New Monthly Feature: Journal images (Happy Thanksgiving!)

I am grateful to be continually creating art.

In honor of my whole approach to art making (Make Art Now!), I am now starting a monthly feature for this blog, which is that I will at least once per month, at some point at the beginning or end of the month (or both!), post about my current journal and post photos of art from my journal, to inspire everyone to make art a daily habit, or make creativity a daily habit, whether you like cooking, poetry, singing, scrap booking or just dancing around your house. Challenge accepted! PS I made a “Blavatar” from my I Am drawing!

Images from journal made today and recently: enjoy your holiday time off!

Daily Prompt Post: I picked Nov. 20, 2014, Sparkling or Still? Glue, still and sparkly!

What’s your idea of a perfect day off: one during which you can quietly relax, doing nothing, or one with one fun activity lined up after the other? Tell us how you’d spend your time.

With water, I don’t drink “bubble water”, never liked it. Best straight from the tap, still.

Perfect day off: Depends on whether I am alone or whether my family also has the day off.

If I am alone, it is neither fully sparkling or still. Probably on the “still” end of things, as, if I had a day to myself, I would spend it by myself. Maybe spend a lot of time in my art studio on Franklin Street, working on various art projects. Today when I had time to myself and wasn’t doing paperwork, I was in my studio going a bit nuts with my new favorite art material, the glue gun with colored glue sticks. You don’t use it to glue anything, but for decoration. I had a lot of gold and silver glue sticks, and every color glitter glue sticks. I used so many of them today that I ended up with just green glitter sticks and one black stick. I used up all the gold and silver, the purple, silver, gold, red and blue glitter glues sticks, and I had a lot of them. I used them on everything from altered books to a pair of blue crocs I keep in the studio. So I can have a big party with just three glue guns and a bunch of colored glue sticks. I also took apart a box I had decorated and put parts of it in four altered books.

So my idea of fun is to “think about paint and… think about glue
What a jolly boring thing to do” (from Andy Warhol, David Bowie song)

Rest of my day alone would involve doing yoga again by myself in my studio, using my Simply Yoga app, for about an hour.

Then I guess I might meet one of my close friends somewhere nice for dinner and a glass of wine, just one person, as I prefer one on one.

If my family had the day off, then the day would probably sparkle with adventure and maybe a little glitter of some kind, glue or otherwise…

Blogging101:Assignment for Day 12: be inspired by fellow bloggers

I found this great very long but worth reading poem on a great art therapy blog by Jen Berlingo. ( See more at: http://www.jenberlingo.com/blog/#sthash.qoXCMaRS.dpuf

The Invitation    

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. 
I want to knowwhat you ache for
and if you dare to dream
of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me
how old you are.
I want to know 
if you will risk 
looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me
what planets are 
squaring your moon…
I want to know
if you have touched
the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened
by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I want to know
if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I want to know
if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you 
to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations
of being human.

It doesn’t interest me
if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear
the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I want to know
if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”

It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live
or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me
who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me
where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know 
what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.

I want to know
if you can be alone 
with yourself
and if you truly like
the company you keep
in the empty moments.

~by Oriah Mountain Dreamer

BLogging 101 Day 9: Inspire Yourself!

This assignment comes from the assignment of the day before, to create an “About Me” page. I just got rid of my boring “Profile”  and substituted a more passionate “About Me” page: https://natashashapiroarttherapy.wordpress.com/about/

I’m pretty satisfied with it, but the featured image does not seem to show up. Anyway I will post some images to this post that reflect the idea of writing a post inspired by my “About me” post.

While writing it, I remembered this great quote from one of my favorite artists, Louise Bourgeois; its from her book, “Drawings and Observations”, which is a great book that I own and used to look at frequently but of course, like lots of things at my house, I can’t find the book!

So from another book of her work, here are some interesting quotes:

My early work is the fear of falling.

Later on it became the art of falling. How to fall without hurting yourself.

