Exploring with Images

Visual Food 4: Interesting things from around the web

Jim Denevan Sand Paintings

Here’s some large scale earth drawings that get washed away with the tide. Certainly solves the ‘where do I store all the artwork I’ve accumulated over the years’ problem.

Drawings by Stephanie Bergeron

Here’s a delightful creative project, line drawings that integrate with a shaped book. I particularly like the way Stephanie has integrated the outside edges with the subsequent pages. Wouldn’t it be a great coloring book? (One of the ones for adults that come with really nice colored pencils.  OK, forget the pencils, I’ve got plenty.)

Art inspired by William Morris

I adore William Morris. I had a portrait of him in my high school portfolio. As a textile major in college, I poured over his designs for wallpaper and fabrics. So I was really interested to see what Hllary Pfiefer is doing.

She’s being inspired by the forms in Morris’s work, creating them as jewelry from found objects, and installing them on a 100 square foot wall. If you click over to the Kickstarter site you can see a short video about the piece.

I was also excited to see she is in Portland. I want to see this!

More info about her work can be found hilarypfeifer.com and on her blog hilarypfeifer.blogspot.com

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From the studio: Many roads

In the version above, the images are digitally put together. It’s available from my online gallery in an interesting format called a fotoflōt. The image is printed onto a surface that does not require framing and allows the image to stand by itself without a frame around it.

The images are also available separately as shown below.

I’ve been visually exploring the ideas around many choices, how many roads we have to choose from. I’m not big into regret, I think we do the best we can at the time given what we know. It’s just hard to see where all the roads might lead. In this one I was also thinking about how things look different in the day and night.

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Supporting local farmers

This is my first year purchasing a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)  share. We chose Sun Gold Farm on the recommendation of friends, alignment with their sustainable approach, and convenient local pick up. I wasn’t sure I was going to like it. I enjoy visiting the farmers market and growing my own vegetables, but the idea of someone else deciding what I would eat? Made me nervous.

Each week we get one bag full of veggies. Quite unexpectedly, the surprise aspect has been one of my favorite parts. It has absolutely inspired me to eat more and a wider variety of vegetables than I would chose on my own. I think I can safely say I have eaten more cabbage this summer than in several years past put together. I’ve tried kohlrabi and all sorts of new kinds of cukes and squash.

The thing I have been most fascinated with so far is in bunch in the center of the photo above. It’s fresh garbanzo beans. We got a bunch of stalks with pods all over them. Inside the pod is a green bean. I’d only ever seen them in dried or canned form. They have some crunch to them, and are really tasty. Much better than the ones from the can.

Sun Gold sends a newsletter out each week where I learned most of the garbanzos are grown in hot climates, but they discovered they were able to grow them here by testing growing them from a bag of dried ones from the supermarket. We’ve enjoyed snacking on them like edamame as well as tossing them into salads.

The newsletter tells us what we are most likely to get in the bags for the week. It has stories about the farm and its history. Sometimes a recipe. We’ve started feeling connected to the place even though we have never seen it. We also follow reports on Facebook which talk more about the planting, watering, hay crop, and getting up in the middle of the night to protect the greenhouses.

Discovering any interesting vegetables this summer?

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From the studio: Landscape panels

I’ve been interested in paintings that align to form a larger whole for many years. This is the first in a new series I’ve been working on. Prints of the individual panels are available on my online gallery in a variety of sizes.

Po Bronson on the Crisis of Creativity

On The Harvard Business Review site, Po Bronson talks about the Crisis of Creativity in American Business

One of the things in this video that caught my attention is Po’s point that good managers don’t have to be creative as long as they can recognize and capture the good ideas of others. He identifies a big mistake as a manager who thinks they are the ones who should come up with all the ideas, therefor squelching the creativity in those underneath them.

Facilitating others creativity

I was a facilitator at Penland School of Crafts in the 90′s. It was there that I started to realize that making stuff was not as important to me as helping others access the creative process. I’ve watched thousands of people who identify themselves as artists as well as those who do not, wrestle with their creative anxiety. It’s powerful stuff. It touches the place of feeling like you are not enough.

