A lesson in showing up when you're shut down.

An art retreat review!

Liberating poetic play! Join me live on Sunday, July 7th, 10:30am-12:30pm central for “Ekphrastic Fantastic: Poetry with the art of Remedios Varo”, hosted on the Vision Train Zoom, FREE!

I did not feel artsy, energized or inspired during my retreat. At all.

Being both perimenopausal & premenstrual during the full Capricorn moon kicked me in all my astrological houses. (BIG SOLSTICE ENERGY! 🫠)

But!

My week was still a success. Why? Because I did a lot of careful preparation and boundary work and set intentions and had accountabil-a-buddies —

And I showed up for myself every day.

Do you have these days at the easel or on the page? You’re staring at your work-in-progress and you feel distracted and uncertain, antsy, defeated. Sometimes this is when you absolutely ruin the project. You make a mark and you realize while you’re putting it down that you are dancing with the devil and will live to regret working like this but you do it anyway? Or you just get sloppy and one way or another start making choices that take ages to roll back from?

I think most of the appeal of working digitally is freedom from this inner torture. UNDO! UNDO! UNDO! UNDO! Oh, the sweet relief of working in layers! Duplicate projects so you can trash one! Heaven! My cortisol is plummeting!

(Perhaps you’ve taken my Procreate class & also experience this inner peace?🌈)

But, here’s the deal: Life is fucking uncomfortable all the time! If that stopped me from showing up for my art, I wouldn’t be here talking to you today and you wouldn’t really care what I had to say.

We could focus on chores or dying or whatever and leave art for the robots to churn out… But once they finally gain general consciousness, I suspect they’ll be in the same boat, so we might as well all figure out how to art through the discomfort.

Here’s what worked, what didn’t, what I made and what kept me going during my roll-your-own retreat:

• The best thing I did for myself was to not get too attached to what I “should” be doing. I envisioned my long table flowing over with sketch pads and loose ecstatic scribbles, but it turned out that wasn’t who I was last week. So I let it go and followed one impulse to the next. When I stalled out, I let myself just sit and stare at my work. A surprising amount of work gets done in that headspace!

• The worst thing I did wasn’t really bad— but next time I won’t book a trip for the tail end of my retreat. I tossed a full day of art-making because I needed to pack for camping and run last minute errands and get our house un-fucked for our lovely cat sitter (We love you, Tori! Sigil says, “MEOW!!!!!!!”). So, noted: Don’t split up a mini retreat with travel.

What I listened to, watched & read:

• Whoever said, “garbage in, garbage out” clearly hasn’t enjoyed paranormal erotica audiobooks while they work. I’m here to tell you that I have listened to hundreds of hours of Laurell K. Hamilton while animating, painting, drawing and that shit soothes & focuses the mind like nothing else.

• At night, we watched so many great films on Kanopy (I’m obsessed):

• On-Gaku: Our Sound, 2019 (The pacing, the unique rotoscoping, the storytelling all felt fresh and surprising…)

• Blind Willow Sleeping Woman, 2022 (Another interesting blend of animation styles made by a team who has clearly paid very close attention to the strange and beautiful nuances of behavior…)

• Islamic Art: Mirror of the Invisible World, 2011 (This beautiful one taught us more about world history than the entirety of high school and is, mysteriously, narrated by Susan Sarandon…)

• Salvador Dalí: In Search of Immortality, 2018 (Kanopy has so many amazing films about the lives of artists. This was an excellent art history dive after which we were both saying “Gaaaaala….Gaaaala!”…)

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xo,