The Artist's Way in New Orleans

Week 4 — Outing the Inner Critic

(Note: This post is about a formal Workshop that was held in the past. For information about the ongoing weekly Book Study at the New Orleans Healing Center, click here.)

This exercise could well be the most powerful element in the entire six-week program. 

I've done this exercise before with a group, but just minutes before I introduced it last night, during our fourth session, I came up with the title: "Outing the Inner Critic."

The premise for the exercise is that we all have multiple critical voices inside telling us we can't achieve our goals because . . . I'm too old . . . I'm not bold enough . . . I'm too disorganized . . . I never finish what i've started . . . whatever. 

And these voices live underground, coursing constantly through our psyche, never really being exposed to the light of day, to the light of truth.

The goal of this exercise is to expose these inner critical voices to the daylight, and also to fight back against them, as in, "Oh yeah? Who sez?"

Here's how the exercise goes: It starts with a brief visioning session where we imagine that one of our dream goals has happened in five years and we describe briefly our lives at that time. How does it feel to be successful? How do we live? What is life like?

Then, on a blank page in our journals, we list all the reasons why we can't do what we want to in life. This is the inner critic in full bloom. The amazing thing is how many negative thoughts we all have inside, and now they come pouring out. I tell students that others will be seeing this page, so don't put anything on there that is too personal. 

Once the list of negative voices is made, I ask students to pick the one that has the most juice today, the one that seems most powerful, for today, and circle that one.

And then the fun begins when I say: "Now pass your notebook to the person on the right." Wow! Really? And that person is to address the circled negative message with a different thought, to push back against what is usually a bizarre misstatement of truth. For instance, one highly competent young person once wrote "I'm not good enough." When I got her notebook in my hand, I thought: Are you kidding me? Not good enough? I wrote on her page that she's likely "too good" for whatever she tries in life, and she'll have to use her energy dealing with that. 

When our notebooks make it around the circle, we sit and read encouraging words that fight back against our inner critic. It's not just each of us alone against these shadowy, cowardly voices inside. Now it's the group, all of us kindred souls in the room, against the absurdity of that inner critic. Sometimes the statements are true, as in "I'm disorganized," but for something that can be overcome to stop us in achieving our life dreams becomes more and more unacceptable. I always feel teary at this point.

This exercise is a good example of how working The Artist's Way program in a group is far superior to sitting in one's own house and going it alone. Sometimes the solo route is the only way, but if one can get into a group, these kinds of powerful life-shifting experiences are more likely to happen. 

I also want to point out that I scheduled this exercise at Week 4 to give the group a chance to bond, to establish trust in each other. This would not be a good exercise for Week 1 when we don't know each other and haven't revealed our strengths and weaknesses. Last week, a woman wanted to join the group, and wanted it badly, offering to pay full price, etc. But it was this exercise that would suffer the most from a newcomer entering the circle, and I regretfully had to say no. After last night, and the magic this exercise created, I see my instincts were right on. Perhaps I can trust myself.

Week 3 — Imaginary Lives

(Note: This post is about a formal Workshop that was held in the past. For information about the ongoing weekly Book Study at the New Orleans Healing Center, click here.)

Last night, during the third session of our six-week Artist's Way workshop, we came dressed as one of the imaginary lives we had listed last week (or another imaginary life that sounded cool). The purposes for this exercise are manifold. We want to reclaim parts of ourselves we have discarded over the years as being impractical. I mean, you discard so many elements of yourself and pretty soon you can feel empty and flat. We're trying to reinvigorate the fullness of our beings.

Also, we want to have fun playacting. It's fun to make stuff up! And we want to learn how to think differently about our own lives. So much of the time, we live the story we tell ourselves about who we are. So why not tell a different story?

I came dressed to the nines (for me, anyway), wearing my Anne Klein shoes (right) and my name badge said I was Katerina, a wealthy and eccentric real estate investor. Another participant asked what the "eccentric" label was all about and I said that gave me permission to be colorful and "out there." But on reflection, eccentric can be a word that tells us we're not to be taken seriously. So I don't need that label.

In our group, imaginary lives included a travel journalist, a New York art dealer, owner of a equestrian riding academy and a world-famous dancer.

To get further into character, we answered 13 questions such as: How did you get started in this field? What natural talents do you have that made you so successful? How do you use your wealth to help others?

We also made collages to illustrate the imaginary life we are inhabiting for the evening. Mine, left, was all about making homes nurturing.

