March 2010 - Dora Sislian Themelis Art

Yarn to The Rescue

I was too tired to drag myself to Holy Week services last night. Trying to keep a meatless/dairyless fast is not easy. Maybe vegans can do it, but that’s not my bunch. This afternoon I’m definitely going. The service today is Holy Unction and the worshippers are annointed with blessed oil for healing. Two services are performed today and the afternoon is less hectic than the evening. Ok, people bring their crying, screaming children in the afternoon, but I think I can block them out and be in my own zone for an hour or so. And I could always use some healing.

It’s just impossible to do much art related endeavors while my mind is busy focusing on each coming day this week. I’m not resisting just distracted, edgy, and tired. The way I’ve been able to slow down the rushing moments and float away is by looking at yarn. I ordered some really colorful yarn for something and time stops when I look at the color, feel the texture, and play with it on my needles. Time stands still for that moment. I know I could look at my paints and those colors, my new watercolor paper, but then I might find myself painting and losing valuable time being lost in that! We’ll never eat dinner!

Yarn is available, within reach, and not too time consuming. My stash sits in a big basket next to my little dream corner couch and I can take a few minutes out to get to it. Isn’t the color of this yarn delicious? It’s amazing in person too. I had a certain thing in mind when I ordered it, but it’s not the right gauge. There’s no way I’m returning it though. I’ll do something else with it. In the meantime, I ordered another few skeins of a different brand, a better gauge, with better maintenance and great color, online anyway. Gotta have color! It better be great color when I get it, too. Otherwise I’ll have to order something else.

So it’s Wednesday and the week is close to over. It better be over soon or I’ll be up to my eyeballs in yarn.

Who Could Paint This Week?

The weather is as horrible today as yesterday. The rain is unrelenting, the sky is gloomy and the wind is starting to pick up. It’s mid-morning and if this is the way the day is going to go I won’t get any errands done. Besides, this week is Holy Week for those of us who are observing the Easter holiday, and it’s not fun in bad weather.

As Greek Orthodox christians, this is the holiest week in our calendar. Many of us observe Holy Week as if we are living it. There are church services each day and all day, if people are interested in attending. Every day is a different service and story leading up to the Passion, and finally, the Resurrection of Christ. It’s great theater if you look at it that way. But between attending services, the dietary rules of fasting, the cleaning, baking, cooking, preparing, it’s a rough week. Who could paint? I’m not sure I will even get to post to this blog this week. We will see.

Beginning the evening of Palm Sunday and through to Tuesday night is the Service of the Bridegroom, from the parable of the Ten Virgins signifying the need to be ready when the “bridegroom” calls for the brides, very symbolic. Holy Monday commermorated the story of Joseph the Patriarch, son of Jacob from the Old Testament. Tonight, Holy Tuesday, the church continues to celebrate the Ten Virgins, but also the Parousia, or the Second Coming, with the subject of spiritual vigilance. My favorite part of the Tuesday service is the Hymn of Kassiani, which the music and lyrics written by this nun are quite beautiful and awe inspiring.

Born around 810AD in Constantinople (Istanbul now), Kassiani had to be one of the earliest artist/feminists in history. Beautiful, wealthy and smart, she spurned the advances of the byzantine emperor Theophilos, who wished to marry her, with some terse words:

He said: Through a woman came the baser things..
She said: And through a woman came the better things..

You know that wasn’t going to go well. Pretty angry, he chose to marry Theodora instead and had Kassiani scourged with a lash and banished to a monstery where she wrote poetry and music to accompany it. She was probably thrilled thinking, Oh great, now I can just go do my art! Seems in those days, besides religious belief, people chose monastic life to pursue their art and were involved in icon painting, illuminating manuscripts, writing liturgical music, and the like. Hey, why not? Think about it, peace and quiet, time to paint, write, whatever, without distraction. Sounds great!

Will I attend services tonight? I’m not sure if I will. There’s a whole week ahead of us. Just thinking of all the things that go into this week kind of makes me want to hole up in a monastery to get some painting done.

Hey, Who Used my Creative Checkbook?

I’m still moving along in the latest Artist’s Way coursework with the book, Walking in This World, by Julia Cameron, albeit very slowly. Some days I read the next chapter, do some tasks, and other days I forget about it altogether. I blew off the morning pages Sunday morning, not because I didn’t feel like writing, but because I went to church for Palm Sunday with my family. By the time I realized I didn’t write my pages it was late afternoon and time to plan dinner. Too many people were around (my husband and my son!) for me to sit in my favorite spot without having them ask me what I’m doing, what’s it about. “Just go mind your own business” doesn’t work and having to defend myself gives me stress.

