2014 Summer Art Camp ~ things unfinished and left undone

I think it is important for me to leave things unfinished and undone. 

This stretches my comfort zone. 

It reminds me to breathe and live Life.

It encourages me to embrace my way of learning and living and BEing in the World.

And then again...

Sometimes I love to dive in and experience Life and chaos and see if I can't just find the pony in the poop.

Summer Art Camp is sparking up my Trust the Process bits.

It is letting me try, play, DO whatever. 

NOT complete. NOT get right. 

Just DO what I CAN Right Now. That's all...

When looked at like the gorgeous, decadent, and deLIGHTfully superlicious thing it is, each Summer Art Camp day feels like diving happily into the chill waters of Cache Lake.

I was a camper and counsellor there for a hefty slice of my teenager+ Time.

I could roll with the chaos back Then. It's nice to remember that Me.

I was also quite without a rudder. Mostly I remember spinning with no feeling of traction, no sense of rootedness. 

Camp was somewhere I learned what I could DO. If I wanted to try. 

It gave me glimpses of what I might BE capable of in This World.

Glimpses. Encouragement. People taking their precious Time to help me grasp or experience something difficult, new, even a little scary.

I still find chaos on the menu, but I have discovered how JOYous a thing chaos can BE.

At 61.

Carla Sonheim has gathered artists who love to teach and encourage and who can cause water to BE laughed out my nose sometimes. I mean, they are so fun to watch in their videos. And they laugh. A LOT!!

I love that they come Right Here to ME.

When I want them to.

And they don't care if I don't feel like playing Right Now either.

Or if I DO everything or share what I am DOing or finish or even understand what just happened, none of it matters one smidge.

Still... you might like to see some of my less finished and undone stuff. 

Cherry Creature I started then abandoned.

Painting I did DO of cherries a la Fred Lisaius with a bit of digital fiddling ;~D.

Watercolour from Fred's last day... 

Intended to BE a summer postie card.

A "memory" of Cache Lake.

All of this happily unfinished.

And happily, well, happily shared, too...

2014 Summer Art Camp ~ continuing slowfully

I'm still enJOYing and playing at Summer Art Camp each and every day. It has been a splendiferous gift as I go through chemo. Big Gratitude & Love for it!!

I had a rough go last end of week and weekend, so I saved Lynn Whipple's 3 days for sometime other than Now. It's the most fun, I BElieve, to play along in the "real time" days.

Anyhoozle...

Karine Swenson's monster painting was great fun and a good challenge for me. I am NOT a "painter" the way I think a painter is a "painter" if that makes any sense [or nonsense].

The first go was to just use black and white and gray and focus on value.

A big part of this exercise/adventure is the shadow of the monster, but I gave up on that part pretty much from the start.

I have been having head/brain aches and it's just too hard to BE in Light bright enough to create the shadow... so I improvised and worked around what was NOT okay for me Right Now. 

I found a little monster image on Google and worked from that. I was working pretty small, too, on 4-inch square canvas boards, a gift from my dear friend, Jen, in FL.

This soothed me. I find such soothing important, even essential Right Now.

One of the other things I loved about this particular camp experience was painting my monster 3 times, which gave me 3 opportunities to "see" and "show" my whatever it is critter!!

That in itself was BEyond whipped cream and a cherry!!

I also loved how Karine called this an exercise and NOT a painting. I think this is why making art is so helpful to me as I travel through Life with cancer. I get to BEgin fresh all the time and just see what happens.

One quite HUGE-to-me piece is the digital fiddling I DO with paintings to share, here or on Flickr. It's nice to own that and to realise it. 

I love what happens digitally fiddling my art in Picasa and Pixlr. MayBE that is another plus for cancer. I can bring my art along, wherever I go, and fiddle happily with no "supplies" to carry!!

I tried to learn Photoshop Essentials, but kept coming back to these 2 freebies. I play in them more intuitively, so I don't think of it as trying to learn to use software. 

Anyway, here's my second take, adding one colour to the black-white-gray value only.

I used raw umber which is reddish and goldish and warm gingery brownish. It was so helpful to see the value AND the colour dance.

I noticed the eye on my first monster wasn't "BEhaving" itself. Coming back to the second go round I "saw" how to change this. Might seem like a small thing but it is a treasure in my book!!!

When it came time to paint Monster #3 I was to add "colour" to the painting. Well, this was a wee thing my brain overlooked in choosing my monster from Google's pickings.

You see, my monster was GREEN. Like Elphaba in Wicked. All and only green. Of course, this was a good thing for the first go, focusing on value, but it got a little cornfuzzling at this point.

Which is largely why I decided to go with blue. I felt blue-ing was a good exercise for me with colour.

I appreciated Karine's suggesting that I NOT focus on details but get the paint on. I had done drawings first on all 3, and I noticed my perspective on the whole really shifted from the BEginning.

I learned so much from Karine. And from Carla's warm-up drawing. Such grand teachers and infinitely deLIGHTfull companions for this particular passage in my little Life.

Thank YOU!!!

2014 Summer Art Camp ~ continued

These are my 5 scribble drawings from Day 2 of Summer Art Camp. 

I did these in the waiting room and then while in the other room waiting for my radiation oncologist.

The radiation folks are always curious to see what I am drawing, so this little exercise let them "weigh in" on what they saw!!!

