This week I worked on some cards based on The Mahatma Gandhi Hat Company paintings I did last year. One day I was thinking about peace as we all do sometimes and I wondered what would happen if we all wore the kind of hat Mahatma Gandhi once wore. Would we keep peace on the mind? Would we see that we’re all one? Would we say hi to others in the hat, be it a No.1 or a No. 17 or whichever model the wearer had specifically chosen according to their needs? Would we forget about the conflicts that keep us separate even when we’re really not? Would we forgive and forget? Would we smile at each other more and be kinder? A lot of questions!

Those thoughts led to the paintings. Then a wonderful man came to our open studios this spring where I had the 4 paintings hanging on the wall.  I saw him looking quite intently at the paintings and laughing. Some people who saw them laughed immediately; some just stared blankly then made a quick departure! That’s the way it goes. But the man who laughed commissioned a series of cards for the center for peace he directs. It’s still pending institutional approval and I’m fine with whatever happens as I love the work and it will morph into other stuff. But with luck, one way or another, they’ll go here and there in the way that cards do. I like to think of them arriving in some foreign place in an envelope with a stamp, the way messages used to travel. I think we should send cards again and forget email so people have something beautiful to hold in their hands and to set on a shelf. They have reminders that people care.  And even though the cards are  not actual hats, perhaps they’ll inspire the recipients to create their own messages of peace. Or just to smile. That’s my hope, at any rate.

I love how they’ve come out—the back has a small portrait and a quote from Gandhi as well as the words that were on the original paintings. I got to combine painting and digital tools to get the simple bold graphic look that is how I love to work. Having the computer to help with color balance and shading etc as well as typography really helped. In the making of these cards I got a lot of ideas for how to take this project further. But for now, I’ve just had a really fun week making these.

Thanks for stopping by!

When we were away three more people signed up for the London creativity retreat—September 25-26th. I’m excited because we have a really interesting group—a dancer, musician, writer, designer amongst others. We’re primarily going to be using drawing as a tool in which to explore the creative process, to learn to think big and to discover the true nature of our presence here. But we’ll also use writing. Of course, everyone can draw even when they don’t really know it and we’ll discover that on the first morning. Drawing takes us out of our reasoning minds and into the space of imagination and inspiration. We’ll learn how to use it to access ideas and make quantum leaps. But writing is useful too—more analytical. We’ll learn to use it as a way to discern what has real value for us as we move forward.

I’m in the process of planning our two days. There’s a lot to pack in and I know it will be a joyful and liberating experience for us all. It’s what happens when people work together with awareness and generosity of spirit. It will really charge the energy for the next part of our creative journeys—whatever they may be.  It will be especially stimulating to share with artists of different disciplines. I know we’ll all leave enriched for the new contacts and new connections we’ve made.

There are just a few places left now. If you’re interested in coming or know someone who wants to take their creative life to the next level, please go here to register— http://www.theconfidentcreative.com

Meanwhile, all good wishes!

A

One post I particularly enjoyed was by writer, Mike Watson, on rebellion and art. Mike asked what creative impulse artists from different periods in history share.  He then points out that Michelangelo and Marcel Duchamp shared the same purpose—to upend the limiting conventions of their times. Michelangelo rebelled against organized religion and Duchamp against the bourgeoisie. Mike goes onto explore other ways artists use creativity. Check it out.

I believe we’re all creative—that it’s what distinguishes humans from other species. Lots of us seem to forget or get stuck or not quite believe in ourselves. If we really connected with our true creative selves, not our ego-based selfish selves, we’d be doing things a little differently on the planet. It would be a kinder, more peaceful, healthier place. We’d find solutions to the messes we’ve made.  We can start with ourselves by exploring the notion of creativity.

So pop on over to James’ site and join the exploration and the conversation. There’s a lot of inspiration there!

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And you can check out my post on James’ site on creativity and drawing!

In Part One we looked at how to get a drawing club up and running— finding a space, setting a time, inviting a few folks over, committing to weekly meetings and getting the necessary supplies.

Next, we need to consider what we’ll do each week. First, if you’re leading the group you need to decide. If there is no one person in charge then each week someone should be designated to choose what the group will do the following week. I like a little challenge—creative challenge. So, if one week we work in charcoal, how about the next week we do portraits in collage? That sort of thing. In the Boston drawing club that I lead we experiment a lot. We try to push the limits of drawing. Remember—drawing is simply making marks on paper so there are infinite possibilities.

What sort of things should we draw? There are basically 3 kinds of drawing—Making Marks, Drawing What We see and Drawing From Imagination.