Later on it is the art of hanging in there…Hanging in there-the art of living, the art of a lifetime. -Louise Bourgeois

I choose these three because they also apply to art therapy and the therapeutic process for both therapist and patient. “Hanging in there” sums it up in terms of once you get yourself going; now that I am in my 40’s I have passed the other stages, the fear of falling and the art of falling.

There is much to say about hanging in there, but for me it involves returning to my basic survival kit, my art supplies and my “portable studio”, doing art anywhere and everywhere including in my current studio.

As the making marks on paper or any surface is mainly a non verbal process, I won’t say too much about it, as I still believe what I discovered over a quarter century ago, that art making was a balm for all the words expected of us all the time, a sanctuary from explanation, a sacred space to make your own without need for verbalizing. Hanging in there is about just showing up every day to your life.

Here is the image I tried to use for the About Me page:

It’s a page from my journal, from 9/25/2010.

Here are a few pages from the journal I started this month:

More photos from old journal sketchbooks

Looking through old journals…

Today while cleaning I found many old journals. I always have a decorated sketchbook in my bag. Over the years I’ve made many. These are some random highlights, some date back to the 90s!
Some of these photos are of sketchbook covers and some of pages from them…
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More Zig Zag Books!

As with most art projects, the zig zags have a life of their own. The flat scalloped edge paper with a lot of yellow in it started as a zig zag book but evloved into a kind of painting with embellishments. This was art by a patient. While the patient made it, I tried a zig zag on neon pink corrogated paper using paint and some collage. The two pieces complement each other well

The last photos are of a different session, again with paint. The patient was very creative about cutting some of the edge but not all of it and felt free with the painting process. He even put duck tape in it. While he made it, I made a collage painting in my journal…

Blogging 101, Day 6, Post to Your Dream Reader: New Art Therapy Project! Zig Zag Books

My dream reader is I guess, someone who is interested in all different kinds of art, loves art materials, and wants to try out things that I post because they look like so much fun!

So, thanks to Helen Ellis, whose art therapy blog I follow, I came across a super great art project, and art therapy project, and gave it a test run yesterday and continued it today! I did it with a total of 8 individual sessions and my weekly group!

Here is the link to her original post about Zig Zag Books:
http://helenellisarttherapy.com/2014/11/17/little-mandala-book/

There is something very appealing about this project because it is an automatic art object similar to a triptych but it’s a double triptych with six panels or a quadruplet with four panels. It makes a great gift and doesn’t need to be framed. It’s like making a card but on a higher level of aesthetics, and has the appealing back and forth of the zig zag…it’s easy to make; I did it half with people who don’t always want to do art in the session and half with art enthusiasts. 3 people chose to make a painting out of it and the rest chose mixed media, especially collage with decorative paper and duck tape as well as other embellishments…

It’s a pretty simple project that you can have lots of fun with using multi-media. I test drove it yesterday The photos I posted are,
Close up of the first time I tried this project, with a relatively new patient. Luckily I couln’t find her project from last week, so she was fine with trying out a zig zag book. She was attracted to my duck tape of all colors, patterns etc. so she used duck tape to do her first “frame” and I used duck tape and glue gun color to embellish mine. The first three photos are of the one I made during our session.

The group really enjoyed it and I made the purple and gold one with them. The bronze and gold glitter paper is one of the ones I did alongside a patient, and the gold and silver panels with the beads is a patient piece. During that session I made the silver and black one during which I discovered I could cut the top with fancy scissors.

The one with duck tape and the PopUp owl was made by a patient as well. I have a few more to post in the next post! Let me know if you try this out!

 

Daily Assignment: try a new kind of post

I wanted to upload a video directly to the blog to watch, but WordPress does not do it, at least not with this “theme”. So I took a video of one of my altered books that is I think finished and has a doll in it that is removable. I am uploading it to my Youtube channel so I can post the link on this blog. While it’s uploading, here is my most recent video of a big altered book with a doll in it!
(Don’t expect any music or talking, it’s pretty much just looking at the book.)

Day 2 Assignment: just do it!

An interesting assignment to write or post something at the heart of what your blog is.

I’m going to post some photos of artwork in my studio as a picture can say a thousand words and the first task I wrote a very long post…