Today I wrote the pages. Afterwards I read chapter 5, Discovering a Sense of Personal Territory: Caretaking vs Sexuality. It’s not what you’re thinking, ok. It’s about the feeling you can’t stay away from creativity, the excitement, adventure and even the dangerous quality of wanting to create, and doing it again and again. Well, it’s an interesting point. You get the idea. If we, as artists, are asked to “mother” our friends/family/colleages we become desensualized, neutered, and feel used. Our relationships with others can either make or break our relationship with our art. We need that good mirror for our art to flourish.

As I read on there was alot of putting ourselves first talk. Being ‘selfish enough’ is being ‘self protective’, as in saying no to invitations and situations that don’t serve us. Now things were starting to click about here. I came to a paragraph entitled Energy Debts, and read “any relationship that risks your artist’s identity is not self-loving”.

Bingo!

Recently I connected with a “Crazymaker” who, for years, I allowed to effectively keep me from my art. I won’t go into why I made the connection, but I did. Rather than have all kinds of bad things said about me behind my back I casually connected. Probably won’t stop talk from happening, but whatever.

While always praising my creative ability to no end, they may have been jealous of it, and distracted me from it. I let it happen thinking we were good friends, having fun, helping each other through things, but when it comes down to it I wasn’t painting or making time for me and my art while they were around.

I realize now that I was not spending my time wisely, didn’t have a good mirror in this relationship, and was not authentic to myself. Yeah, this person liked to prop me up and tell me how good an artist I was, but it wasn’t real, it was control. I started to say NO and they were put off by it.

Slowly, quietly, I began to step back. Did I really need to hear from them 5 times in a day or each time I logged on to the computer? No. Did I need to get swept up in their drama? No. Was it worth it losing my time to run around with them doing everything but painting? No. They were using me for their own agenda and when I woke up from that fog I began to set boundaries. And I’m a bad person now? I don’t think so.

Things with a Crazymaker will never get set to rest, just pushed to the side where it belongs, not in my general vicinity or else the whirlwind of that drama-filled stuff will try to take over again. Why “give someone without scruples, your creative checkbook so they can run willy-nilly spending it all?” I’m not buying that cheap stuff any longer. When you wear Manolo’s, there’s no going back to PayLess, get it? Ain’t happening.

I deserve better than that which I allowed myself to endure for the sake of pseudo friendship. Done, so done.

Friday Photos

Whatever the weather is doing, whether it’s raining, cold and snowy, or warm and sunny, the crocuses know that spring is here. Enjoy the weekend!

Thought for Thursday

“I’m not inspired every day I go to the studio, but you’ve got to push yourself. Do it every day and once in a while things will really click. That’s the biggest high you can imagine.”
~Jamie Wyeth, Artist

What is Your Joy?

I had a totally different blogpost planned for today. Last night, before I closed up “shop” (the computer) for the night, I noticed a direct tweet from Mark, a fellow twitter/artist/friend living in Canada, (check out his blog/bio/links). We were throwing comments back and forth during the evening, along with other twitter people. The last tweet I saw from Mark was asking to see what I look like in person since my avatar is an Andy Warhol type of abstract, multi-color photo of me and a painting in the background.

Now, the thing is this: Do people on social networking sites want to be anonymous or right out there in detailed real life? I’ve got nothing to hide, but still, who are the people out there? As an artist, I do want to have a network of like-minded artists sharing a virtual art world on the net. With all the identity theft of late, it could be a scary world out in cyberspace.

Actually I believe artists are pretty benign bunch. Okay, we have a different sensibility about things. So I don’t find it odd that Mark, and I’m sure other cyber-friends want to see who we’re communicating with. Hey, some people don’t add their real name! And it’s a human nature thing, too. We want to connect with other human beings on a more personal level. This computer stuff is not the same as eye to eye contact.

Well, I offered a recent photo of my real self taken last fall when I visited the Nassau County Museum of Art for the Norman Rockwell exhibition. I didn’t add the photo to my blogpost, but it was a less unflattering photo than some others I had, you know, you want to look semi-decent, not like a hag. I was so happy on that Artist’s Date, my first. The weather was beautiful, I had a great time by myself and the art, I found hiking trails on the grounds of the old estate and took a quiet walk. A wonderful day and I felt happy and light.