Po’s call to managers is just the first step. Those managers also need to be aware of the behaviors that squelch creativity in the workplace. Things like performance management systems that only reward narrowly defined outcomes. The lack of effective conflict systems that result in people just keeping their mouths shut. People meeting each others differences with judgment rather than curiosity.These things are why we developed the VisualsSpeak Building Great Teams miniset.  I want to offer tools to help people clear up the things that get in the way of creativity.

What do you do to foster creativity in those around you?

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Stories from Africa

Part 1: Sending Visual Tools to Africa
Part 2: Adjusting images for Africa

Part 3: Safe Passage to Motherhood 2010

The Safe Passage to Motherhood (SPM) team were met at the airport by Emily when they arrived in Kenya. Emily acted as a translator during training, and takes responsibility for much of the communication between Bware and Portland, OR. Annie is a midwifery student, and the boys are Maggie and Mari’s teens. Mari is a physician assistant and Maggie is a nurse midwife.

In Kenya with specific goals

The team was in Kenya to assess the results of the training they started the year before. They identified specific things to look at while they were there.

• Assess the number of communities and participants trained,
• Assess the quality of the ongoing training as they cascade down to more
  and more women
• Set mechanisms in place to track health outcomes in trained communities
• Understand barriers and challenges
• Determine ways to support the sustainability of the program
• Strengthen ties between youth and women leaders
• Increase the emphasis on education and prevention starting with the young and
  extending through child-bearing years

Beginning to gather data

The Home Based Life  Saving Skills (HBLSS) program includes keeping detailed records of training and births. The SPM team was thrilled to find that their contacts had kept detailed notes and tracked their progress.

On the wall behind Mari and Emily is a pyramid chart. Each trainer filled in information about how many people attended their training each month.

When the numbers were added up, there were 10,000 people who had heard about how to identify signs that a woman needed help birthing. With proper training, skilled attendants can recognize problems early and can intervene directly or stabilize the condition and help the patient reach specialized care.

One woman started spreading the word in 2009 by training 15 people. One year later, those 15 have reached 10,000 people.

Understanding Barriers and Challenges

Safe Passage to Motherhood is committed to working with the people in Bware to help them solve their own challenges. The process includes listening to stories of what they are already doing, identifying resources they can utilize or reassign, and partnering to learn skills that can make a difference. The organization here in the US operates on a shoestring, and the trainers are volunteering their time and medical skills. This is grassroots. People sharing knowledge to help one another.

There are real challenges to spreading the work. Money to get SPM trainers there, money to pay for supplies and transportation in Kenya, money to pay for the medical supplies. At the same time, the groups have been incredibly resourceful in how they spend the small amounts they do have. The goal is always to think about the sustainability of the approach.

What are the problems?

The first step to looking at  barriers and  challenges was to make a comprehensive list of things that had come up in the last year. Seventeen items were identified, the Kenyans picked the top five as the most important.

1. Transport
2. Umbrellas, rain boots, shoes
3. Bag for carrying materials
4. Money for transportation
5. Badges and uniforms

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6. Sickness
7. Work at home
8. No money for help
9. Food for trainers
10. Trainees being late
11. Equipment
12. Vacation from work
13. Cultural beliefs,
14. Different ages and belief systems
15. No light at night
16. New people at repeat trainings
17. Distance

Understanding more fully what this means

We created a set of VisualsSpeak images to be used specifically to deepen understanding of these challenges. The more the SPM team knew about what people meant when they said these things, the more effective they would be helping them come up with solutions.

Before they left for Kenya, I had a number of conversations with Mari about what prompt to use. She decided to use:

Find pictures that speak about a time you have succeeded at a challenge as a member of BUCHWA (the community health group that does the HBLSS training.)

What happened?

There was no hesitation with the VisualsSpeak process. The Kenyans were very comfortable with the images and process. There was no learning curve. Maggie reported,  “They are very metaphoric, it was like they had drawn the images themselves. We had no difficulty.”

Many of the stories that emerged were less about the challenges, and more about the empowerment. Stories about being lonely and only affecting their homes before learning all the skills, and now being a part of something bigger. Making a difference. Being someone.

Hierarchy is a large part of Kenyan culture. This is a poor rural village. There are not a lot of opportunities for women. The SPM team knew this, but until they heard all the stories, they didn’t realize how huge this was for the group. The uniforms and badges the Kenyans found so important? Very much about being part of, being someone special, being someone with knowledge.

