Lead By Imagination

  Wisdom from White Banners , a novel by Lloyd C. Douglas, 1936,   " ... if you find that you're related to people—all kinds of people—so closely that if you make war on them you're fighting yourself—and if you don't trust them you're not trusting yourself—there's a strange power that begins to give you more than you had lost by being defrauded, now and then. If you walk quietly and trustfully—you have something to show for it."  The entire book is available to read for free online here https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0608861h.html Gotta love Project Gutenberg!

  The Legend of Bob Ross My mother painted. She watched Bob Ross. The paintings now hang here and there in our house. Bob Ross' paintings don't hang in anyone's house. He's still painting on TV, YouTube, and now a new generation loves him.

Here's my photo of Vincent Van Gogh's cafè today --photo taken November 2019. As I stood across the street to take the photo, I imagined Van Gogh standing next to me. "Not the same," he whispered. I didn't ask him whether he meant there's a difference in me just snapping a photo and him creating the painting, or maybe the cafè looks less romantic than when he'd been inspired to paint its portrait. I walked by the cafè at night, as well. Closed. Not the same. In many ways, of course, the whole city of Arles has changed from what we might imagine it looked like when Van Gogh walked the streets. It's still ruggedly handsome like Van Gogh. The distress becomes more obvious outside the "tourist" area. Arles lacks the beauty one hopes to find in Provence's villages. The unchanging charm of Avignon and Cassis and St. Rémy take the visitor back to another time long ago. Arles feels real and well worth exploring. Van Gogh's f...

Creative activities reduce stress . The major studies looked at creating visual art, https://www.wassilykandinsky.net/museum-75.php but I've no doubt all creative exploration can reduce stress. We could call it play. Not competitive play, because that may spike someone's anxiety. Real play where no one loses. Imagination leads the way.

Life means process. Always ongoing, never finished, moving forward to engage imagination along the way. A painting might be finished eventually, but not so with people; we keep changing. Movement and change fill our lives with meaning. The challenges along the way help us grow and keep us focused on the process of life. We live in the ever changing progression of every day, week, month, year, decade...; we can never fail because life provides new opportunities for learning to overcome the challenges, to become fully alive. Like good yeast, we embody the natural energy to help the world grow. We are not the finished product, not the bread itself. Bread is finished when it comes from the oven. Then, it cools and is sliced and begins from that moment to grow stale. At best it's a good breakfast toast. When breakfast ends, the toast has been consumed. Perhaps we need to use more color in the painting of our lives. Paint colors can be blended together to make more colors, dee...

Nancy Hellis , author of The Artist's Journey, lays out and examines FOUR traps to avoid as an artist. Create your art as exploration. The journey of art is inner focused. Self-expression looks within. Art releases the expression and our identity emerges through evolution. Art is a leap into the unfamiliar. I have lingered in one and sometimes all four of the traps. Frequently. Even continually. 1. I must acquire the technique first. 2. What will the real artists say about my artwork? 3. I'm not a real artist. 4. Fear of vulnerability in expressing myself. As a writer, the same traps swallowed me up for a long time. Even after multiple publications and success as an editor for others' work, I stumble into the traps. Hellis leads us into daily practice for the development of one's art as regular exploration of the elusive deepest work. The most wicked self-doubt comes from thinking "real artists" do not need webinars, classes, mentors, etc.; theref...

"The unusual two-piece "Foot and Arch" was created by Indian sculptor Ganesh Gohain . It was installed near to Charles Rennie MacKintosh's House For An Art Lover in Glasgow's Bellahouston Park by Alan Kean in 2005." Great place to visit if you find yourself in Glasgow.

Look! Up in the sky. It's a plane, it's a... passenger drone? Yes, in Dubai this reality of traveling from one rooftop to another has already come to pass. Frank Lloyd Wright designed a similar system in his Broadacre Community Plan. We could be calling Uber from a rooftop downtown to take us to the airport or to lower Manhattan from the Rockefeller Center, if only people would have taken Frank more seriously. Maybe it sounds like a Star Trek episode, but passenger drones are a THING now. Make no mistake. The Ehang 184 can carry people from one tall building to another. All you have to do is call from your cell phone and charge the ride to your account. That's one creative solution to urban traffic. The bike still has a smaller ecological footprint. Still, a drone does have some advantages, I have to admit.

Today I sent my Sketchbook to the Brooklyn Art Library, NY, where you can go to visit it anytime. The deadline for this year's project is April 30, and I mailed it off a few days early. Every page contains a watercolor on tea bag paper. I drank the tea. Let the paper of the tea bags dry each time. When it dried thoroughly I painted on the paper with watercolor. The sketchbook contains a chronological story of tea time during the sketchbook project period of about 6 months. This page has the only tea bag with tag attached. The image is inspired by a tile in my shower. Sometimes I drink tea in the shower. In part 2, the afternoon comes to an end and leans into evening. A good time for tea. We have owls and sometimes I can hear their hoots. All together there are 16 watercolors on tea bags in this sketchbook. 

Visiting nuclear sites on your bucket list for vacations? Here's an inside story on what to look for and what you might find. remembering-my-trip-to-a-nuclear-missile-silo-nov-2012

If you visit Hartvig Hansen Kunts' FB page, you can watch him create this one of kind beast. The webpage is here http://www.hartvig-hansen-kunst.com/ but to watch the videos go search for him on FB.

Craig Mitchell's Garden of Glass at Missouri Botanical Garden.

Of all the watercolor paintings I've attempted in the last year (my first year of watercolor), the aspens in autumn give me the most satisfaction. I've like very few of my watercolors, actually. Like the other paintings I've done, I found inspiration from a photograph. I chose to go wet on dry which I've not done in any of the other paintings. It gave me more control and in watercolor there really is no control, for me at least. The color depth, darks and brights were more manageable. I like aspen and birch groves so I'll be doing more of this subject.

I accepted the "art challenge" from Margherta Lahrman to help fill Facebook pages with art instead of fractured facts and ugly politics. My post included a photo of one of Wassily Kandinsky's paintings. “I applied streaks and blobs of color onto the canvas with a palette knife and I made them sing with all the intensity I could...” --Wassily Kandinsky My favorite classes in college were art history classes. No surprise, since I hoped to major in art and design. Art history classes back then involved projecting loads of slides on a screen for the students to ponder while being enlightened by the professor expounding on the artists, the themes of the paintings, the techniques, and the conceptual meaning below the surface. When it came time to write my final paper, I chose Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian artist from the early half of the 20th century. In particular, I focused my thesis on one of the paintings in the Composition series, which he painted over...

Time for watercolor practice. The artist instructing us for this workshop hung up Chinese lanterns for our first lesson in applying the techniques she shared with us.

These birds are of the colored pencil feather variety. I used Prisma Color pencils.

Check out the WAMcollective from Weisman Art Museum for a look at some outstanding artists, one of whom I highly favor and admire. " Kelley Meister is an interdisciplinary artist that creates work combining sculpture, printmaking and drawing with time-based media such as film and performance. Meister’s work explores concepts of home, belonging and personal history. Recently ze has been exploring the Mississippi River Valley as a site of history, conflict and production."  video and animation, km Weisman Museum link for more artists... https://wamcollective.wordpress.com/2016/06/24/wam-pride/ " In honor of June being Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Pride Month, the WAM Collective has pulled together a list of 15 LGBTQ artists we are proud to have in the Weisman Art Museum’s collection. The artists and works ranging from the mid 19th century to today, covering a unique range of subjects and mediums. Some of the featured works c...

One of my favorite outings while traveling takes me to fresh produce markets. The colors and variety never cease to amaze me.