I was upgrading my Vimeo account this morning and came across this Staff Pick called “What Comes After Religion” by Jonathan Hodgson. It’s thought-provoking and beautifully made and addresses (in just three minutes) questions about the human need for spirituality in the absence of formal religion – and the way art plays an integral part. I thought it was worth sharing. Comments?
WHAT COMES AFTER RELIGION from Jonathan Hodgson on Vimeo.
OK, back to work – is it Friday yet?
I just returned an hour ago from beautiful Whidbey Island near Seattle, WA, where I spent a week teaching and learning with Joanna Powell Colbert at the Gaian Soul Retreat – thank you, Joanna , from the bottom of my heart for this reflective time in such an incredible space at Aldermarsh Retreat Center. There was virtually no Internet or email and I was totally awed by huge trees, twenty amazing women, and the singing of frogs in the marsh.
I’ll have more to say about it as last week gets processed in my overwhelmed brain, but one of the most amazing experiences was walking along the beach on Useless Bay on Friday morning. There were crows and gulls and wind and chill and solitude, and in the not-so-far distance was Canada.
There’s so much more to talk about and think about, but right now I’m excited about being home and back at the Studio.
I’m especially happy to welcome Monika Astara back this Saturday the 28th! There are spaces left in her Inspired Dressing workshop and I hope you’ll email me to let me know you’ll join us – here are the details.
Monika Astara, highly-followed fiber artist and clothing designer from Austin, will be bringing her incredible wearable art to Lyn Belisle Studio for a trunk show on Saturday, March 28th, from 1:30-5:30. Many of you love to wear her designs, and now you can browse in a comfortable environment with friends and refreshments and no crowds.
But there’s more! Monika is teaching a private workshop called “Spirited Dressing” on that Saturday morning from 10:30 until 12:30. She will work with each attendee personally to show how colors, layers, styles, textures can make our soul sing and give us confidence and joy. Monika has worked for over a decade helping her clients, and says, “If we get supported and strengthened by what we wear, we stand up straighter, our voice gets stronger, yet more pleasant, we feel good about ourselves and we literally radiate from the inside out. People respond to us differently. Our days are brighter and easier.”
Attendance at the private workshop is limited to ten participants. (note – there are six spots left at this writing) Tuition is $50 a person, and that can be applied as a rebate when you purchase $200 in clothing. You’ll get first pick of Monika’s designs before the sale starts at 1:30. And you will enjoy a light brunch and camaraderie with the group at Lyn’s comfortable studio. To reserve your spot and be among the ten participants, email Lyn: lyn@lynbelisle.com
This sounds especially good – Monika also says, “Prices at private shows are about 25% – 35 % below retail and I will also have a sample sale rack with wholesale prices and below.” Well, yay!
Monika’s looking forward to seeing you all on March 28th. And I’m excited, too! Please forward this to friends who appreciate wearable art.
Today’s Friday Freebie is a wonderful little metal “chop” – a steel stamp of the Chinese ideogram for the word “understanding.” When I ordered several of these little chops because I liked the design, I took the concept for granted, figuring I totally understood what understanding means. But it got me to thinking – what is “understanding,” anyway?
The first definition of understanding is “a mental grasp, a comprehension.” Easy. But, whoa, read on – understanding is also defined as, “a willingness to understand people’s behavior and forgive them.” That’s HUGE. First you have to be willing to “understand” a person’s behavior (which sometimes seems quite impossible), and then you have to be able to empathize enough to forgive them. Yikes.
I always equated understanding with comprehension – like, “I understand some Spanish but I can’t speak it”. Understanding someone’s actions and why they do what they do is a lot more complicated. From now on, when I use this little “understanding” chop on a clay piece or in an encaustic collage, it will remind me of that deeper, more compassionate meaning of the word. And I’ll try to be more understanding.
If you are a SHARDS subscriber by midnight on Sunday, you will have a chance to win this little chop – and if all this rambling seems a little too philosophical, I hope you will understand and forgive me. 🙂 TGIF, Y’all.
Where do art ideas come from? Darned if I know – Here’s a piece that invented itself from 12 clay face slabs I made last week just because I didn’t want to throw away too-dry clay. The piece is called “Dissolution of Remembrance” because forgetting the names of objects and misplacing small items worries me, and I know I’m not alone in that.
I used these unplanned clay pieces to address this worry through an art piece. I arranged the fired earthenware slabs in an almost irregular pattern on a 24×30″ canvas, then sewed and adhered them in place. First came a wash of walnut ink (of course). Then I added some red oxide acrylic paint – here’s what it looked like at that stage – kinda disjointed.
I tried to make it more cohesive with various colors of paint, attempting to suggest a progression of memory loss, and finally got the idea of putting rusted wire inside each head – it didn’t really work. Suddenly, I remembered talking about cheesecloth in my last post, and added a layer of cheesecloth over the whole composition to unite the elements. That was a good decision.
After that, there was lots of action going on with matte medium and fabric stiffener. Next came a thin coat of encaustic wax. Finally I added branches to allude to the branching dendrites in the brain. Science occasionally comes in handy 🙂
The last element, silk cocoons, was another accident – the plastic bag of cocoons was open on the table nearby and the silk kept catching on the branches – well, duh – how obvious was that? So, on they went. Symbols of hatching new thoughts?
I’m not sure “The Dissolution of Remembrance” is completely finished, but it’s been amazing to watch the process as both the maker and the observer. Now if I could just remember where I put it – – – only kidding. I think. 
