Painting as food for the word

Feeling stuck

I was posting here fairly regularly, complete with artwork. I was also painting everyday. Then my sister came to visit for a few weeks, and I had several deadlines. My practice of starting everyday by painting suffered. First it was a day, then a week, then a month. I didn’t stop painting completely since I was working on a project that required it, but I lost the practice of starting my day in a creative space.

Thinking of things to say became more challenging. For blog posts, facebook status, and twitter. I found myself sinking more deeply into silence. Yesterday I resorted to asking what to write about on twitter. I got some good ideas, but the well was still dry. Words were not flowing.

Painting is food for my writing

Writing is hard. Paint flows. Yet I find myself spending most of my days writing (or trying to), and not giving myself the space to paint or do other visually creative things. I still fight the inner demons that judge the visual work as not really working, or just playing. Despite the art degree, selling work, and other marks of ‘real’ artists.

I know the words flow easier for me when I start with the visual. My whole company specializes in the power of visuals to facilitate conversations and insights. Yet I don’t consistently allow myself to do it. I still battle the inner demons, the messages from other times, people, and places.

Recommitting to the practice of painting

I know I am more creative in everything when I avoid email and start the day with painting. This is my public committment to returning to the daily practice of putting the brush to the page. Its not about creating great art, but rather creating great creative space. Sending the universe the message that the creative is priority. So I begin with day one of returning to the paint.

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Exploring with images

A few weeks back I was complaining to Naomi Dunford from IttyBiz that I had reached a stage in my life where I was just middle aged frumpy, with no online persona or presence. Dull, boring. Wondering how I was ever going to add video or get any of the spark I know how to create offline through facilitating experiences. (In case you are wondering, she suggested audio so you don’t have to look at me).

Shortly afterward I was having coffee with a colleague. She was telling me about thinking about me as she read the chapter about the explorer brand in the book, The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes . When she mentioned explorer, I realized it was so central to who I am and what I do that I couldn’t even see it. She reminded me perhaps there were parts I was forgetting about.

Now that I think about it, most of my prior businesses have had an explorer aspect to them. My first retail store was Quests End, a later one was Four Winds (bookstore specializing in healing, inspiration, and celebration). I created Soft Sculpture Environments (underwater scenes). My artwork often has themes of roots, doorways, passages.

It’s hard to imagine fully expressing the power of images through strictly audio. I figured I better start creating images to go with what I might want to talk about. That is how this new series of images and framing metaphor was born. This is the first image, the overview. I see it as describing the many paths we can take to explore the world. There are so many paths, it can be overwhelming if you don’t pick things to focus on.

I’m working on a small deck of images to be used in conjunction with a series of workbooks. I’m starting with these three areas; exploring me, my life, and my business. I can’t tell you all the details yet, since the images come first for me. I have been painting and capturing the visuals. I’m just starting to work on the words.

The Explorer Metaphor

I’ve been asking friends to help me explore the metaphor of exploration. I’m just fascinated by what they’re telling me.  There has been a lot of talk about preparation. At first this surprised me, but as I thought about it, I realized it’s as big a part as the adventure itself. I’ve started to organize the various aspects of being an explorer into categories. I see a correlation to the three focus areas.

Exploring Me

• Qualities of explorers
• What motivates us to quest?
• Who do we hang out with?

Exploring My Life What it takes to prepare for a journey.

• How are we traveling?
• Who is going with us?
• What are we bringing with us?
• What do we want to bring back?
• What knowledge is required?

Exploring my Business How do we share what we have learned with the world?

• What gifts have we  returned with that can be shared with others?
• How can we make the world a better place?
• How have we been changed?
• How can we guide others?

What else do you think about around Exploration and Explorers?

I’m gathering all sorts of ideas about explorers. Got any to share?

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Living with a packrat

Havi Brooks teaches a metaphor shifting technique where you take something that bugs you and transform it into something you can work with. It has been really helpful in thinking about business stuff, so I thought, why not, lets try it for my husband.

I’m married to an engineer who is beyond packrat. Packratus Magnimus. I moved into his house/office when we got married, which was floor to ceiling electronic gear.  People say I ‘knew’ what I was getting into. But honestly, I thought I was going to change him, I mean really, why would anyone want to live like that?

I’m not exactly a neat freak. I did underestimate how challenging it would be to share space with someone who saw space so differently. I spent the early years trying everything I could think of. Negotiating, whining. bitching, pleading, rationalizing. He did change, a lot. We rented half a duplex across the street where he moved his office, some of the electronic test equipment went to the shed, he brought a whole bunch of things to his airplane hanger (don’t ask- airplanes in pieces and stashes of stuff). There is still more than is comfortable for me. All the storage is packed full. There isn’t space to stage the day to day flow of things that come in and out.

Converting Packratus Magnimus to Super Squirrel

Accepting I am married to someone who loves being surrounded floor to ceiling with electronic gear was the start. No, actually, he adores it. Full immersion, surrounded with bits of flotsam that can be combined in a myriad of ways to create new things. He’s an inventor, and he really can take a couple of tin cans, pieces of wire, and a pile of those little parts and make something amazing. He talks about thinking like an electron. Yea, and electrons are surrounded by electronics.

