Mindfulness Archives - Page 3 of 7

Even If You Think You’re Not Creative

06.29.2018 by Amy Johnson Maricle // 4 Comments

if you think you're not creative

Dear Wonderful, Creative You:

Our creative lives are made up of lots of little acts of creativity – the way you arrange the flowers, the card you made for your mother, the silly poem you wrote with your nephew, or the art journal page you worked on while waiting to pick up your daughter. Your time spent reading this post about art is creative. It’s all a part of your creative life, and whether you own it or deny it, you are an innately creative human being.

I’ve got a great little exercise I’d like to share with you, it comes from my new class, The Small Creative Acts E-course. Take out your journal or a sheet of paper and when you get to the questions, pause the video to give yourself at least 5 – 10 minutes to write about your answers. Really let your mind wander. I’d love to hear about what you discover in the comments.

What did you discover? Who are the makers in your family? When I did this exercise, I was astounded to realize how many makers there are. And now looking at the family I’ve created for myself with my husband, it is FULL of makers. Frequently at Christmas, I’m thrilled to notice that we exchange so many handmade items: bread, candles, cutting boards, scarves, and tiny paintings. There are makers in your family, you just need to take some time to look. Think about the immense creativity of things like being a good story teller, creating technology that makes our lives easier, and putting together a delicious meal with whatever you find in the cupboard.

If you want to start really living your creative life, I’ve created The Small Creative Acts E-course to help you do it. With 1-hour 15 minutes of video instruction and a 22-page workbook, I’ll help you to appreciate your creativity, visualize your creative dreams, and make more art. You can get playful and creative with your art supplies in ways you never thought you would, and commit to your art practice. You’ll have lifetime access to class material and your private FB group.

I would love to have you in class! You can register here right now.

Creatively Yours,

Amy

Facing the Empty Space: Practicing Mindfulness Through Art

06.20.2018 by Amy Johnson Maricle // 3 Comments

Dear Wonderful, Creative You:

Since last fall, I’ve been participating in a practice called authentic movement. It’s a movement-based mindfulness practice and active imagination process. I’ve been inspired by all of the parallels between the movement practice, and my art practice, and I wanted to share with you about one of them today.

Just so you understand, I’ll give you the basic layout. We practice in a light-filled renovated barn – a big open space. There is a facilitator who is the witness, and there are movers. Each of the participants moves with her eyes closed for about 45 minutes. The idea is to tune into what your body wants to do, and to follow the impulse as closely as you can. So if your hand wants to make a fist, you do that. If your feet enjoy sliding on the wood floors, do that. (I do that often.) But it’s not a planned movement or a performance of any kind. It’s about being mindfully, non-judgmentally present to your body and what it wants and needs in the moment.

When the movement is over, the witness reflects back something she saw and what it made her feel and experience. Her job is to help you feel that you were non-judgmentally seen, not interpreted. It’s a very beautiful practice, and I find it more accessible than regular meditation practice. There’s something really powerful about being seen non-judgmentally, both by yourself and by another.

Before we begin, we stand at the periphery of the room and make eye contact to honor each other, and then we do something interesting – we look at the open space to honor it too. We do this again at the end. At first I wasn’t quite sure what this meant, but recently, my teacher offered a little nugget of wisdom that really struck me. She said:

“In the beginning, there is nothing. In the end, there is nothing.”

It’s the same with art. In the beginning, there is nothing, and in the end, there is nothing once again. You begin a piece in the empty space, fill it with your marks, complete it, put it away, and return to the emptiness. We face the possibility, the curiosity, and the anxiety of not knowing.

So much of what scares us about art practice stems from facing this empty space. So much of what excites us about the art process stems from the emptiness too. What helps me to face the possibilities and the anxieties is knowing that I am not alone. I face the unknown in community.

Fluid Art Workshop:

We’ve been talking a lot in my Diving Deep class about how important community is in building our courage as artists. I want to help you build your art courage too. I’m inviting you to a free workshop tomorrow, Thursday, June 21st at 12pm EST. There’s still time to register, and you’ll get an amazing PDF with all the goodies from the workshop. There’ll be a 48-hour replay as well. I’m thrilled to tell you that I’ll be announcing an AMAZING freebie at the end, so stick around for that. Click here to register now.

Creatively Yours,

Amy

Let’s Make Perfectly Imperfect Art

05.04.2018 by Amy Johnson Maricle // 2 Comments

Dear Wonderful, Creative You:

In my Diving Deep class, we focus on learning to dance between intuition and technical skill. The skill we have been focusing on this week, blind and semi-blind contour drawing, is one that can really call up the inner critic. Blind contour drawing also offers tons of opportunity for self-reflection, surrender, mindful attention, gorgeous attention to detail, and the development of your intuitive, personal style. As a teacher, I dance between guiding students in technical skills, while also helping them to hear their own inner wisdom about what each art piece needs. Above all, I’m encouraging us all to be on a journey of making perfectly imperfect art. The magic is in the imperfections.

As with anything, folks come to class with a range of experience and comfort level with the techniques. One of the things I offer in addition to the live videos is to continue practicing and posting the techniques myself. I try to offer a mix of inspiring images, and images that show my mistakes, and how to dance with them.

Here’s a good example: I tend to do blind contour drawings in a very slow, detail-oriented way. I almost never do completely blind contours, unless it’s for an exercise. I enjoy semi-blind drawing where I peek at my paper a little. I also take my time and don’t go too quickly. One of my students shared a video of artist, Phil Hansen, doing blind portraits of people in 1.5 minutes. I thought this sounded like a fun challenge.

I decided to use a picture of my brother as a child and do 3 drawings this way. As you can see, there’s not much recognizable here at first glance. However, look more. See if you can find some details of accuracy, even in the distortion. See if you can find playful creatures in these drawings. They are really quite fun, actually.

One of the things I love about teaching live classes online is that it pushes me too. I had this rich background, and while looking at ostriches in National Geographic one evening, I had the idea to put an ostrich face staring at the viewer on this page.

I went to our friend, Google Images, to find the right expression on the right bird. I found it and here’s my semi-blind contour drawing of her:

Now, I don’t have rights to the picture, so I can’t share, but I can tell you that I’ve changed several details on this model. The biggest difference is the right side. The mouth and the eye got smushed up because I made some “mistakes.” However, thank goodness I do blind drawings in pen and could not erase, because that mistake made the sassy expression that is the magic of this bird.

The right side nostril was also drawn in the wrong spot, so I gave myself permission to adjust that when I painted her in.

How to draw a blind contour, blind contour drawing, perfectly imperfect art — Meet Jeanine the Ostrich. “Whatchoo lookin’ at?”

Let’s get busy making some mistakes.

Oh and speaking of embracing imperfect art, I’ll be co-hosting a super cool workshop this coming Wednesday, May 9th at 12pm EST on a private webinar page. Lauren Hooper, of Lauren-Likes and Get Messy Art Journaling and I will be talking about Travel Journaling. We want to help you take your journal everywhere. This is the secret to finding time to make art – you carry it with you! We will be sharing all our best tips, prompts, and how to get over the fear of creating in public.

You can register by joining Lauren’s list right here: JOIN THE TRAVEL JOURNALING WEBINAR!

I hope to see you there!

Creatively Yours,

Amy