The fifteen Bware United Community Health Workers Association (BUCHWA) members have shared information with 10.000 people. What has happened to them as a result of learning how to help others save the lives of women and babies may be even more profound.

Next up: More stories (and results) from Africa

Coming soon.

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Dr. Brene Brown on Vulnerability

Brene Brown researches emotion. In this video,  Brene makes a series of seemingly simple statements that are  profound when you take a moment to reflect on them.

Seeking extraordinary

One section of the video that I find myself continuing to think about talks about what we seek.

We live in a culture where we are not enough…..Ordinary is meaningless…. We miss important things in life looking for extraordinary… Ordinary is where we find joy.

I’m turning 50 in a few weeks, and I always thought I’d have a different level of success by the time I got here. As I reflect though, it’s only if I use economic measures that I feel a sense of not measuring up. If I look at what is really important to me, helping others make an impact, the equation shifts into a much rosier picture.

Filling the well

Brene makes a few recommendations.

Practice Gratitude. Be thankful for what we have. Know what you have.

Honor the Ordinary. Compete with the images of negativity. Counter with what is joyful. Family…. nature

These seemingly simple practices build the reservoir of resiliency that we need when we encounter the difficulties that are part of life.

Shifting sense of importance

It’s easy to find images and others who have “more”. There is always “proof” of not being enough. Yet, the people I see who have a core of happiness, a fundamental aura of satisfaction, are those who put the comparisons aside. Life is a series of choices. We make some better than others. If I can embrace the learning process, and find a place of gratitude in my experiences, I can build more ease into my life. Become more present in the moment.

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Visual Food 3

Ultimate Recycling – Amazing Book Sculptures by Mike Stilkey

This artist paints on the spines of stacked books. Piles from floor to ceiling!

Visual Time Zone Conversion

This makes me SO happy. Visual Time Zone Converter

Visual Interface for Flight Choices

If seeing time zones isn’t enough, now I can see flight choices too. YEA for visuals!

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From the Studio: Three Roads

Adjusting images for Africa

Part 1: Sending Visual Tools to Africa

Part 2: Safe Passage to Motherhood 2010

The goal of using visual tools in Kenya was to encourage people to tell stories of their experience with the Home Based Life Saving Skills course, HBLSS they learned the year before. Maggie Alexander is the nurse midwife who trained the group the previous year. Mari Alexander  is a physician assistant who was on the assessment trip two years before. She is a VisualsSpeak customer who has used the tools in her mental health practice and in her work in diversity and inclusion training. The two of them were joined by their teenage sons and a midwifery student for the 2010 trip.

What images should we use?

The original VisualsSpeak tools are all photographs. While we worked hard to make them diverse, they are still a US designed tool, created for a professional market. We were nervous that rural Kenyans would not be able to relate to them. I’ve been working on new products that incorporate my paintings, and have a deck that we’ve been using in testing those products that we knew worked in the US and Europe.

I’ve also been working on a series of paintings for a storytelling deck. They have broad universal themes, and are the images in my online gallery. I plan to create a storytelling product as well as use these in other new decks.

We didn’t know which to pick, so we decided to send both, but with modifications.

Adding local images

The first deck is a mixture of 24 photographs, 12 illustrations, and 12 abstract paintings. We added 24 photographs Mari and Maggie had from Bware. Most of them were people, but there were also a few of the houses and landscape.

This deck is about the size of playing cards. We made one of those to use with the younger people, but had to enlarge them for working with the adults. We did this because most people do not have reading glasses (other than the gifts the group brings over) so they would have difficulty seeing the details of the images.

Brown is generic not diverse

We felt more confident about the storytelling images for a number of reasons. First, the Kenyans have a storytelling tradition. Second, my style has the flat patterned look of some of the textile work from the region.

When I did the original paintings, I made the people medium brown. As the group looked at them, they felt they were way too light. Especially considering how dark the Kenyans are. They also suggested making them more shades of brown to make the diversity clearer.

I altered many of the people images to be a variety of skin shades. Thanks to the wonders of Photoshop, this wasn’t too difficult. I printed out the images and laminated them. We put them in  zipper pouches handmade by a woman in our town, and sent them off with Maggie and Mari.

Other parts of the story:

Part 1: Sending Visual Tools to Africa

Part 3: Stories from Africa

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