The Spontaneous Art & Life Project

From The Spontaneous Art & Life Project Book

Between today’s blog post and tomorrow’s I will have reached the half way point with this blog experiment. I have traveled through the hours, the days, the minutes, I broke through to a kind of happiness I haven’t known in years, changed my diet radically, began to lose weight and see my health improve across the board, gone off the psych meds I have been on for decades, and then awakened to what real life without medication means with its ups and downs. Of late there have been more downs than ups. Nearly a week ago I hit a bottom and finally started to surface again, I awakened to what I have, right now, in this moment — my writing, art, and the book that I started in 2014, The Spontaneous Art & Life Project. I have realized that the work that I am supposed to do is already here, as it has been all along. It is something that will grow day by day, not with some kind of deadline in mind. The relief that I feel is so enormous I cannot rightly explain it, and I don’t have to. I will just be here, doing what I do, and watching it grow into what it is meant to be. I am no longer searching for what might be, I am simply doing what needs to be done.

The foundation is my writing, here, on this blog. I will continue my daily blog posts tracking this life that I am living. Showing up here daily with an eye to what makes me happy and recording my progress is the central part of each day. Then comes the art.

My relationship with my art is shape-shifting. I have realized something important. The reason, I believe, that I always hit a brick wall with my Ladies and then stopped was because, given my limited experience and knowledge, I could only go so far with what I was doing. Last night I went to my Facebook page where most of the Ladies I had drawn in the 4 months of daily drawing challenges at the end of 2016 and January 2017 reside. I posted the Lady each day with the story I had written for her. I was very proud of them at the time and there are still many stories that make me smile or touch my heart but they were a moment in time and, I realized last night, the moment has passed. Surely part of what I did with them is inside of me, and new Ladies will be showing up but in a new and different way. It is no longer, for me, about those Ladies and the stories they tell, it is about the art that I make and where it takes me, how it heals me, and how it might guide and direct me into my future.

I have realized that as much fun as those Ladies were to do they were my entrance into making art, they helped me begin, and because I love drawing them I will continue on with them, but I am expanding what I will do and how I will do them. And it won’t be only the Ladies I will be drawing. I am beginning to study more techniques to expand and incorporate into the self-taught, off the cuff, way that I began. And while what I do will not change dramatically — that isn’t even the goal — it will help me expand what I do to keep going and growing instead of hitting a wall and stopping because my abilities are too limited to take me further. I found a wonderful site called Creativebug. I signed up for the 7 Day Free Trial and have already decided to go on with it. It is truly amazing. For only $7.95 per month you can take endless art classes — there are over 1000 with more being added daily — little video classes in everything under the sun (including all kinds of arts and crafts) — and amazingly many of the artists I love, whose books I may have or who I follow on Instagram, teach here. I am learning more about working with watercolors, gouache, drawing in general, patterns and surface design for backgrounds, and so much more. I just watch a class each morning over coffee and then make art in my journal. The Ladies are there, but their worlds are expanding. With no pressure, and for very little money, and simply having fun and open to learning all kinds of new things I have opened a doorway onto the artistic future that is possible for me. Without trying to make great leaps into producing “works of art” I am learning new ways to expand what I already have been doing so that the possibilities are endless, not limited. This is what I have long needed to do but didn’t know how. I couldn’t see it. But, finally, here is the way I can move forward.

And finally, writing and making art everyday, I am finding my way into health, wholeness, and a whole new kind of life by doing these things that are my love and my passion, this is my spontaneous art and life project, and as I live it I will be writing about it. The book itself, which I have been working on for years, first in a series of eBooks in 2014, comes out of decades of teaching journal-keeping classes, creating several different zines and small press publications, making whimsical and cattywompus Ladies for the last 5 years, and writing, from the time I was 9 years old, the thing that saved my life, the foundation of all of my creativity, and the process that has opened an endless series of doors for me and kept me going when nothing else could. These are the things I have done all my life and they are all I need. I just need to keep doing them everyday, allowing one form to flow into another, and in the process a book will be born. I have been making it so much more complicated than it needed to me. I need nothing more than these few things.

To create from joy, to allow what will be to be, and to share it all here on the blog as I do it in my daily life will be the pattern of the days to come. And I could not have done any of this, come to see and understand what I’ve needed to, had I not started this 365 day experiment here on this blog. I have recently heard something that is exactly what I’m trying to say here, Enlightenment arises out of action. Those are my words, not a quote, but they sum up the truth that I have found. You cannot sit there and wait for an answer to fall into your lap. You have to daily get up and work toward something, even if you’re not sure how, even if the outcome is uncertain, even if days are hard and you’re scared and you try and fail again and again and again, the answers come in the middle of the doing. And new and better and clearer answers come all the time. I still don’t know what the ultimate answer will be for me but I know that in the second half of this blog experiment more will happen than I can begin to imagine in this moment.

What I am holding onto, right now, is the quote by Thoreau that I have long loved…

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

I am advancing confidently in the direction of my dreams. I need do nothing more than this.