And then we made our presentation to the group and answered questions. I found it fascinating. For me, I realized that being a real estate investor that buys distressed properties in New Orleans and rehabs them with love and concern for the future inhabitants is totally possible. It's something I'd been wanting my husband to do. But why not me? How many times do we think others should do the very thing we need to do?

Other participants also loved the exercise for its sense of possibilities, which is the theme of chapter 5 in The Artist's Way book, the chapter we are on (along with chapter 6, on abundance). One person said she felt sad about lost opportunities in life. And so sometimes an Artist's Way course will bring up deep feelings, not all of them pleasant. Anyone thinking of engaging in the book, process or a workshop should be aware of that.

Meanwhile, I'm seeking out a starter property. I might just make my imaginary life a reality.

Two women, two kids and a box of paints

Last Saturday, I had plans to meet my friend Carole and her two grandkids at the Amusement Park and Storyland in City Park. I had to get some footage for a video I'm making, and she thought the kids, Steven, 8, and Ali, 13, would like the rides.

Just prior to our afternoon meeting, Carole took her grandkids to the Art Museum to see the Disney animation exhibit. This is when I had this brilliant idea: Wouldn't it be fun if they all came over to my house (across the street from the park) and did some art. And so they did.

The idea was brilliant because right after they left the Art Museum, Ali said that she felt like drawing. You see, that's what happens when we give our inner artist some nourishment: she wants to make art. And after we make art, and we're ready to be filled up again.

This reflects exactly my experience 20 years ago when I went to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival with a class and where we saw seven major productions in six days. In between the productions, our teacher had us doing a lot of art, collage, playacting, mask making, etc. She explained that unless we made art, unless we emptied out and put forth our creativity, we could not take in more . We would become saturated with stimulus and overwhelmed with the productions we were seeing. So I started getting up early and doing collages. I took that practice back home and did some more each morning before I left for my newspaper job. See the site my early collage-making here.

Eventually I was accepted into a juried art association, had an art show and sold some pieces.

So when Carole (a very accomplished pet portraitist) and I and those two kids were playing around and putting paint on paper plates and making hand prints and using as much glitter glue as we possibly could, we were not just having fun, we were also getting ourselves emptied out and ready for the stimulations at the Amusement Park. It was magic.

Julia Cameron: 'We are all creative'

Week 2 — My Artist's Date — Drumming Circle

(Note: This post is about a formal Workshop that was held in the past. For information about the ongoing weekly Book Study at the New Orleans Healing Center, click here.)

 Each week during The Artist's Way workshop (and perhaps for life), we are to take ourselves on an Artist's Date. That is something we do to nurture our inner artist. And it's best done by ourselves so that we're not spending a lot of our energy being codependent and making sure a companion is having a good time. This is for us. It could be an artistic experience, like going to the art museum or a symphony. It could be an adventure, pushing ourselves to do something we'd thought about but hadn't dared to do.

This week, I went to a community drumming circle. I'd stayed away from drumming circles before for several reasons. First of all, the ones I'd seen were on the beach in Santa Barbara and seemed to be populated by Grateful Dead followers and there was the scent of weed in the air. That's not my scene. The next reason is that I have no idea how to drum. I didn't even know you were supposed to tilt the drum to get sound out of it!

The drumming circle I attended solved both of those problems. It was indoors and there were no substances, legal or illegal. Plus, this one provided the drums (which look almost identical to the one pictured above), and an amazing teacher. There were about 8 of us and we learned simple drum moves: the slap, the snap, the base, etc. I think I have those right. I'll learn more next week.

The sheer power of the drumming sound was therapeutic, a vacation from my writerly life. Not once during the 90-minute class did I think of an article that was due or how to plan my next Artist's Way workshop or that my dog really needs a bath. I was fully present. I wish I could have gotten video. Maybe next time.

Here are some examples of facilitated drumming circles. This was NOT the class I attended, but you can see the value of a good teacher and leader.

 

 Here are some basic tones we learned:

   

 More after next week's class!

Creative living is beyond paint, clay and keyboards

Last week I received a call saying that my 93-year-old neighbor was having trouble breathing and could I please go over and be with her until the ambulance arrived. The call was from my neighbor's family member who was at work.

Of course, I ran right over. Also arriving to help out was a family friend. She wore a suit and looked like she worked in a corporate environment. As we entered the house, the other woman began making phone calls, looking around for paperwork and medications and generally taking care of business.

