Yes to Art

Hope you can make it to our May 21, 2011, 4 to 7 pm event! Happy day, Colleen

What are You Creating?

We are the creators of our own experiance or as I like to say, I am the boss of my own painting. What does that say to you?
It says FREEDOM to me. Freedom to decide what I think about. If I can think it than I know that the "how" to create it, is available to me. I realize I don't need to know how it will come to me I only need to be clear on what I want. Then I focus on it. I think about how it would feel to have it. I get clear on the "why" I want it and then the way is opened and it will come. Yes...it is as simple as that.

How are you painting your life?

Forgive and Create...part II

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_uRIMUBnvw&feature=player_embedded#at=20

Forgive and Create

Some things that happen in life seem unforgivable. I use to struggle with the question of whether I had truly forgiven if I could still remember what happen. The words of Jesus say to forgive one another with no mention of forgetting. I found peace in this and yet I questioned weather I was pretending. Then one day I read the words of Eckhart Tolle, “You are not pretending anything. You are allowing it to be as it is, that is all. This "allowing to be" takes you beyond the mind with its resistance patterns that create the positive-negative polarities. It is an essential aspect of forgiveness. Forgiveness of the present is even more important than forgiveness of the past. If you forgive every moment, allow it to be as it is, then there will be no accumulation of resentment that needs to be forgiven at some later time.” I then remembered Jesus words, “Forgive seventy times seven” and I realized that forgiveness is a moment-to-moment thing.

Wayne Dyer says, “Forgiveness means changing your misperceptions. When we forgive another for anything that he or she may have done to us, we are really saying, ''I no longer give you the power to control who I am, how I think, and how I will behave in the future. I take responsibility for all of that now.''

When we live in our past hurts, we give over our own power to the story that no longer serves us. We remain stuck in the past and we miss the beauty of today that has the power to create. Who would you be without your story? My husband left me for another woman and now I hate men. My father never believed in me and so I never amounted to much. My sister insulted me and so I stopped going to family gatherings. Imagine your life without your story. Imagine taking your power back to create your own life, your own happiness, your own YOU!

Forgive and create the life YOU want.

Creating a Masterpiece

I often hear my students exclaim, in the middle of doing a painting, “This is coming out so bad and I am just going to throw it in the trash.” I smile and say “Oh good, now you can start being creative! If you’re going to throw it in the trash, anyway, what do you have to lose?” It is at this point that they pull out all stops, dare to listen to their own creative genius and push through to a masterpiece that surprises even them.

Fear of failure is one of the biggest things that hold us back from success. Fear of failure is closely related to fear of rejection and fear of criticism. The mind thinks if we criticize ourselves or reject our own creativity then we take ourselves right out of the game so that other will not do it for us. When in reality success is just on the other side of what looks likes a failure if we push through the fear.

So how do we push through to that masterpiece, dream or success? I believe the first step is to change your thinking. For me, realizing that there’s no failure, there’s only feedback, was a huge shift in my thinking about life. I actually had a choice to learn and gain wisdom from every situation in life and be grateful.
I also have found that what ever I resist will persist. Resistance is a creating energy; this creative energy magnifies the very pain I am trying to avoid, giving it strength to continue in my life. For example; I completed the painting for the cover of the Billerica Green this week. All that was left to do was to give it a final spray finish. I chose, however, to give it a brushed on final finish when suddenly the paint on one of the faces started to smear. I panicked and grabbed a brush with water and started to try to fix it and it turned into “the little shop of horrors” and the face started to bubble and peal away. I could feel the fear and I started to spiral into a mini meltdown. The more I tried to fix it the worse it got and I thought the painting was lost. Suddenly a voice inside said, “Colleen what would you tell one of your students right now?” I stopped, took a deep breath and said out loud “Everything is fixable!” I stopped resisting what was: The face was gone. Then, I picked up my brush, knowing I had created that beautiful face once and I could do it again. I pushed through my fear and three hours later I had completed a masterpiece!

What doubts and fears are holding you back from creating your life into a masterpiece?
Let me leave you with the creatively genius words of William Shakespeare: “Our doubts are our traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.”

Creative ways to say "I Love You"

When giving gifts to those I love, I start by thinking about the person I am giving the gift to and the massage I want to convey. Sometimes the perfect gift with the perfect message comes across my path in a way that whispers "When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it." - Paulo Coelho. One such gift came to me this past holiday season.

