Creating Creating Creating!

Tomorrow is Easter Sunday and I am ready for it! The baskets for the Grandkids are fixed, dinner is organized and we were out buying plants for our garden. Last night was Good Friday Stations of the Cross devised by the youth of our church. It was a powerful experience of Jesus' Last Walk - which is what they called it.

I've been making an almost daily practice of creating a small,watercolor pencil and ink mandala. I finished a mosaic piece and two kilns worth of new beads to make into Spirit/Blessing necklaces. I finished a painting and am nearly done another. Whew! Creative energy feeds on itself. Trying to be creative everyday makes it easier to continue being creative that day and the next and the next. And being creative isn't limited to artwork either. Planting a garden, or planning a menu, making Easter baskets and participating in the creative acts of others all help feed the flame. Next week I'm going to see Caroline Myss, a favorite author of mine, in person! I can't wait! She has helped feed my creative and spiritual flames for many years!

Expressing Artfully

I've just returned from an intensive session of my Expressive Arts Therapy class in Florida! What an experience! I'm revived and enthused! I don't know what to begin working on first so I'm reporting on my reutrn home and then going downstairs to my studio to begin working on some new ideas for a series of artworks I want to call "strange angels." I'm not sure if they will arrive as paintings or mosaics, so stay tuned! While I was in Florida I took with me all of my Spirit/Blessing Bead necklaces. They were very well received! I left with 65 and returned with 7! So I will be removing those I posted on my ETSY site because they have been sold, and posting some new ones ASAP! Thanks to all who did me the honor of buying one!

Off to Florida

I'm going to Sarasota, Florida tomorrow to my second Expressive Arts Therapy Intensive. This is a wonderful program for creative, emotional, psychological and spiritual growth using a variety of art modalities. I've known for a long time that the arts can be revealing both to the artist as well as the viewer, but this program helps this learning for the artist to occur at a rapid pace. I'm hoping to offer this form of self exploration very soon. Even one intensive has helped my creativity blossom incredibly. Stay tuned for further developments.

Long time gone

It's a terrible thing to lose your mind...or your blog! I left it here and couldn't find it when I came back! The dog ate my blog! Oh where, o where has my little blog gone? Well you get the idea. I'm only somewhat technologically adept. But not very. so in the course of human events I lost my blog but now its found so I hope to be back regularly reflecting on life, faith and art glass!

The Dance

Life has a funny way of going in circles. Thirty some years ago I graduated from college as an Art Education major and taught high school students. I tried to share my passion for the creative process with them. Later I became a minister and have spent most of my career up to now as an educator too. I always tried to incorporate art into the educational process as a different way to help people process their faith, but over time I discovered that it wasn’t enough for art to be an add-on. Bit by bit making art had crept back into the forefront of my being. One day a colleague said to me, “If you spent half as much energy on ministry as you do on making beads you would be doing something.” Ah. Well. I must honor the muse. So now I make beads and jewelry and some mosaics and a few paintings and its all prayer. Art is teaching me how to be faithful. Faith, art, and teaching they keep circling round and round informing and completing one another. Sometimes it can make you dizzy! But I love the dance!