But when I walked in the door, I immediately noticed the look of panic on my neighbor's face. When you can't breathe, you panic and that makes it even harder to breathe. In a split second, I decided my job would be to help calm her down. So I got her to sit in an upholstered chair and I sat on the floor right next to her. And I simply acknowledged that what she was feeling was scary and that help was on the way. 

To me, sitting on the floor in the middle of a crisis is a creative act. It's not something I read in a book or saw on TV. It was an instantaneous act of artistry that I believe really helped the situation.

As I work with The Artist's Way, I am become more adept at putting paint on paper and words online. But I'm also finding myself thinking outside the box when it comes to my day-to-day life, which is where I spend most of my time.

Week 2 — So many awakenings

(Note: This post is about a formal Workshop that was held in the past. For information about the ongoing weekly Book Study at the New Orleans Healing Center, click here.)

I absolutely cannot stop looking at my Dream Box, which I painted last night at Week 2 of The Artist's Way workshop. 

The print of my own hand is spellbinding. And the encouraging words around it work like salve for my soul:

You Are My Dream Come True

Let Your Light Shine

Devoted to You

Good Work

Bliss

Who knew? I am my own dream come true. I have all the talent, beauty, initiative, soul, depth, compassion, energy and connectedness that I have sought in other people. I am the full package. Maybe now I can let other people off the hook. I can say: You don't have to be all things to me. I've got that covered.

I also realized last night how important it is for Artist's Way participants to make art during the workshop. While I have introduced written exercises from the book into the workshop, those are tasks that people can do at home from the book. But making art, in different forms, in a supportive group setting . . . well, that's what an Artist's Way workshop excels at.

I will still have a few written exercises. The Inner Critic Push Back exercise is not to be missed, nor the Self Compassion exercise. Those are musts.

But as for the artwork . .  We have four more weeks in our six-week workshop. I definitely want to do a vision collage for the last session, using most of the time to put on large poster boards images and words of where we want our lives to go from here on.

So that leaves three more workshops. My mind is going wild thinking of art projects we can do during the class. I'd like to make lamps from cast off items. Or little painted wood boxes for rings. I want to have my students decorate plexiglass panels with Mardi Gras beads to hang in the Lower Ninth Ward Village. I want us to make a short film in one hour, depicting a woman looking outside herself for fulfillment but finding it inside. I want to decorate Easter Eggs. How about painting chairs? And then there is the Poetry Walk that is so popular with past participants. 

So, my creative mind is on hyperdrive today. I have another six days to figure out our next project. But I also have a bunch of articles to write (four due by next week) and videos to make (three due ASAP). So I must get on those projects.

I've noticed that when I'm highly involved with The Artist's Way — either taking or facilitating a workshop — my career really starts to pick up. It's like the universe feels my energy and everyone wants to get in on it. It's especially frustrating on Tuesdays, though, when I'm super amped about the upcoming evening's activities and I start getting emails from my various clients for last-minute assignments. That's a nice problem to have! But I need to make sure that anything due on Tuesday gets done on Monday so that I'm open for these last-minute opportunities.

And that, my friends, is The Artist's Way!

P.S. One of the reasons I do postings about The Artist's Way workshops I facilitate is to inspire and encourage others who want to attend workshops or facilitate them, especially those from out of the New Orleans area. My friend Marjorie is right on the verge of facilitating an Artist's Way workshop in Pittsburgh, and if she and her future students can benefit from my postings, that would be awesome! As I read in a book: "We will see how our experiences can benefit others."

Week 2 — Encouraging ourselves with finger paints and dream boxes

(Note: This post is about a formal Workshop that was held in the past. For information about the ongoing weekly Book Study at the New Orleans Healing Center, click here.)

 This evening we had the second session of our Artist's Way in New Orleans workshop, and it was so fun. I felt closer to the women in the group than I had last week when we all first met. I found myself really looking forward to our gathering as I prepared throughout the day.

Here was our program for the evening:

• Check In

• Finger painting on Dream Boxes (boxes into which we will put our dreams for the future)

• Written exercises from the book:

    Detective Work (Page 73 in The Artist's Way)

    List 5 Traits You Liked About Yourself as a Child (Page 76, #2)

    List 5 imaginary lives (Page 39)

    Name something you could do this week that relates to one of those lives

• Artist's Share (great painting from a member of the group)

• Finish our Dream Boxes 

The Dream Boxes project is something I invented just today. Initially I had planned to do our Poetry Walk, where we stroll around the neighborhood and write down certain words. But it was literally freezing outside and there was no way I could ask our class to do that. So I cooked up this new project. It's a combination of one of my favorite childhood art forms, finger painting, and what is called a God Box. 