I like to start with Making Marks— drawing in an abstract way. It’s fun and hugely liberating to simply explore the marks we can make, the nature of our hand and the connections we can make between marks and meaning. Marks  are an expressive language. Each time we draw this way, the results may well be different. Some of us will love expressing ourselves like this as Cy Twombly does. We can look at the work of Twombly and others to get inspiration. Here’s a whole discussion—Why does Twombly’s work affect us? And how? In time we can develop our own interests. Perhaps it’s chaos that interests us, or pattern. or the sheer energy in lines. Perhaps it’s the bold strength in a strong line or the fragility of a delicate one. The way these two elements speak to each other may speak to us. We draw to discover what matters to us. This kind of abstract, exploratory drawing is powerful and liberating.

So, let’s start there. It’s a place where there is no good or bad, no getting it right or wrong. It’s often a confusing place to start for those reasons. We’re often not used to stepping out naked without the protection of an acceptable coat. So let’s start by being vulnerable and open to discovery. That’s where great things happen.

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There are lots more exercises in my book—

The Confident Creative / Drawing to Free the Hand and Mind

Available on AMAZON

My book, The Confident Creative / How to Free the Hand and Mind, was inspired by the drawing class I teach on Saturday mornings. I love, love, love my class and it has turned into a club really—a bunch of great people who get together every Saturday morning to draw together and share their creative journeys. What I care about, is that we come to know our true creative selves and feel the freedom to express ourselves fully. The class is based on yoga—drawing is our practice and we come to watch our minds and connect with something more. We have fun and leave filled with happiness. It’s like magic. So, I’ve written Part One of how to start your own drawing club. It’s here below and will have its very own page in the menu tabs above so you can refer to it any time you like. There’s great energy in drawing together. If you form a Confident Creative Drawing Club, please write in and tell us where you are. And join the Confident Creative Facebook Page where there will be more updates!

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How To Start a Drawing Club / Part One

Drawing can grow our creativity on all fronts and it’s great to draw alongside others! Working together we amplify the benefits of drawing. We can have a lot of fun and affirm each other on our creative journeys. Nothing great is ever accomplished on our own.  Energy and insight comes in sharing.

A club is not an ordinary art class. In a club, we all participate equally. If there is a leader, she draws alongside everyone else. It’s all about drawing together—everyone diving in to whatever experiments we will choose to explore.

So You Want to Start a Club!

There are two ways to form a club—with an artist leader, and co-operatively with a member taking the lead each week. In my Saturday Morning Drawing Club I choose something for us to do each week, bring inspiration in the form of printouts of artists’ work, order and set out the materials, plan exercises to address skills, and draw along with everyone. I get paid to do this.

If you’re a practicing artist, you may wish to take the lead and recruit people to join in. You can offer insight from your experience and may wish to charge for leading the club. If you’re a novice, find friends to join and share the tasks. Be spontaneous! Invite people you’d love to spend a little time with each week—4 or 5 will do! Invite anyone who has a genuine desire to grow their creative selves.

Remember—

• Everyone can draw! Yes, we can!  We may not all draw like Rembrandt—in fact, only Rembrandt can draw like Rembrandt—but we can all draw.  we can all put pencil to paper and make marks. we can all learn to draw what is in front of us. And we can all benefit from the meditative practice of drawing.

• We’re all creative! In fact, we are here to create—to understand that we are part of the creative energy of the universe, to learn to open to and trust inspiration, and to act on it immediately without hesitation so that we enter the magical dance of life. We are here to know our life purpose and fulfill it.

• Drawing grows creativity! Drawing can help us meet our true creative selves and grow our trust in the creative process, whether or not we are artists or plan to be. When done in a yogic way, drawing is a tool for self-realization that is available to all of us.

• Drawing is fun! And life is meant to be fun. Many people no longer know how to play.  Drawing can restore our ability to play and express ourselves freely as we once did as children.

Time and Place—

Time: Saturday morning, of course!  From 9 until noon. Three hours is what we need. Weekly for 8 weeks three times a year.  What?  Not every week?  No, not all.  People have lives and their own creative endeavors for which they need time. Besides, anything can get stale if done to excess.  A drawing club is a special thing, concentrated in time, an opportunity to share and grow together.  But, like all great things—no need to overindulge. When we work in 3 concentrated 8-week chunks, we’ll look forward to meeting.  And when we don’t meet, we will miss each other  and gather steam in our own way.  We’ll come back to the club with so much to share.

Session 1: Mid-September until Thanksgiving.