It’s his creativity. I started having more compassion. I never thought about creativity in the form of these kind of things. I knew he was a designer, and there was some place of overlap between the artist in me and the engineer in him. Took me a while to make the connection that he thinks the things he works with are beautiful like I think about paint, beads, and Apple computers.

When I looked closer, I started to realize that what I thought was just heaps of random stuff, actually had order to it. Things were carefully lined up and stacked. I started noticing that no matter how much stuff I piled up to go ’somewhere’, it would disappear. I know he wasn’t getting rid of it. The space isn’t that big, and only a certain percentage of it was going to the hangar. I started notice he was like a squirrel with nuts, and he can fit an amazing number of nuts into a space.

So starting with my original thought of husband as Packratus Maginmus, I began to list my associations. When I thought of Packratus Magnimus, I thought about overwhelming, overstuffed, fear, scarcity, impossible to clean, tension, battles, over-attachment to stuff and a really ugly Lazy Boy recliner.

Looking for a new metaphor, I remembered the squirrel. Yes, they can be pesty when they eat all the food out of the bird feeders, but basically they are kind of cute. The fluffy tail instead of the skinny rat tail helps. Squirrels are really good at storing things for the winter, and fitting an incredible amount of stuff into a small space. They have quite a bit of energy to scamper about.

Yes, husband as Super Squirrel.

Putting Super Squirrel to work

I’ve been working on a major decluttering and excavation of my office/studio. Through this process, I have come to a deeper understanding of where the places are I get stuck. The first one is not having a place to just empty out a room and then move stuff back in. It’s like a slide puzzle, and there is a stage when everything is ripped apart and I need to see new ways to configuring where I shut down. There is just too much.

Super Squirrel to the rescue. Not only can he spin things in three dimensions in his head, he can tell if things are going to fit in  particular configurations just by looking at them. So, when I got stuck, I was able to ask him to help me by telling me about several ways I could move things around. He even made me a little map on graph paper with cutouts of the furniture so I could play with the ideas. When I decided, he helped move them. And didn’t say anything when I changed a few of them after seeing how they felt in the space since it is about more than actually fitting for me.

Another big place I get stuck is what to do with all the stuff that isn’t trash or treasure. Where I have to decide to keep it or get rid of it. The vast majority of stuff fits into this category for me, the trash and treasures are fairly easy. This whole category of stuff in the middle does not exist for Super Squirrel. There is only trash (a tiny amount of things) and NUTS, which are all treasures. Because if there is any slight doubt that there may be value someday for any reason, it is a treasure to be stored.

When I get to the point where the whole floor is covered with things I don’t know for sure what to do with, I discovered I can call in the Super Squirrel and he can tell me multiple ways to compact and store it, using just what I have in the room. Very handy when my sister is on her way to visit and the room is still a mess.

I’m sure I will discover more ways to utilize the Super Squirrel. Its much better to work with the strengths rather than trying to contain/change/battle Packratus Magnimus. He is so much happier when he can help me, and when his behavior makes me happy instead of irritating me. Good all around; for me, for him and most important for our marriage.

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Learning about relaxing

I’m not great at relaxing. Ok, everyone who knows me in face to face life, stop laughing. Maybe its slightly an understatement. Last week I kept biting inside my cheek. I complained about it on Twitter. The always very wise Kate Foy responded with the suggestion that I should get a massage since I was stressed. If the colleague in Australia can see by my tweets that I am stressed, I figured I needed to pay attention.

It was my wedding anniversary last week, so we headed down to Yachats on the Oregon Coast. The night before, we found the Overleaf Lodge and Spa on the web. We couldn’t get massage appointments at the last minute, but it was on the waterfront and had a pool of hot water overlooking the ocean, so we headed down.

Starting to relax

I love the sound of the surf. The area where we visited had waves crashing on rocks. We sat in the spa watching the sun go down over the water. I started to relax. After I got back to our room, I went over to open the window to hear the waves better and shut my finger in the slider. Black stripe on fingernail within moments.

I started to wonder about the relaxation thing.

I decided to relax in front of the fireplace listening to the surf anyway. It was really lovely. I woke up relaxed, and promptly walked into a chair. Kicked it very hard. Lie on the floor moaning hard. Now I have a very black toe to match the stripe on my fingernail.

Now I’m really wondering about this relaxing thing.

When I don’t relax regularly, and then I do, its like suddenly finding myself in someone elses body. I lose sense of where am in space. And I often find the result painful. Its a classic catch-22. Need to relax really bad, relax and damage body parts. I’ve got to find a better way, which probably involves relaxing regularly. I’ve been pretty good about making time for exercise. So carving out more time to do less is a bit counter intuitive, but I’m seeing it needs to be part of this redesigning the day to day life and business.