This morning I saw Mark’s tweet: “You have the gaze of a joyfully expectant seeker…. what are you looking for? What is your joy?”

So the big question is: What is your joy?

I was stunned by such a thought provoking question at the start of my morning. My twitter answer: “Well, I seek to find the who I was when..free, serene, w/turps as my perfume..”

As a kid I considered myself an artist. Of course, as a young person you have no responsibilities except to schoolwork, family, my art. Once we grow up, marry, have a family, there are some things the person who stays home gives up. As I’ve said before, I tried to stay in the creative world by doing creative things on the sneak, so to speak.

Snatching little bits of time to draw, pastel, knit, anything art/color related before kids come home from school, time to prepare dinner, in between loads of laundry. I remembered my favorite college fine art professor who told me that women artists don’t make it because they end up focusing on the family instead of their art.

Well, the day I took the photograph of myself in the woods was the day I felt I was re-introduced to “myself” of a long time ago. With less to do since my sons are now adults I’m able to take my inner-artist out to explore, to spend time re-discovering my artist voice and create, play, and just be me.

Thanks, Mark.

The Virtual pARTy Painting

I came across a fellow blogger/etsy/artist’s post a couple of weeks ago about something called the “virtual pARTy” while meandering around the etsy forums where we meet and talk about art and techniques. Artist Kathleen Roeth, aka tapestry316, paints horses and she commented about this art party thing one day. Well, I’m not an animal person much less a horse person, nor am I that interested in painting them, but the idea of joining in on this idea seemed like a good departure from the bagpipe work. In fact, I was so tired of the bagpipe I had put it aside and started throwing paint on the paper with no particular plan just to get away from it. After I saw this horse posting I jumped at the chance to paint something new and out of my comfort zone.

The way the virtual pARTy works is a photo is presented during a set time and the artist has 24 hours to start and complete the work in the medium of their choice. When it’s done you upload the painting to the blog. When the week is over the blog owners put up the entries for viewing.

The result of my work is ok. I wasn’t really interested in the outcome. It felt good to clear my head and look at a different scene with new colors. I played with color mixing, different brushes and the strokes they make. I had never tried to paint snow and tried to keep my white spaces white. Now that I have great info on paper quality from you helpful readers, I can see how better paper could make the difference in a work. Obviously, I’m going to have to go shopping for paper before I start the next piece.

All in all, I’m glad I found the virtual pARTy and decided to go for it. Why not? It’s all good.

Done and Ready for What’s Next

I’m finally finished with this painting of my son and his bagpipe. I can’t do another thing to it or it will be a mess. Thanks to a suggestion from a lovely commenter, the paper might need to be rougher or stronger if I’m going to rework areas or use a lot of water. I learned a few things about my materials and myself, how I paint, what I like to paint, and maybe how to fight with resistance. It’s a process.

Resistance was beating me with this painting. I will look at this in the future and remember how hard it was to go to the studio to work on it with all the action. Boy did I want to just skip it and move on to something else! I weakened and found myself working on an area, giving up the resistance battle. I guess that’s how it is. One day you’re playing, having fun and the next it’s a chore to paint. Something clicked and whatever it was helped me get back. Was it the reading material, the doodling tasks, the morning pages, or was it just my head being ready to try again?

As I have said in past posts, I was primarily an oil painter. I think I used watercolors the way they should be used in this work I painted quite a few years ago. This was done after the miserable watercolor class I took. Can you see the difference?

The other thing about these two paintings is that the bagpipe was painted using a photograph of the scene and this was painted from life in one sitting. I think the life painting has a freer, more spontaneous watery quality. When I started using watercolors, I had just ended a bout with resistance. Since I was new at it, I had motivation in my corner and kept painting.

The bagpipe work is dramatic because of the lighting and paint application, but maybe a bit too detailed for my comfort.

As I move on it may be time to get the oil paints out and revisit painting on canvas. I’ve been using watercolors as if they were oil paints by applying them the same as I would the oils. Maybe it’s not a great idea. Maybe it’s just how I work. I’m not so sure.

Watercolor paints are just so easy to get out, use and clean up afterward that they’re very inviting. The transparency of the medium is what artists like, but did I work with them the way they’re meant to be? Does it matter? Comments, questions, criticisms?

Anyway, that’s my own critique. Thanks for listening to me rant. I’m done and I’m moving on.