My thought was that when we're kids, or when we have kids, we put their hand prints on paper or in clay and really honor that image. The kid looks at that and feels so special, so important, so real. I thought, why don't we do that for our adult selves? Where is our "atta girl," or "keep strong," or "way to go"? Those encouragements are too rare. We must give them to ourselves. The box would serve as a place to contain our hopes and dreams, and also be a source of strength and self compassion.

To get everyone in the mood for finger painting, I played this little video I made earlier in the day:

Our task was to pour different colors of acrylic paint into our paper plate, press our hand in there, and make a print on the top of a nice box. We let the paint dry while we did our written exercises, then embellished our box with words from markers or from some rub-off letters I found at Michael's. Of course, the other participants in this exercise had their own ideas about how their box should look. The most pleasurable time for me was when we finished the boxes from 8 to 8:30 p.m.. We were all standing at the worktable, embellishing our boxes with kind words, and also talking and chatting the way women do. I knew some in the group had to get home for jobs in the morning and children and other responsibilities. But I wished that scene could have gone on much, much longer.

You can see our boxes below:

 

 

 

In my mind, this was a spectacularly successful evening. 
 

Stepping Out — Hanging my piece at Fair Grinds

 
Yesterday, Bill and I hung my Plexiglass artwork in the restroom at Fair Grinds Coffeehouse on Ponce De Leon, off Esplanade Avenue. It was a monumental step for me, to hang my new art form in a public place. But it's not a new thing for me altogether. Another piece of my paper collage series hangs in the administration building of La Casa de Maria, a retreat center in Santa Barbara, California. I made that piece around 1992, 18 years ago, and I must stop by there on my next trip to California and see how it's lasting. When I was highly involved with paper collage, I took great care to use acid--free, museum-quality paper and archival-quality glue.

With this piece, I used Plexiglass panels covered with tissue paper painted with water-based urethane. I wired those pieces together and embellished them with translucent Mardi Gras beads and other New Orleans symbols. In the center panel, I glued Scrabble pieces behind the panel to spell out Fair Grinds. That represents the Scrabble games held every Monday night at Fair Grinds.

This piece was custom made for this window well. It has to work both at night, when light is shining on it from within, and during the day, when light will flood through from outside. It needs to allow both privacy and natural light.

Here's how it came about: I held my previous Artist's Way workshop upstairs at Fair Grinds and I wanted to do something to contribute to the coffeehouse. The manager had posted an ad on Craigslist looking for an artist to paint something on this window to provide privacy. It's a fixed window, meaning it doesn't open, and consists of just one large pane of glass. To create the project, several of us from my Artist's Way workshop set out to make a Plexiglass hanging. Through a series of twists and turns, I ended up tasked with making the artwork on my own.

What I found out is how much I love working with translucent panels. It is my new material of choice. I got these panels by posting wanted ads on Freecycle.com. I got them from two separate women in town. One is named Audrey Evans, and she is an energy rater who lives along Bayou St. John. The other batch came from a Tulane art student who lives across the lake. I met her outside her Tulane art studio and she handed off the panels.

With my new art form, I'm finding that I want to use mostly castoff materials that would otherwise end up in landfills. I want to stay away from buying new materials whenever possible.

In this piece, I'm not sure about the longevity of the Mardi Gras beads. The translucent beads look like some kind of resin, which will probably last a long time. But I did use a couple of strands of metallic-looking beads and those may blacken over time. As this is a new art form, I will need to research and make sure I'm using museum-quality materials.

The one thing I know is how much I love, love, loved the process of working with these panels. I've just acquired several large and expensive panels from a Craigslist ad (which I will blog about soon) and I will launch soon into my next artwork.

For me, hanging this first piece in my new art form in a public place is a case of really stepping out there. I have no idea if anyone will like it (I haven't gotten any correspondence from the coffeehouse yet). But I'm beginning to realize more fully that not everyone is going to like everything I do. Maybe no one will like anything I do. But if I like it, if I'm fulfilled in the process, that is all that matters. It is how I feel about my art that is most critical. What if great artists like Helen Frankenthaler and Mark Rothko and Frank Stella waited around until everyone gave their approval? There would never be any art. So, I stepped out and I'm proud of myself for that.