The Artist's Way in New Orleans

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.

Even running a marathon, we all have our own artistic style

See an overview of Week 1The Rock and Roll Mardi Gras Marathon goes past by my house today and I as I observe the hundreds of runners passing by I'm struck by their individual styles.

Some runners take small, conservative steps, while others take long strides. And it's not necessarily based on leg length. Some people lean far forward, some are upright, and a few seem to lean backward. Some of these marathoners run with their hands in fists, some with open hands, and some with one hand open and one hand closed. A guy just passed by with both hands wide open and his arms straight down by his sides. Some runners wear head gear, some not. Some wear headphones, some not.

And of course the dress is varied. Some guys run bare chested and some women run in sports bras. Most runners wear shorts, but some wear long tights. I see some arm warmers worn with tank tops. One guy just passed by wearing a long silvery wig and another had a two-foot-tall fleur de lis tattooed on his chest.

And the social networks during marathons vary. Some of these folks are in groups up to 20, some in smaller groups, some in pairs and some alone.

This race illustrates what we hope to grasp in The Artist's Way. We all have our own individual style and we have a right to express that style. In a marathon, you simply do what gets you to the finish line. No one can criticize that. And if they do, porch sitters like me, so what? Whoever is running the marathon gets all the credit.

Likewise, whoever is doing their art, expressing their own individual sense of the world, those are the folks who rock and roll. I hope we all take some time today to run our own artistic marathon in our style and at our own pace.

Week 1 — Collage: 'What's Up?'

(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.)

Our six-week Artist's Way workshop began Tuesday, and I've decided to start a blog about my own activities, insights and growth during the course of the workshop. If you want to follow along with us from a distance, please do. You can feel free to post your breakthroughs in the comments section below. I'll be doing this workshop again, so there will be more opportunity for long-distance participation. On the other hand, now is a good time.

We are covering two chapters in the The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity each week. This week we will work with chapters 1 and 2, which are titled: "Recovering a Sense of Safety" and "Recovering a Sense of Identity." In these chapters, we want to protect our emerging creativity and to get more in touch with our own creative impulse.

To begin the first session, we each introduce ourselves. There are six students in the class, plus me, the facilitator. We are meeting upstairs in a charming old building in the French Quarter. The room has a large table, exposed brick walls and a balcony overlooking Esplanade Avenue. We can hear live music from Checkpoint Charlies on the next corner, and we hear urban life all around.

It seems to me, I share, that each time we attend a growth-producing event like this, we have something "up" for us. There is some facet of our psyche that is ready for review, for change, for a shift.

Meeting each of the participants is always a thrill. We discover a lot in common. For this group, I'd say there is a lack of confidence in our art, our right to be artists, our right to live authentic lives.

I share how I have been in intense personal growth for about 30 years. Lately, after amping up my involvement with the Artist's Way, I've seen my own progress zoom at a high speed. My biggest challenge is letting my being adjust to the new productivity, achievements, happiness and connections with the world.

I explain to the group that each week will be the same format: 1) Check In; 2) Artistic Exercise; 3) Written Exercise; 4) Artist Share; 5) Check Out.

Artistic Exercise — For our artistic exercise, I ask the students to make to collages on facing pages. On the left side will be what is "up" for them today. What is the big issue up for review? What does it look like? Feel like? That exercise takes 15 minutes.

Then, I ask them to make another collage on the right-side page to show what having the "up" issue resolved would look like. How would life be to have that thing resolved? To have moved on from the issue? That exercise also gets 15 minutes.

I won't go into the issues of my students, as that is strictly confidential. For myself, I see in a magazine a photo of a woman (right) who looks stunned, confused, off-balance. And I realize that is what is up for me, the feeling of being a little in shock from all my current growth and movement. On the right side, I picture a life more content, with enjoyment of music and food and not such a struggle. One by one, we show our collages and tell our stories. It is amazing.

Written Exercise — The written exercise is straight from the book The Artist's Way, on page 38, and it consists of making two lists of those who influenced our artistic confidence earlier in life. One list is for what author Julia Cameron calls our "monsters," those who shut down our creativity, and the second list is for our "champions," those who encouraged our creativity. These are not necessarily good or bad people. We are just trying to connect with what is good for us and what is not good for us. Ultimately, we need to move closer to those people and situations that give us creative strength, and move away from those people and situations that make us weak.

The final part of the written exercise is drawing a "circle of safety." That is from page 56 in The Artist's Way. We put our name in the center and with us we write the names of people  and elements of our lives that are good for us, and outside the circle we put those things and people that are a threat to our emerging creativity. I wish this part of the exercise could have been given more time. (One note: There are many, many tasks and exercises in the book. It's impossible to do them all in one workshop. However, the more we do, the greater the liberation from what is holding us back.)

Artist Share — Each week one participant will share her art. I took this first slot and sent around a sheet for others to sign up for subsequent weeks. The first thing I share is where I came from. Earlier in life, I was very obese and shut down. You can see a picture of me here. Then I share a piece of art I made years ago when I was a juried member of the Santa Barbara Art Association. I sold that piece (shown above) and it is now in a private collection. 

Today I am working with pieces of plexiglass and other types of sheet resin. This continues my love of collage with geometric shapes, but in a more solid form. There's something thrilling about drilling into plexiglass. I can't explain it. But as I've been telling myself lately: Don't explain, don't complain. I share photos from my computer of a piece I'm working on that will soon hang at the Fair Grinds Coffeehouse. It is made of plexiglass that I got from Freecycle.com, and it's embellished with recycled Mardi Gras beads and symbols of New Orleans. I'm feeling very passionate about using recycled materials in my art. The centerpiece has Scrabble pieces that spell out Fair Grinds. This is homage to the Scrabble games that take over Fair Grinds every Monday. I will be hanging the piece this weekend and will take more photos of it in its eventual home.

Below you see a photo of this current work on my table as I finish it up. I drill holes to wire smaller pieces together, and the wooden block you see at the top is a backer to prevent my drilling into the oak table.

Homework — During the six weeks of the course, we are to use these three tools: 1) The Morning Pages, which are three pages of longhand stream of consciousness writing each morning; 2) Artist's Date, a weekly adventure we take ourselves on to nurture our inner artist, and 3) Walking, we are to walk at least 20 minutes out in the world to clear our minds. (I'll be sharing more on these tools in coming posts.)

Check Out — It seems like the two hours has passed too quickly. As we do our check out, many express excitement and trepidation at what is to come. Many express gratitude to be in the room with like-minded emerging artists. I totally agree.

Feeling burned out? The Artist's Way may bring you back to life! (Video)

Vision Board Workshops

New!

Vision

Board

Workshops

 

What:          Vision Board Workshops

Why:           To help us envision and plan our own futures

How:           Fun, lively workshops with written and artistic exercises
                    that result in poster  board collages with a vision for each
                    participant's future.

Who:           For individuals who want to consciously move forward in
                     life, and for groups who want to have a fun and
                     enlightening shared experience.

When:         Private groups: Scheduled at your convenience during one
                     of these time slots:

                                             Afternoons — 1-5 p.m.
                                             Evenings — 6-9:30 p.m.
                                             Weekends — 1-5 p.m.

                    Public groups: times and dates to be announced

Cost:          $45 per person (min. 10 participants) including all
                    art supplies and refreshments

Facilitator

Kathy Price-Robinson is an award-winning journalist, videographer and workshop leader based in the beautiful city of New Orleans. This workshop is an outgrowth of The Artist's Way, which Kathy has been involved with since 1994. See more about Kathy here.

To discuss a Vision Board Workshop for your group, send Kathy an email.