I met Kendyl briefly at a meetup for entrepreneurs that I organized. She was only able to come to one meeting but she had plenty of wisdom to offer the group and I was a little sad when I learned that she was moving to Victoria, British Columbia. Thankfully I can still see her fun drawings and constant creativity - and her adorable dog, Breakfast - on a regular basis.
Yahoo! We've almost finished a month of the drawing project. This experiment that I had no idea what to expect of seems to be going quite well. People signed up, they're doing the assignments, they're posting in the Facebook group. The assignments are actually fun (I half expected to be getting into arguments with myself about them) and I'm a feeling a looseness around drawing that I haven't really felt before. My inner critic only woke up during one drawing and the rest of the time has been snoring soundly in a corner. I definitely don't think I've cured my anxiety around drawing, but I think I'm off to a great start.
I spent the last couple of months working for one of my favourite events here in Edmonton. The Kaleido Family Arts Festival is an exuberant celebration of the arts that happens over a weekend in September every year. It started as a way to help make the neighbourhood safer and friendlier to artists and families. After 10 years it continues to grow, with music, dance, circus, theatre, art installations, and more. When they asked me to coordinate their installation competitions, I jumped at the chance to be part of something that I believe so strongly in.
A multi-talented, multi-passionate artist who is known for her bold, unconventional choices. She started out in performance art, made a couple of feature films (Me and You and Everyone We Know and The Future), published a short story collection, helped start a massive group art project, wrote a book while she was procrastinating writing a screenplay, sent her famous friends' emails to a hundred thousand subscribers (I was one of them), created an app that lets you send someone to deliver your messages in person, designed a handbag, and published a novel, among a myriad of other projects.
You may or may not have noticed, but I'm a bit of a self-help addict. This week, I'm sharing with you some useful self-help tidbits I've come across on the internet. A lot of these writers are people I go to when I'm stressed, and I pull from them when I'm trying out new techniques to feel better and be more creative. If you want to make the most of your creativity, you gotta take care of yourself. Here are some ideas. Enjoy!
Artist and illustrator Gloria Ho was introduced to me by a mutual friend who thought we might get along since we were both artists and Royal Bison vendors. Did we ever! From the first day we met we've had so much to talk about. Gloria's watercolours paintings are distinctive and she's so good at capturing the whimsy and delicate beauty of the animals and people that she paints.
This urge to say no, to not speak up, to not share ourselves with the world, becomes ingrained at an early age. We're afraid of rocking the boat, getting in trouble, getting made fun of. As Keith Johnstone writes in his book Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, "We suppress our spontaneous impulses, we censor our imaginations, we learn to present ourselves as 'ordinary', and we destroy our talent--then no one laughs at us." I've spent many years suppressing my impulses, to the point where I often didn't think I had any. Maybe you've felt this way too and if you're tired of hiding, it might be time to start reconnecting with your impulses and learning to say yes.
I still don't know what to call this project. All I know is that I want it to happen. I want to spend a year drawing as much as possible, learning to improve my skills, but more importantly, learning to calm the critical voices in my head that make drawing so unpleasant. I want to find a way back to childhood, back to when drawing was FUN.
I've found that the act of recording can be just as important as the act of paying attention, though for different reasons. Observation helps us tune in with the present moment. Recording helps us capture the magic of the moment for future use. Paying attention can enrich your life, but recording your ideas, discoveries, experiences, and learnings can help you to enrich other's lives with your creative productions. It can be tricky to figure out how to start a practice of recording, so here are four ways you can keep track of your experiences and observations. Use these to build up a creative archive that you can pull from at any time:
Paying attention brings magic into everyday life. If you feel like your life is too boring to bear, you're probably not looking hard enough. Last week I also listened to an episode of Elizabeth Gilbert's podcast, Magic Lessons. She was talking with pastor Rob Bell about the power of paying attention in even the most mundane circumstances and how this practice deepens our art and our lives. It was one of those conversation I had to listen to twice to get everything down.