It was fun just scribbling, looking and seeing something, even if it really isn't there!!! 

BElow each of my scribbled "boids" [they all seemed bird-like to me] is a digitally fiddled version.

Although I wanted to partake of more watercolouring, I've had a difficult time sitting and painting the past few days. 

Digital fiddling feels so much more "just right for Right Now" and it's really just another kind of "painting."

2014 Summer Art Camp ~ Day 1

I don't think chemo is supposed to BE this fun... 

I couldn't have imagined what great distraction & inspiration were possible.

Today was Day 1 of 2014 Summer Art Camp with Carla Sonheim et al.

Here are some wrong-handed crabs I drew to "warm up" or get loose.

And here is my final finished Beach Painting with Fred Lisaius.

Kind of got carried away and made my "shells" into wee critters...

I think I will call this one "Beach Blanket Brouhaha." 

Just the thought is enough for a good long laugh.

I'll share more in the days to come.

Gives me a good reason to post back here...

Haven't done so in nearly 3 months!!!

enJOY!!!

Using My Words ~ Photo Art Friday May 2014

I write a LOT. Perhaps I even write too much. 

I wonder if there is a program for this?!

I canNOT imagine how I did NOT always write like this, but realising that lets me understand some other stuff.

Writing is very healing. And clarifying.

And as much as I love it when my writing touches someone or resonates with others, I have to say that I don't DO it for that.

NOT at all.

Although, I DO sometimes have one of my "regular" readers in my heart or mind when I write.

I suppose it is the connection piece [peace?!] of writing.

Or something.

And so it is with that springboard that I approached this month's Photo Art Friday. 

I am a collage artist, or at least that is what I used to think, and when I first tried my hand at Digital Fiddling, pretty much the coolest [and only] thing I understood was Picasa's collage feature.

So I left this month's theme for "last minute," even though Bonnie was so encouraging about working on it throughout April.

April kind of got swallowed whole for me. I was diagnosed with lung cancer and all I seemed to have got done was to keep "following the bouncing ball" of tests and procedures and doctor visits. 

As May dawns I realise that the more Life changes the MORE Life changes. All I am EVER DOing is following the "bouncing ball."

Things look good Now. I had a long afternoon yesterday with a radiation oncologist. It is pretty awesome what he is able to DO with "digital fiddling" of another sort.

Anyway... the photo art. 

Every morning I get up BEfore the sun and write for a few hours. I make a piece of digitally fiddled art. I share a small bit of my writing and my digital fiddling on my Gratitude blog, I Love You, Currie. 

These little bits of art are made from photos, drawings, collages, mail art, paintings, and sometimes nothing more than words on a background or texture. Whatever they are in the World, they are my intention to give back what I have been so freely and generously given.

For a long long while Now I have been DOing one word and building my posts around that. It is fun. It is like a game. It is like eating M&M's. Even at that morning of the hour!!

I have always loved the encouragement, Use Your Words. It's probably something that I was NOT encouraged to DO so much, but... ;~D

When I was fiddling about earlier, wondering what to DO for Photo Art Friday, I considered digging up some of my old photo collages and tweaking them with the things I know to DO Now that I didn't know to DO BEfore.

But I got sidetracked DOing my April backup and started to get another idea from my April posts.

I should USE MY WORDS!!

And so, here, without fanfare, a selection of my words from April's Gratitude in a collage. 

I tried it a few different ways. It was really fun. I could have gone on. [and I probably will, once the merry-go-round stops]

enJOY!!

Quirky Selfie for Photo Art Friday April 2014

Life's often a puzzler...

This is a photo I took in San Jose in April of 2009.

It was fun how it had my name + my last initial, so I played.

Now, 5 years hence, I found it makes for an excellent "selfie" launch pad.

[And it's "quirky" too.]

And, after a week in hospital and Now one recuperating, this was right up my digital fiddling capabilities alley for this month's Photo Art Friday.

I played with the photo one time:

Having explored overlaying some of the quotes I found in a nearby folder in my photo stash:

Since both seemed to signify new ways I am BEing Currie since 2009...

Then I tried some digital fiddling with some different layering over:

BUT... it was NOT so "different" so I decided to crop the CURRIES bit to make it stand out just a bit more. 

All the values seemed to BE running into each other and same with my brain making creative connections!!!

About this point I was wondering if this even makes any sense, so...

I stopped.

Looking forward to "meeting" others "quirky face-to-quirky face" tomorrow!!

Photo Art Friday ~ Abstract Flower

It has been way too long a long time since I digitally fiddled with a photo straight out of my camera. 

So, this month's Photo Art Friday gave me a chance to See What Happened When I broke that way too long a long time record.

I got to visit the current Chihuly Exhibit at the Desert Botanical Garden last week with my mum. 

I had visited another exhibit when I lived here in 2009, and so I knew that I was in for a treat.

There are desert flowers and cactus of all sorts, but I was most enthralled with Chihuly's installations.

I did NOT realise until I was there that this was all new and different, so it made the discovery all the more exciting.

This one was a particular favourite BEcause once again the garden itself was transformed by Chihuly's remarkable glass.

It is pure JOY to let his colourful play take my imagination for a ride.

I've added Bonnie's Leafy Landscape texture to this and then just carried on in Pixlr Express.

I am REALLY REALLY looking forward to seeing what the other participants have shared in this month's digital showcase.