Not sure when I’m going to have time to get work done with all this taking care of various parts of self. I recognize in theory, I should be way more efficient when I am actually working if I have balance in my life. I’m still skeptical, but I’m continuing the experiment.

The Turducken

We have a local health food supermarket, New Seasons Market where we do most of our shopping. They have special organic and free range meats for the holidays. I noticed something called a turducken on the list of options over a year ago, but they were sold out. I was curious, just what was this turkey-duck-chicken thing?

It was expensive for a turkey at $4.99 a pound. Next holiday, it was sold out again. Which made me wonder more. Just what made this thing worth so much, and why did so many people want them? So this year, I got online and ordered one early before they sold out.

Just before Christmas we went to pick it up, not really knowing what we were getting. We had a number of interesting discussions around just how did they get a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey? We asked our friends and family. No one knew, but there was curiosity. And we had to promise to tell the story of what we discovered. So here it is, our nine hour day in a two and a half minute video. (It’s the first one we’ve done on Camtasia, so we still need to learn about getting good audio. There is also the part where the cat is biting the microphone….)

Holiday wishes

All the best to you and yours for your celebration of choice. We’re grateful for the journey we share and the myriad of ways our lives intersect. We look forward to the crossing of our paths in the future.

Christine and Tom

The intersection of photos, data, and story

Recently I was in San Fransisco for a day, and stopped by the Museum of African Diaspora (MoAD). There was a show of photographs of families and their food.

Hungry Planet: What the World Eats organized by COPIA, The American Center for Wine, Food & the Arts. This fascinating photo essay documenting 30 families from 24 countries provides a thought-provoking analysis of worldwide food consumption. Long known for their coverage of international feature stories and books on world culture, science, and the environment, photojournalist Peter Menzel and writer Faith D’Aluisio investigated food and eating habits around the world, documenting a fascinating exploration of comparative world nutrition. For their study, Menzel and D’Aluisio spent time with typical families in each country, discussing their eating habits, calculating a week’s worth of food purchases, and accompanying families to the market place to document local customs and traditions.

I started looking at each family and reading short narratives about each of them. These were displayed along with a list of their food for a week and how much it cost. After a few I was totally engaged. For several reasons:

• the composition of each family was so different
• you could see a relationship between how people looked and what they ate
• there was a huge disparity between families in various countries
• there was a lot of junk food, especially soda

Then I got to thinking about the logistics of putting a show like this together. As a photographer I started looking at the quality of the images and lighting. Neither food nor people are easy to photograph, and here were incredible images of both. The images were enhanced by the narratives and well as the data. All of the elements combined to tell a story that unfolded across the globe as you walked through the exhibit.

It was a near perfect juxtaposition of communication vehicles. Even video would not have conveyed it better, since you needed to stand and contemplate each image to begin to notice all the details.

The book that goes along with the exhibit takes it to another level. There are more photos of the families, their context, stories, and more facts about the countries they live in. It’s incredibly compelling, and a great example of how image, data and story together can communicate in a way none of them individually can achieve.

The Museum of African Diaspora is at 685 Mission Street, San Francisco. The exhibit will be there until January 20, 2008. You can see other places the exhibit will appear, or arrange for it to visit your area here.

Other side effects of blogging.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the unexpected aspects of blogging. At that point, I was talking about the challenge of seeing myself as a writer, and the benefit of how blogging shifts and clarifies my thinking.

Where is the time to implement all these new ideas?
The practice of writing has given me insight into places in my business practices that aren’t as clear as they should be. It has been a catalyst for strategic re-evaluation. All this clarity is great, but how am I going to find the time in the day to implement this new found clarity. It’s like coming home from a powerful workshop or conference bursting with inspiration only to be greeted with the pile up of email, voice and snail mail (not to mention what can happen to the house).

I need to find a way to structure space. I can’t keep cramming new things into an already full space, whether it be physical, emotional, intellectual, or simply the hours in a day.

What will I stop, start, and continue?
How will I decide?
How will I gain support for those decisions from those around me

Read more..

Unexpected aspects of blogging

I thought about blogging for quite a while.

But I’m not a writer.

The first big barrier to get over was the voice of the evil English teacher in college. Mind you I do not remember the person’s name, or even if it was a man or woman. What I do remember is sitting in class during the second week after turning in our first assignment. The professor handed me the paper with a big red C- on it and said something in a loud voice in front of the whole class about my having absolutely no talent for writing and was lucky to have any credit for the assignment at all. I walked out, dropped the class, and avoided writing for almost 20 years until I went to graduate school. Avoiding writing wasn’t even necessarily conscious, it was like touching a hot stove and just learning not to do that again.

Read more..

Craft in America

I watched the new PBS series on Craft in America the other night. Since my first degree is in textiles, I spent a number of years living in the world of craft. I did exhibits and craft shows, and made stuff. Some of my favorite work was the underwater scenes I made out of painted and stitched fabrics. Anyway, because I spent a number of years immersed in the world of fine craft, I have met many of the people who were featured in the series. It was fun to see what has happened to people in the last twenty years. Read more..