Getting away

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

-Orson Welles

This is one of my favorite quotes. I've thought about it a lot lately. This semester has been super busy and I have had little time to work in my studio. This is frustrating to say the least. I've been hearing a lot lately about conferences, retreats and classes. I even had the chance to take a class at Kid & Ewe this year. Since then, I've been having one of my reoccurring fantasies, a week in Cloudcroft, New Mexico in a little inn. I've stayed there before for a night or two with family and I know it would be the perfect getaway. 

But am I ready for a week without limitations? I'm not sure. If I can't make time for art in the thick of things, am I disciplined enough to do it without structure? I'd like to find out someday but for now, I'll catch those few minutes between classes and do the best I can. 

                                          

Journals

I've noticed that many creative people keep some type of journal, everything from the traditional "Dear Diary" to gratitude journals to art journals to morning pages. Why?

• as a place to test ideas
• as a method to process thoughts and feelings 
• as a way to record memories that may later be sources of inspiration
• as a form of meditation.

Consider art journals. Using a theme, "work," "blue," "November," one tears pages out of magazines, cuts words out of newspapers, colors with crayons, glues glitter, writes with markers or pencils and builds around the theme. The sheer spontaneity of the exercise relaxes the Inner Critic and allows for one's true feelings of the moment to come forth. Sometimes what the page expresses is clear to all viewers. 

"Oh, look at the joy!" 

Or "Oh, you really didn't like that job, did you?'"

Other times, the significance of a page isn't even understood by the creator. The creator may be at a loss to explain why that purple turtle ended up as the hat on the little boy. But for some reason, it works. In creating a page of an art journal, even for a little while, there is complete freedom of expression.     

HOPE

Last week, 33 men were rescued after 69 days trapped in a Chilean mine.

Now, I know these men will never have a normal life again. The media circus has already begun and we can expect made-for-TV movies, Discovery Channel specials and countless books and magazine articles covering everything from the history of the mine, their lives while entrapped and the engineering it took to free them. There will be divorces, alcoholism and probably a suicide or two among them. 

But for a brief time, governments, corporations, engineers, scientists, medical professionals pulled together to preform an amazing feat. The world watched and cheered. Now, I'll be honest, before all this my knowledge of Chile could fit into maybe a three sentence paragraph and even now, my knowledge isn't much more. Yet I know they should be very proud of what they accomplished. 

So what is it that they did? They worked together, they asked for help, they knew very clearly what the problem was and worked quickly to solve it. The engineers, the doctors, the government officials both in Chile and the countries that aided them all worked around the clock against the clock to do something that had never been attempted in history, something that was positive and productive. They did not take "No" for an answer.

In almost sixty years, I have only seen something of this magnitude one other time, in July 1969. I hope I don't have to wait another forty years to see people work together again.