My friend Susie Monday is an amazing artist. She inspires me, and so many other people, in our work and in our lives. Here is part of her Artists Statement – see if it doesn’t resonate with you, as well:
“My textile paintings tell the spiritual and metaphysical stories that unfold in my life and in the lives I observe of women around me. My goddesses, saints and angels are less about religion than they are about everyday occurrences: our hopes, dreams, frustrations, foundations and the resources we call upon in the secret spaces of the heart.”
Yesterday, I stopped by the University Presbyterian Church near Trinity University where Susie’s textile collages grace the gallery in the Education Center. It is a visual treat to see so much of her richly symbolic color-splashed work in one place – here are some photos from the exhibition. I hope you get by to see it this month. The show will be up until the first of March. Thanks, Susie, for the joy your bring to our lives!
I shoulda posted yesterday’s Friday Freebie (the Shish-ka-barbie dolls, which you can win if you’re a subscriber by midnight Sunday) but I forgot – darn. OK, yet *another* New Year’s Resolution: start keeping a daily a “To-Do” list and follow it!!
While looking for ways to remember stuff better, I found out that Leonardo da Vinci wrote To-Do lists! And they are very cool – nothing like “post to blog” or “stop by HEB.”
Nope, his were more like, “obtain a skull, to get books on anatomy bound, observe the holes in the substance of the brain, describe the tongue of the woodpecker and the jaw of a crocodile, and give the measurement of a dead man using his finger as a unit.” And he illustrated his To-Do lists, meticulously and beautifully:
You can read more about his To-Do lists on Open Culture. I love this site – it’s so worth exploring, lots of free courses and images and ideas, but make sure you don’t go down the Rabbit Hole of fascinating links and end up like I did, watching a free 1934 B Western John Wayne movie from their archives called The Lawless Frontier. (Don’t click that link – you’ve been warned).
I’ll announce the Friday Freebie winner on Monday – I’m putting it on my To-Do list. Happy 2105, everyone!
(Note to self – rewrite resume . . . . . . . . . . .)
OK, so I’m rather taken with cats. Or taken by cats. Whatever. But some of the most enjoyable small art pieces I’ve done lately are cat spirit figures – sorta like Spirit Dolls with cat heads. As part of this, I’ve been informally researching cats in mythology – they have been around a long time and have always been considered pretty weird and magical. For example, did you know that Ceridwen, the Welsh goddess of wisdom, was attended by white cats who carried out her orders on Earth? Or that, in Islam tradition, dogs are considered unclean, but cats – who frequently bury their own waste and rarely eat another animal’s feces – are not. I like that “rarely” part – I mean, a cat’s gonna do what a cat’s gonna do.
My new favorite cat story is about Freya, the Norse goddess of love and fertility and the wife of Odr (who disappeared right after they got married, but that’s another story). She rode in a chariot pulled by two Norwegian Forest Cats or Skogkatts. Here’s the photo to prove it, taken on the spot – 
and the cats look pretty happy about the whole idea. No wonder it’s a myth.
I loved the idea of Freya’s cats, though, and my latest piece is called just that, Freya’s Cat. This is a powerful cat, rough-and-ready, able to pull chariots, leap tall buildings, or row boats (should Freya want to travel across a Fjord). This guy carries around a bunch of protective charms, just in case. I think he’s a pretty cool cat. Nice kitty!
“Freya’s Cat” – Mixed Media Assemblage – Lyn Belisle – 2014
“Freya’s Cat” (detail)
It’s hard to explain how it feels when the parts take over and show you where they need to go – sounds kind of weird. But I just finished a Shardian assemblage that did just that. This figurative piece had never existed before, so there were no directions, but the pieces fit together so smoothly that every piece that was put in place felt exactly right. I love it when that happens! Hmmm . . .this piece started right after my visit to Papa Jim’s . . . (hearing theme from Twilight Zone) . . .
I am one lucky artist – yesterday’s opening at the SA Art League was exciting. Miguel Cortinas, fellow painter in the exhibit, did a beautiful job of hanging the show, and the pottery pieces by Eloise Stoker and Nancy Pawel complimented the paintings and mixed media works. The whole occasion made me feel like a real grown-up painter! Thanks to everyone who came out – and here’s a video of me trying to explain some of the work. There seem to be a lot more questions than answers. I guess that’s how the old art game works sometimes.
PS – Congrats to Dinah Robinson, winner of the Friendship Bridge Friday Freebie!
Making art for an audience is tricky, and it brings out my Creeping Cowardly Conformity. I’m discovering that as I finish up a series of small collages on canvas that will be included in the San Antonio Art League show which opens Sunday, Nov. 2nd. The Art League is a venerable organization with lots of Real Painters, and being invited to participate is rather intimidating. Here is one of my pieces in a five-part series called “Copper Koan.” Like a lot of my work, it deals with the concept of shards and fragments of incomplete stories. A “koan” is a paradox to be meditated upon, and it seemed like a fine concept for this series (the series title is also a take-off on “copper coin.”)
“Copper Koan: Wand” Lyn Belisle 2014
This is what it looked like yesterday (below) – I didn’t want to add a little face or any text because I thought that would make it look “too crafty” and “not sophisticated-ly abstract enough.” Arg . . .Creeping Cowardly Conformity makes us compromise. You make like this one better, and that’s super OK, but I kept thinking it looked incomplete and anonymous.
So what the heck – I added the distressed earthenware face and the text fragment on my little Copper Koan, and now that they are there, I’m much happier with the piece. I hope my audience likes it, but we, as artists, gotta remember that we’re driving this Art Bus and if we take directions from our passengers, we’ll get everybody hopelessly lost. That’s MY story and I’m sticking to it!
PS. If you’d like to see the exhibit for yourself, please know that I’d love to have you there to discuss all of this and to see the work of my fellow artists – here’s your invitation! Feel free to share 🙂
