Illness

This week I received the gift of getting sick.

For many years I was a left-brained professional organizer. I made a living keeping myself and others on task and productive. Nothing wrong with that. I still use those skills every day.

Then we sold it all and moved to Mexico. Living there was an opportunity to stop and breathe and see all the beauty in the details around me. It's where I picked up a camera again and began making art without a schedule or agenda.

Now that I'm doing my art business full-time, I've been grappling with walking between the right-brain world of artist, and the left-brain world of business owner. I make lists and put things on my schedule that feed my artistic soul, like going to the museum, or having coffee with another artist. I've been calling on my history about what it takes to make a business go to try to make my business go. (Make contacts! Reach at least ten people! Make art every week! Blog!) Again, nothing wrong with all of that. But I saw this week that my focus has been on a linear approach to time and results. As in, if I make ten calls, I'll make $x.

I believe getting sick is a communication from the body. Usually for me, it means slow the hell down. But I really haven't been working that hard. I have however, been feeling lots of guilt when I don't do what I think I should do.

So this week I used getting sick as an opportunity to release guilt and just do what was in front of me to do. If I felt like napping, I napped. If I felt like calling new art buyers, I did. I actually managed to create art this week, reach new art consultants, research and find several exhibition opportunities, and take care of myself. I read four books, took naps, and slept in so I could heal. All this without a list.

Below is an image I shot on my walk with Jake this morning after the rain cleared and the sun came out. I only had my camera with me because I felt moved to bring it.

I still love my lists and my calendar and will continue to use them. But I'm going to keep letting the guilt go and just do what I do, and not do what I don't do. It's what's going to happen anyway.

Edges

I woke up yesterday morning thinking about edges. (I swear this is true. My brain. Usually I wake up thinking about what's for breakfast.)

In honor of Easter, I just reread Christopher Moore's delightfully irreverent "Lamb:  The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal." It's a story about the missing growing up years of Jesus, where he and Biff went to China, Tibet and India to study with spiritual masters of all types. Great read. (And we learn why Jews eat Chinese food on Christmas.)

Somewhere along the line, one of their teachers asks them to consider that their skin is the not the barrier, not the edge between them and the rest of the world, but rather the place where they connect to it. (This is a quote by a famous thinker but I could not for the life of me find it again to credit it or quote it accurately.)

But the idea stuck with me as I've been contemplating the world, our connection to it, oneness, etc. I'm sure you've noticed that Oneness is a more and more common theme in art, music, Facebook posts, etc.

So it was with these ruminations in mind that I made images yesterday at my favorite conservatory/greenhouse here in Seattle. I ended up shooting familiar plants and succulents, but I attempted to approach them with this idea of edges as connection and not as separation.

I'm not sure how this image captures that for me, but I have to say that it does. It's a good inquiry. I'm not done with it yet. In fact I've got some ideas for more. Coming soon ...

What today looks like

Care for a tour of my desk and what I'm working on today? I'm putting the finishing touches of oil pastels on the canvas called "green after image." I printed it for a show last summer and now I'm playing up the patterns and softening the edges with the oils. The whole thing has this very painterly feel now, and other than the row of thorns up the right side, it doesn't look like a photograph at all. And I'm praying the fixative spray I ordered on Amazon gets here by Thursday, because I've promised this and five other pieces to a show that opens Friday. Fingers crossed.

On my monitor you'll see the latest email newsletter I'm getting ready to send out, and some notes in front of me on what I'm including.

I got this wireless mouse recently and I don't know if I'm supposed to get a mouse pad. (Have you noticed that when you get computer equipment nowadays they no longer include paper manuals? And yes, I could look it up online. I will at some point.)  Anyway, the mouse seems to work better on something, so there it sits on the Seattle Art Museum calendar, which is also reminding me to go see the new exhibition.

You can't see the wall to my right where I have a bulletin board with images I like, supportive notes, and my forms and charts and folders I use to keep my actions and projects organized. I haven't been an official professional organizer for about eight years, but I still love creating systems to keep me focused.

And that's what today looks like!

After a two-year absence...

I am back! The more I've posted and shared on Facebook, the less I'd been blogging. But my coach kicked me in the butt about it, and she's right. Facebook provides a better interactivity, but blogging allows for a greater depth of sharing. So I'm happy to be back and share what's been going on. (Hint:  a lot!)

This past December, I wrapped up a part-time job I'd had for four years. It was a great job with a wonderful company, but even though it was part-time, I didn't feel like I had enough energy to really create my art business the way I wanted to. So with my husband's support, I made the leap to making art full-time. I've designed and launched a new web site, created a new action plan which I work from each week, and have made more art in the last two months than I did in the last year. (You can see the very latest at my new site here.)

This is piece I created during my 31 Day Challenge in January. Some folks do 365. For me, one a day for the first month of the new year was enough to get me back in gear. This image was originally shot last October when Raymond and I celebrated our 20 year wedding anniversary in Hawaii. Then I reshot it through textured glass last month.

So that's my quick overview of what's been happening. More next week. Thanks for reading!

winter time and the living's easy

Water has the ability to transform the ordinary into something magical. Snow, ice, or in this case, fog, draped the trees in a little bit of mystery, reducing their color and details and emphasizing their forms.

I still contend that human beings were not designed to manage as many details as we do. That if you consider all of human history, it's only the last few decades in which we've been bombarded with the sheer volume of information we now attempt to process. Perhaps that's why for myself at least, I find simple images in nature so soothing. It's a relief. Quiets the mind. And adding a unifying layer of fog or snow (as I am looking out upon this morning) to an already lovely subject just makes it more simple and serene. That's my theory, and I'm sticking to it.


I pass by these tree trunks every week or two when I walk down to the water's edge. Also the little creek I posted on the page with the my new images on my site. There are also several other foggy morning images.


This final image is one of several I've dug out of my archives, and remixed. Again, the effect I am creating is one that emphasizes the beauty of form by removing color and by amping up the contrast.

Tiny Bubbles...

(Now try and get THAT song out of your head.)

There are wonderful images to be created out in cold, rainy, dreary weather. But sometimes, I just can't get myself to get out in it. (Maybe because I'm calling it dreary? I actually do like the changing weather here.)

Anyway, this week I played indoors with a pan of bubbles, altering the light, the background colors, the angles. The results highlight the forms and shapes in a way that I really enjoy. Hope you do, too. You can see them all at karen ussery latest.

A passel, a slew, a plethora of new images!

What a difference a few weeks can make. Because I am now working with Grand Image, and they have happily claimed a whole bunch of my images (which I have happily granted), my site was looking a little puny. But just because I want to create doesn't always mean I do. Or more accurately, that things turn out the way I envision.

A couple weeks ago I just granted myself some space to go play. (Always easier said than done, right?) But I did just that, and as a result came up with a mess of images that I really am pleased with. Please check 'em on out my site: karenussery.com/latest.

Some are very similar to images I've created in the past, but their familiarity isn't redundancy to me. I'm still delighted with the simple elegance of succulents, especially.

And as I look at other artists' works, I realize that some people beat a subject to death before they're done with it. I don't know why I ever thought I had "enough" of a particular subject. When you really absorb and soak in an image that moves you, you can't get enough of it. I think part of my growth as an artist is to continue to illuminate and then trash these rules that unconsciously pen me in. Watch out.