Session 2: Mid-January until mid-March

Session 3: Beginning April to end May.

Place: The space will depend on the number of members. Aa group of 6 can easily sit together in a dining room with a good sized table. In the Boston club, when space has been tight, some of us have worked on small folding wooden tea tables. If there are more people, it might be good to rent or borrow space in a community center, local art center, church basement, school, library, or an artist’s studio. Be creative!  The point is we don’t need anything fancy.

Supplies—

We can begin simply with good drawing pencils and a ream of paper—11”x14”.  Of course, we can draw in charcoal too but    charcoal dust is messy so best used in an art center, basement or outside. We can also use paint (watercolor, poster, gouache,acrylic—all diluted with water to form a fluid consistency).  Pastels are best on white paper that has a bit of tooth. But we can start simply. Once we get going we’ll add in other things.

Exercises—

There are lots of exercises in The Confident Creative / Drawing to Free the Hand and Mind. They fall into 3 categories—

• Making Marks

• Drawing What We See

• Drawing From Imagination

Making marks is just what it says—exploring all the different lines and smudges we can make. Doodling,noodling, letting ourhand fly across the page, making patterns, exploring. When we draw what we see we can set up still lives—plants, kitchenutensils, shoes. Or we can draw from photographs—faces, figures, buildings. We can draw each other.  We can draw upsidedown, with our non-dominant hand, with our eyes only on what we’re drawing, with our eyes closed. There are so many ways to play and explore. When we draw from imagination we’re free to see how a person might materialize on the paper as our hand moves. We might make a cartoon, illustrate a story or draw our dreams.

Commitment—

Here is a beautiful quote from Goethe that is helpful when beginning a club and in all creative endeavor. Start this new venture with the faith that drawing together will open doors to your innate creativity. Commit to it for eight week sessions. Come every week. Don’t worry—this will not feel like an obligation. In our club, we all leap out of bed on Saturday mornings. We know we’re going to have fun.

“Until one is committed, there is always hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness—the moment one definitely commits oneself then providence moves too…”—Goethe

This is Part One of How To Start a Drawing Club. More to come.

Well, it’s only taken a year for us to get around to seeing this and, hey, it was more than worth the wait! In our favor, there was a long queue on Netflix—we did order it ages ago. Not in our favor—think of all those months in which we didn’t have this lusciousness coursing through our veins. It’s a great fun film. Truly. Richard Curtis directs and I love the easy elegance of his films where the edge is sharp and the heart fully present.

I’m thinking a lot these days about the creative process and Pirate Radio is just a great film in which to consider how true creative expression is necessary. The film takes place in the 1960’s when it was illegal to play rock and roll music on British radio which was controlled by the government. But cream does rise to the top and some determined dj’s got the brilliant idea of renting a ship and broadcasting from the English Channel, outside the reach of the law and playing rock and roll day and night. Young people all over England listened and the world changed. The stiffs in parliament were outraged and went on the rampage. It’s shocking to think that they risked lives in order to stop rock and roll and thrilling to know the way music liberated us from tyranny.

Muddy Waters said that the blues had a baby and they named it rock and roll. The blues was born of the most heinous repression of one people over another in the Mississippi Delta, where people like Muddy had to pick cotton 18 hours a day. It was only on Saturday nights that they got to party and sing. There’s nothing overtly political about the blues. The songs are about love and being done wrong by it. But the feelings are amplified by the outrage and suffering of slavery and abuse. Expressing those feelings lifted people up and changed the world.

Rock and roll was white people’s music. It rang out with freedom and fun in the midst of the ghastly rectitude of the repressed, so many of whom had power. Repression always leads to oppression, doesn’t it?  Rock and roll said we all have the right to feel good and to express ourselves as we wish. Period.

So, I love, love, love this film because it celebrates the messy, anarchic joy we all need to access when we create. Every one of us carries within us the spirit of repression. It’s always out there and it touches us all. can we shuck it off and be ourselves? That’s always the question. Muddy Waters may have experienced far more grievous physical repression but the subtlety of social constraint can be mighty powerful too. We’re all on a journey just to be our beautiful selves and seeing this film will give you a little boost. Life is meant to be fun. Arm yourself with joy! Dance and shake it all out.

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I‘m leading a creativity retreat at Dragon Hall, Covent Garden, London on September 25-26th. We’re going to do a little dancing but we’ll mainly use drawing as a tool to open up to full creative expression. There are still a few spaces left. If you want to kick loose, I would love for you to come.  To sign up, please go to— http://www.theconfidentcreative.com

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And this week, I had a really fun and stimulating conversation about creativity with Damien Senn at http://www.peopleyoushouldmeet.com. Damien brings so much to the conversation; it was just great fun to talk with him. I’ll definitely be following his show each week.  Check it out!

