with serious intention and dedication. To find a class and an instructor that were a good fit for me. To see if I was on the right track as I began the next chapter – the remainder – of my painting career. It was either luck or intuition or both that drew me to Homare’s class. His assignment to me of the YEAR LONG CANVAS project was, in retrospect, perfection. It demanded that I slow down, take my painting to the level of a meditation, think more, sometimes think less, TRUST myself more and promise that I would follow the process through until it was time for it to be over. I still have a long way to go, and I don’t enjoy painting in really hot weather, not even in air conditioning. I would love to take the summer off, not from painting entirely, but from painting any more on the YLC. But I will not do that.

In spite of the assignment to PLAY for the summer, I have the YLC here staying with me 24/7 in a corner of my studio. I am her vacation retreat. September will come soon enough and I will have to take her to class with me and reveal what has happened to her over the summer break. Think how it might feel to have to read a great book over the time of an entire year – when you are dying to race ahead to the end but you have to pace yourself and allow only a bit to be revealed at a time. What if babies took 12 months instead of 9? How about a year’s worth of working on the same recipe; refining and tweaking and altering until you lose your bleeping mind. A year is enough time to fall completely in and out of the creative mood at least a dozen times – alternating love/hate feelings – and each time you have to find a way to get yourself geared up and hyped up and ready to move forward again…..only to lose that momentum and speed and focus again and again and again.

Of course there is a much larger life lesson here about CHANGE. We hesitate to make changes in our lives based upon fear – fear that the newer will not be as comfortable or as satisfying as was the previous status quo. Fear that we have moved into the unknown at the total expense and obliteration of the known – fear that the life changes we are about to make will not work out and we cannot go backwards and get back again to where we were. It is my personal experience, however, that carefully considered change usually does bring improvement and enhancement with its evolution, and the result is better than expected. This is based upon knowing myself and trusting myself.

So this week I have done just a little work on the canvas and maybe you will notice it and maybe you will not. A slight bit more of purple was added in strategic areas – in about the 10 o’clock area, if you use the clock guideline. Also just a little more of it at about 4 o’clock, drifting over the orange. The purple was added for balance. Next time I work on her I will be gutsy-er, and if you are bordering on boredom, have faith, big change will come. That will be painful but no guts no glory. And I am supposed to trust that the glory will be reincarnated as a new idea every bit as successful and appealing as it was before. I love the quote I have included in this post about CHANGE – and another quote I heard once that says that to request no change at all requires great change in itself!