A quote from Elie Weisel author and holocaust survivor came to my attention this week, it was exactly what I needed to hear.
‘The most generous thing you can do is receive everything’ Elie Wiesel
Do you receive everything?
Ideas, compliments, different opinions, criticism, questions, gifts, love, inspiration, attention …?
I learned this week I definitely have more work to do on learning to receive.
This week I have been working on a colouring book. I seem to be incredibly slow at the drawing. Putting in long hours figuring out each one. It is a challenge.
My idea is to find a way to illustrate Alexander Technique concepts with simple line drawings and verse …
Something children will enjoy!
Something that might plant some seeds of good advise and direction to last a lifetime.
Something that if I had owned and loved as a child might have prevented me slumping and putting my back out at the age of 24. This is a ‘gift to the universe’ type project. The kind of project that I hope will make a difference to someone somewhere – a butterfly effect book with transformation within.
A second piece of advise came to me this week – to seek sponsors and patrons.
Again the message about receiving. Ask and receive … Wow a new concept, thinking about that one.
I was told that there are people out there who want to be angels to the arts and help artists realise there dreams, especially ones that improve the world. Maybe you are one of those people? Certainly art patronage has a long tradition historically.
So to the heavy boots …
New seeds in art taking root can feel like being an explorer in a dark cavern …
You have the germ of an idea that is planted in your mind and then the seed starts to push through the ‘mud’ to find its way to the light like a little plant.
The creative act is a seed being born.
If you don’t protect, nourish and cherish the sapling plant heavy boots can trample it without realising. Ideas are a bit like that. We have to be tenacious as artists – sensitive enough to do the work yet strong enough to keep nurturing our art and let it grow. A balance. And not tread on our own ideas with our own heavy boots.
Ideas for The Daily Ease colouring book were emerging this week and I blogged about the process, I was feeling excited like a child. Then someone asked me a perfect legitimate and probably loving question asking for more … I heard it as criticism!
My stuff coming from that child place! The wounded child rather than the creative child emerged and had an internal reaction and so instead of looking at my stuff and turning it around Byron Katie style I reacted and deleted my blog from the page thereby losing the opportunity to respond. I know it is idiotic, but wow I have learned a lot from my daft behaviour of thinking what I had offered wasn’t good enough rather than receiving the comment which was helpful if I had allowed it to be!
That is what Alexander Technique is about, learning to change habitual reactions to give us the chance to make better choices.
My reaction showed me how important this particular art seed is to me, and that this colouring book has growth in it for me as an artist and a human being as well as the potential for growth that I hope to share with the world.
This fact of course must be true for how can it be a genuinely helpful ‘gift to the universe’ if I don’t learn and grow in the process of making it?
So I finish this blog with more ideas for images – seeds and big boots and butterflies!
Back to the drawing board aka garden of creative endeavour …
Oh, and if you have a creative seed remember that with a little light – the is your attention – seeds can grow and thrive. If you think you are not good enough then think of the plants growing out of cracks in the pavement in the most impossible conditions! It is often just our own not good enough habits that stop us from being creative.
Seeds want to find the light.
Thanks for reading.
Forward and up!
Kirsten