I started giving my daughter, Johanna, heart stones a few years ago on her birthday. She lives in New York and I wanted a way to both, stay connected to her but also to find a creative way to simply say “I love you“. I wrote to her every day for a month in a journal I created just for her, then on her birthday I gave her the journal and one heart stone, telling her I would continue sending these heart shaped stones when she least expected it, as a way of staying connected. She loved this idea so much she began to search for heart stones herself, telling me that someday she is going to make a mosaic out of them. We both began to have fun with this and sometimes exchange text phone photos showing our latest finds. In August, while on vacation on Lopez Island, WA, I found a special heart that would later be the ultimate gift of saying “I love you”.

Lopez Island beaches are mostly covered in stones. So while on the island this summer I began my search. Rob’s brother Dave, wife Lynn and two nephews Kie and Jaymin were with me when I found the first one. I shared that heart stones are all around us, all we have to do is look. Sure enough within five minutes they began to find the heart shaped stones. As we looked I told them how my children and I use to search for sea glass all the time when they were little and we lived by the beach in Plymouth, MA. Within a minute of telling them this story I saw a piece of glass sticking up between some rocks. What I uncovered made me gasp and had the rest of the group running over to see what I had found. It was the only piece of sea glass I have ever found that was shaped like a heart. Lynn quickly took a picture and we sent it off to my daughter with the text “Look what I found!”

I kept thinking about the heart shaped sea glass and wondering if I could make it into a necklace for my daughter. I began searching the internet for a sea glass artist. Then on my birthday, in September, I received a pair of sea glass earrings hand made by a sea glass artist from my daughter Johanna. I was amazed how we were on the same page of love. Within the next month I found an amazing sea glass artist while at a gallery opening for my friend, Encaustic Artist, Linda Cordner. Sonja Grondstra is one of the jewelry artists at the Pop Gallery on Main Street in Gloucester, MA. When I told her my story she said to send her the heart and she would try her best to get it to me for Christmas.

On Christmas day there was nothing more satisfying to receive a call from my daughter in New York saying how she cried when she opened her gift and saw the sea glass heart transformed into a work of art from a heart of love. “She said, It is my favorite, favorite all time necklace! Thanks Mom, I love it!”

A Year of Voice

Every December, I typically do a mental rundown of my year: What did I learn? How did I grow? What have I accomplished? and so on. Yesterday I noticed an application on Facebook where you could design a page called “A Year in Status”. If you are familiar with Facebook you will understand what “Status” means, however, for all my readers who don’t have a Facebook page, I will explain. At the top of your profile page there is a box that says “Status” which is where you can write anything that is on your mind for the day. Share a thought or a quote or simply say, “I am making Christmas cookies with my kids today.” Your friends on Facebook will see this and they can click that they “like” what you said or make a comment on it. So, “A Year in Status” takes all the status comments you wrote through the year and puts them all together on a nicely designed page to share, for all to see. It was kind of cool seeing a whole year of my own comments on one page and it got me thinking about all the “Voice of the Artist” columns I wrote this year. I would like to take this last column of the year and call it “A Year of Voice”.

Create Love * Homeschooling Art-portunity * Inspire Forward * Art Windows of Healing * Love the One Your With * Life a Creative Adventure * Raising Artists * Creatively Green * Bragging Rights * Creative Communication * Found: Inspiration * Art That Brings Hope * Abundance Thinking * What is your sign? * Focus on Provincetown * Kennedy School Sets Young Artists Free * Summer Art * What Colors are Your Dreams? * Committed to Creativity * Life is Good * Fall Art * Beauty from Within * Art Rocks * Are We All Artists? * Thinking Makes it So * Creative Acts of Kindness * Just Say Thanks * The Gift of Art * You are the Boss of your Own Painting

After reading all the titles of my columns I immediately noticed that I started out the year with “Create Love”. As I think of who I am and the basic foundation of my thinking, Create Love is the perfect title to state what I want to come through in every column I write. I truly believe that love is all there is and the rest is an illusion. It is not so much what I say, but it is how I make you feel that will be remembered.

I crafted a prayer for you out of all my columns and have creatively summed up the year using their titles:

I pray that this year, of this artist, giving voice to create love has opened your awareness to inspire forward to bring the healing light of love to the ones you are with. Life is a creative adventure, whether we are raising artistic children or being creatively green, it is good to remember we are allowed bragging rights in the name of love. Creative communication is found inspiration and is an art that brings hope. Abundance Thinking is a sign of creative freedom that brings color to your dreams and the dreams of others. When we are committed to creativity, life is good and we bring out the beauty from within. It is then that we realize, that art rocks and that we are all artists because thinking makes it so. The bottom line is that creative acts of kindness, along with just saying thanks with a heart of gratitude, is a gift of art unto itself. Finally, I would like to say; this life you live, is a work of art and remember, “You are the boss of your own painting.”