March, 2022
If you are an Instagram Artist, the #100 day project is familiar to you. If not, here’s the gist of it – starting this year in mid-February, if you choose to participate you choose some kind of project you will work on every day for 100 days and post whatever you did each day. Now, from there you have a lot of freedom – define it however you want, do something different each day, or work on one thing every day for 100 days, post every day, never post, whatever. The idea, at least for me is to give you a chance or focus, even if the focus is on something new, and to build that muscle that says you get better and discover your style by making every day.
So, after that intro, here was my plan. I have several tubes of gouache, for some reason (if you are any kind of maker, you understand the concept of those mystery items in your stash. I also have a bunch of old report covers for my business, back when every job required multiple printed copies. These have my branding on one side, but the other is blank and is a nice heavy cover stock. And, I need to loosen up and do some painting of some kind every day. All that combined means I chopped up those report covers into 3” x 4” pieces, and every morning I do a little painting.
There’s another layer to it as well, kind of my personal secret color palette. I’ve talked before about Louise Hay’s book Colors and Numbers – in that book is a scheme to use your birthday or calculate a number for each year, each month, and each day. Then, each number correlates to a color. That’s what I use as my color scheme. My color theme for 2022 is purple, so that is somewhere in every little painting.
On the back of each little painting, I’ve recorded the date, then the color code, then a word or phrase or two that come to me.
I’m about a third of the way through. Some pieces are landscapes, some are just patterns. Some are better than others. I don’t post all of them, because I can’t imagine anyone would want to see each one, but from time to time I pick out a selection.
The important thing is that it’s working – just these 20 minutes of painting are becoming routine, I’m learning about a new medium that is beautifully portable, and that big stack of old report covers is finding new life.
March, 2022
Well, I got my answer from the universe on how to work with morning pages. Just as I was beginning the Artist Way program, an artist named Catherine Rains that I follow on Instagram spoke about something called Illumine Hour. It is hosted by a woman named Daphne Cohn, and she opens a Zoom room every morning for an hour, for free, and invites anyone who wants to be there. She opens with a blessing and an artist’s prayer, people may or may not share what they intend to do for the hour, and then everyone just “makes” their art.
I have been using the time to do morning pages (about half the time) and then to work on a 100-day art project I am playing with – more on that in other posts.
At the end of the hour, you will hear her voice, calling you to a closing blessing, and that is it. People silently not even really witnessing, just sharing space. I have wanted better focus, and it appeared just as I needed it.
A few weeks after I joined Daphne sent out one of her newsletters saying she was overcoming a fear of asking for support, and was going to start to accept donations – appropriately, just around International Women’s Day. Again, just perfect, because I was intending to find a way to support her. Something that arrived in my life so perfectly timed and became such a quick part of my routine is certainly worthy of support.
March, 2022
One of the new things I started in February, mid-February to be exact, is working with an on-line community through the 12 week Artist Way program. This one is organized by Meredith Hite-Estevez who works under the Lumina Arts Foundation brand and has a podcast called Artists for Joy.
I’ve read the book before and maybe mentally played with the exercises, but never really committed to using it as a workbook and taking it seriously, week by week, for twelve weeks. We will see how it goes, but it is nice to have a weekly check in with a community and as someone with life coach training, Meredith seems to have a pretty good handle on how to faciitate. Morning pages are somehting I theoretically admire but wonder if I will keep up, and breakout rooms on line are always hit or miss, but my first one was a hit, so I will “keep coming back”, or at least that’s how it feels like now.
March, 2022
There were a bunch of February adventures. The real treat was a last minute decision to hit the road and head to Tucson for a winter break – sunshine and temperatures in the 70s were a nice change from a Chicago winter, even for just a week. Truth is, we would have stayed longer but the amazing house we found was only available by a fluke. We know something now for sure – we live in a high-rise, which is kind of like living in a hotel, so the big treat for vacation is a house with a backyard. So happy we found this one, but so sad to find out we would be the last renters ever – the homeowners were moving in themselves.
Every since I have be overly-obsessied with finding an option for next year. We aren’t likely to be full-on snowbirds, but we are flirting hard with the idea of February in the desert.
March, 2022
I’ve meditated in lots of different places – more hotel rooms than I can count – but my favorite nest ever is the place where I sit most days at home in Chicago.
My husband and I have kind of an unusual living situation – we have two condos in the same building downtown right at the lakefront. In one, we sleep and entertain and spend Sunday mornings reading the paper and he spends his days in his office. The other is my daytime domain – my office, my art studio, my main prep kitchen, and my meditation corner. That’s it in the picture you see. I don’t even know what you call this chair – it spins, it’s nice and deep, and it’s got a bunch of pillows to tuck in here and there. I keep a few things on the table next to me, not al altar exactly, just little symbols that mean something to me. There’s a candle – I don’t light it, but I can smell it and something about that smell sets the mood for me.
There are several malas, prayer beads or necklaces depending on your point of view. You’ve seen them before, they are kind of boho-fashion, but they also have a long history, with meaning to the number of beads and the way they are sectioned off. I guess you could say that they are the Eastern religion corollary to rosary beads for Catholics. Anyway, for me they don’t have any specific religious meaning, they are something nice to hold on to – bringing in that sense of touch. I’ll tell you another thing, one of my personal themes is the idea of uniting left brain and right brain, art and commerce, intellect and intuition, so looping that string of beads around both hands, uniting them, has personal symbolism for me.
And yes, there are crystals – selenite, a gift from a friend, and a few others I’ve been gifted along the way. I’m not an expert in crystals, and I don’t spend much time thinking about whether or not they have attributes or powers. I do know that the selenite is said to clear negative energy, and the idea of something from the earth supports the idea of being grounded, and both of those concepts appeal to me.
So, all together, these symbols may not make magic themselves but they lend meaning and are helpful reminders of what I want for myself.