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Oh, and can I say that I just love Bill Nighy?  Thanks. I’m saying it anyway!

The very day after I returned, and in a somewhat jet-lagged state, I was interviewed by Daniel Davis, of Beyond 50 Radio. Daniel made it great fun and his partner, Joy Ramos, then made a video with clips from the radio interview. You can see it here!

Yes, this is Mahatma Gandhi! My friend, Maggie Stern, made him from clumps of felted wool. I don’t know how she did this except to say that I have seen her poke clumps of wool with a needle. Maggie is in our Saturday Morning Drawing Club in which we draw and make various experiments with visual expression. We’re explorers. I set up the exercises but we make no effort to draw like Rembrandt or even David Hockney, wondrous as those artists are. We do look at them, and other artists, for inspiration but that’s all. The club is just a place where artists can get inspired by art, by each other and mostly by their own explorations. We never critique work; we just look and try to see the strength in what each person does. We just allow ourselves to be where we are. The idea is when we recognize and appreciate our strengths, we overcome all weakness.

A few weeks ago, we spent the whole morning drawing Mahatma Gandhi from photographs because our art communicates what we care about and says something about it. Gandhi’s nonviolent intervention for India’s independence and peace is a true inspiration that we might look more closely at in our world of conflict. For me, the most luminous and vital art arises from our core selves, that place in all of us that is beyond our shadow selves. Gandhi knew this place which is why he chose a peaceful path. The core really is the place of love.  He did not attack but held firm to the truth that all life has value and led through this wisdom. “A coward,” he said, “is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.”

So, on our Gandhi morning, we all drew this brave, brave man. And then, later, Maggie made this wondrous figure out of wool. I love, love, love it! Yes, because it is of Mahatma Gandhi and because it comes from one beautiful artist who knows how to simply be herself.  No small accomplishment! To imbue Gandhi with a sense of playful fun is pure inspiration.  Just brilliant. I’m deeply honored that woolly Mahatma Gandhi now resides in my house—he lights us up!  Thank you, Maggie—brave artist that you are!

Her work is about observation of the world around her. She goes out into the world with her camera and finds the telling detail, the bold and brave soul, the outré soufflé where, what should have risen, fell.  I love, love, love it. She works small which makes the book a real treasure.  It’s so much easier to reproduce small works in book form and to really experience them. Though, I must confess, I can’t wait to see the exhibit when it comes to NYC.  One of the things I really admire is the way she blurs the boundaries between “fine” art and “illustration.”  This work is full of pleasure, like Matisse’s, and she, like Matisse, convinces us that pleasure is not a bad or shallow word. It’s human, stunning, almost heart-breaking and often funny. We feel things. Wow. And we care about people. I love that. Isn’t that the purpose of art—to awaken appreciation and compassion? So here’s to blurred boundaries and the humanization of art. We can understand Maira’s art and carry it with us in our consciousness and hearts. Thank you.

I have a new post up this week on the Huffington Post—Financial Advice from an Artist. It’s great to have this place to write now. Sometimes, as artists, we can feel like we’re laboring away in the trenches and who knows if it matters. But what we learn in the trenches can’t be learned in school or by keeping our shoes clean. May I call it grit? So, for what it’s worth, I’m thrilled to be writing about worldly financial matters—from the perspective of the trench, of course! The path of art really is a trench—you go down deep, you get dirty, you wonder if you’ll survive, you become really happy—if you take the middle path. In the post, I’m singing the virtues of what the Buddha called the middle path. When we’re artists of life, we have no need for those gargantuan bonuses that have now undone Wall Street, our country and the world. We know the blessing of living simply. I’m already at work on my next post. Taking it all a step further. Stay tuned.

Wrote an essay too this week for Lightworker magazine on the subject of inspiration. I really love this essay because I got to write about something from my childhood that really moved me in a positive way over time. I’ll let you know as soon as it’s published and I can link to it.

On Thursday, I’ll be on the radio here! It’s my first time, so hope I do alright. It’s at 9 pm —www.soulsjourneyradio.com.

Everything is shaping up for the drawing/creativity retreat in London September 25th-26th. I’ll write more soon on that.  You can read more about it here.  Please, please come, if you can!  It’s reasonably priced and is going to be an amazing journey into the creative core of ourselves.

That’s it for this week! Hope all is well in your world. Don’t forget to say hi!