One of my questions for my Friday Questions series on Instagram was, ”What are your top two challenges?" The responses came in quickly. It occurred to me that these challenges are issues that are "top of the mind" issues. It was easy to respond because everyone knew exactly what their challenges are because it runs like a loop in the background of your thinking on a daily basis.

There was plenty of overlap on the top two challenges by many of the commentors. People said it in different ways but it boiled down to Time and Focus were the top two challenges...too many things to do and not enough time to do them and difficulty in deciding what to focus on and maintaining focus on what you eventually decided to do. People said things like self care and choosing how to spend my time, wandering eye for new art forms, filtering ideas to get to the best ones, planning too much for one day, making a decision on a direction and then following through. Time and Focus are really related sequential topics.  One causes the other one which causes the other one. When we feel overwhelmed by too much to do, by definition it is hard to focus. Just like it is hard to be kind when you are angry or feel grateful when you are complaining. So the one thing that would help is to not feel overwhelmed.  Easily said, but hard to do.

Last week, I started a  new series called Coral Reef, Lizard island. The inspiration for this idea is a documentary on Netflix called Chasing Coral.

The documentary tagline from their website is... "Divers, scientists and photographers around the world mount an epic underwater campaign to document the disappearance of coral reefs."

I highly recommend this documentary. You can see a trailer in the link above. It is powerful. You see people who love and study coral reefs documenting the effects of warmer ocean temperatures. 

This documentary hits close to home. The last part of the documentary was filmed at Lizard Island, a research station on the Great Barrier Reef off of Australia. Our daughter spent 10 days on Lizard Island in 2014, the year before the coral bleaching events that occurred in just 30 days and are documented in this film. Watching her see the damage done to a place that she loves was heart breaking. A significant portion of the coral died, along with the ecosystem that relies on it.

Last Friday I started a new thing. I asked a question to people who see my art on Instagram. I really want to engage in more conversations about art, so I thought I will just post a question. I asked "How does my art make you feel?"  At first I couldn't decide on the best question to ask, but then I remembered this whole past month in my Studio Notes I've been writing about emotions evoked by Art. So I just went with the first question that came to my mind... how does my art make you feel? I added the image of the completed 100 days series, Trees and Windows from this past year.  At first I thought this question was too selfish and I really didn't want it to be all about me. But then I realized all these questions are really a way of giving people a chance to think and talk about art which includes my art. It's about dialogue. It's about connection to someone else who thinks about art and color and design as a creator or a consumer of art. It's amazing how quickly people responded and how thoughtful their comments were. I was blown away and very grateful.

People said my art made them feel happy, joyful, energized, motivated, serene, and alive when they saw my art. It doesn’t get better than that. Mission complete.

As a follow up to my article two weeks ago, Questions for Artists, @ we had a wonderful Open House and Meet the Artist event last week. This event is for artists in our annual Public Art Program...

It was a pleasure to get to know the artists in person or by their written submissions to our three questions for the night. The good new is that the questions really just provided a structure for a conversation with the artist since once they got rolling, they talked about things that were important to them as artists.

My job as the interviewer for the Meet the Artist event is to help the audience get to know more about both the artist and their story.

I have reread the recent article on David Hockney by Deborah Solomon in the New York Times, "David Hockney, Contrarian, Shifts Perspectives," several times.   He's being interviewed because there's a massive retrospective of his life and art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City scheduled for November 27, 2017. I was surprised when I read the quote that earlier in his career he thought he was a painter on the fringes. He said  ,“I thought I was a peripheral artist, really.” You see he was doing figurative somewhat realistic art when it was fashionable to only create abstract art. This article pointed out that now he's probably the most celebrated artist in all of England. He is designing a stained-glass window for Westminster Abbey in honor of Queen Elizabeth. The author of the New York Times article went on to say that nowadays artists can choose their own medium, figurative or abstract.  There are no rules. There's no exclusion.  You are not better or worse if you do one or the other. I hadn't realize what a liberating thing that is. If a great artist like David Hockney felt like he was a peripheral artist because of the way he chose to express himself, we are lucky that he had the courage and perseverance to do it anyway.  

I have been interested in David Hockney and his art for years.

 In March 2015, I joined the Fine Arts Commission in our community. The Commission has a mission.

"This Commission has served to provide a forum where enthusiastic supporters of the arts can meet and discuss innovative new strategies to promote art in order to improve the community."

I was asked to submit an application to this Commission because my art was selected the previous year for the Public Art Program. I have included images of both pieces to show how my art has changed over the years. These are the last pieces were i used printed fabrics as now I exclusibely use Kona solid fabrics. It has been a rewarding tenure so far as the Commission is up for new ideas and committed to promoting a diverse array of arts in the community from large public murals to community theater and local arts programming at the public library.

This week I need to think of three questions to ask the artists at our Open House next week.
 

My current series the Forest has been getting some attention in my Instagram account. Even people who have followed me for years said there was something special about this series with the multiple greens and the varying compositions. When I was trying to describe it to one of the commenters the thought came to me I really imagine standing in the forest looking up at the trees with dappled light all around and seeing the blue sky peeking through. I captured the emotion that I use to create the Forest series into words. Sometimes it is hard for me to capture that essence into words and I am practicing doing it. This time I felt like I succeeded. I shared this with one of the commenters and they got it.

Many artists inspire me. I decided to highlight some of them in my Studio Notes in an ongoing series called Artist Stories.

I have been listening to TED talks lately while I have been in the studio. I listened to such an inspiring one this past weekend. I listened to it 3 times and kept pausing it to rehear what Laolu Senbanjo was saying.

His first powerful statement is...

"Every artist has name. And every artist has a story. "

I provided the link to the TED talk because you are going to want to see his art as well as hear him speak.

"The Sacred Art of the Ori"

He starts at the beginning, how he saw the world as a child. 

After spending time on lakes in the woods this summer, I decided to focus more on landscapes in my upcoming series. As an artist I have used the natural world for inspiration for many of my series over the past years. As I told one of my artist friends, I am really a landscape artist.

For some reason, this was a very clarifying moment for me. So what does this mean and how will it change my creative practice?  I plan to focus on the geometric elements of the natural world that inspire me to help inspire others to see the beauty all around us.

I am reading a book called The Private Lives of the Impressionists by Sue Roe. It is a very detailed comprehensive book about the years from when the Impressionists started learning how to paint in Paris, through the years where they found other people with similar interests in new painting styles, up through when a dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, brought the Impressionist art work to New York for an Exhibition in 1886. It took me a while to get into the book because Roe writes about many different artists all at the same time because she goes in chronological order and the artists all converged on Paris around the same time. You learn about their backstory, where they came from, how their families had to support most of them for decades, how some married their models and hid that fact from their middle class parents.  I just didn't realize how persistent these artists were. They wanted to break from tradition and not just copy the old masters and be limited to traditional subject matter like portraiture or classical myths. They wanted to paint outdoors, plein-air. They wanted to paint contemporary subjects, every day people doing every day things.