G2W: 12 (SOOC) Green

I think I could do a whole year of Green.  My favorite color, my whole life is filled with green.  Here are some from a photo adventure taken this weekend...

I will probably do my edit on this one, I think it has potential even if its over exposed.

Thoughts?  Secret code on suburban mailboxes?

I realized my camera was slightly overexposing shots.  So I intentionally underexposed this by one notch.

ABAW:11

I came home one night from work hurting.  Not so much a hard day, it was just a day, with all the typical hard things I have to do, hear and take in.

In one area of my life, I am working on being more open, in touch with my feelings.  As I left work, I remembered sitting in yoga last week, and hearing the teacher say that the area we worked on (hips, I think) could cause a flood of emotions to come to the surface.  I did good work during that class.  I left feeling fine, and although I have felt more vulnerable leaving other classes, I didn't this time.  I realized that it took a week before those feelings came to surface. 

And so I came home and blindly reached for a book to escape from the heaviness and intensity of my feelings.  This one fit just right, as if I was one of the characters doing exactly the same thing.  The book is smooth, descriptive, and luscious, and I slipped easily into the layers of stories, each with happy endings.

I think I need a lot more happy endings.

Scavenger Hunt

Wow, its HARD to keep up with the hunt!  I pulled images from the past few weeks to show, and didn't do too much with edits, only in Lightroom.  And, I didn't even take one of the photos...

Decay:  This used to be a cow path turned into a subway path.  I love capturing images like this.

Groups of three:  From an experiment with art materials.  Three types of medium on a photo, for photo transfer.  It only works so well...once the medium dries, you have to score and peel off the back of the photo, which takes for-ev-er.  But it leaves an image with an interesting texture for art journaling. 

Kitchen:  My kitchen chair, Ikea.

Things that make you go Hmm:  Seriously, what is this?

Me Time:  I didn't take this.  I convinced my husband to take it with his iPhone.  That's me, running!

ABAW:10

Perhaps I should begin with a confession.  I love reality tv.  I rationalize it by saying that after a long, serious day, reality tv is so ridiculous that it helps me to transition home and feel "normal" again.  Its my guilty pleasure.  I'm a Real Housewives, Kardashians, ANTM kinda gal.

I like to keep up with the therapy-esque reality shows like Hoarders, Intervention.  My clients like those shows, and reference them often.  I have clients who refer to Intervention as a reminder to stay sober, or watch it and wonder why no one did that for a family member.  While I realize that reality tv sensationalizes, and is damaging in its own right, I also know that some of these shows are also a source of comfort and education.  There is a whole conversation in there.

So time for confession number two.  I have an odd obsession with Dr. Drew.  Maybe you remember him from Love Line:  I remember driving home late at night, listening to callers asking random questions about sex, bodily functions, and getting lewd jokes from Adam and some answers from Dr. Drew in return.  I wasn't too keen on the program, I don't remember totally why.  Recently, I've been watching shows like Celebrity Rehab and Sex Rehab.  I'm absolutely fascinated.  I love how Dr. Drew works with his patients.  I know, I know, its a tv show and blah blah, but I would give anything to have him be my mentor.  He is so gentle, and just gets it.  I think the clincher for me is that he incorporates art therapy into the show.  They've done everything from making t-shirts with the negative labels we wear written all over them, to full scale throwing paint and plates at canvas while screaming angry statements.  Good stuff. 

So I ordered his book on impulse buy, when I bought my Walking in This World book.  The book itself is not too deep or informative, but I do appreciate how Dr. Drew acknowledges the need to save, which can be a difficult thing to achieve when people are so very ill.  Its not something that we have control over.  Truly, the same can be said for the addiction itself.  I also appreciate that he writes about what we call "transference" and "countertransference".  Transference are feelings that the client wants us to feel; countertransference are the feelings that come up for us, that we need to sort through in order to continue treatment.  I wish more professionals were that honest. 

So that's the deep reading that I've been engaged in over this past week. 

G2W: 11 (Edits) Flower

SOOC

I always forget to throw a little intro in the beginning of my posts to let folks know what I'm doing!  That's totally me, just jumping into a thought with no preparation.

I've been following along with Good to Wow, a online teaching collaboration between Jill Samter Photography and Ashley Sisk of Ramblings and Photos.  Each week, we are given a prompt and two tutorials:  one to improve our straight out of the camera (SOOC) photography and one to improve our editing.  I'm using Photoshop CS3 to do my edits.

Over these past eleven weeks (wow!), I've already learned a lot.  Its almost hard to keep up with the learning, because once I get something down, I realized I have ten more things to learn.  But totally worth it.  This week's suggestion was Flower.  I have a confession:  I rescued this bud out of the trash, and my husband was deeply embarrassed by me.  Too bad, because I feel ridiculously proud of this one.  Besides, it was sticking out all gorgeous and perfectly faded.

And, as testimony that I am actually learning, I didn't have to do too much to my edits.  I downloaded and ran Ashley's action that performs all the clean edits, and tweaked as necessary.  I decreased the image resize, ran the unsharp mask and saved to flikr.  I did mess around with other actions, and did all sorts of gorgeous things, but I'm starting to feel out my "style."   I like things easy and simple, I'm trying for strong colors and rich blacks.  I don't know if I achieve it, but that's what I like.

I went back to last week's tutorial on sun flares, and played around with it.  Edits below!

W/Edits + Sun Flare

W/Edits

G2W: 10 (Edits) Yellow

So very very behind. Here are my quickie edits to two of my yellow images. This won't go down as my best week, but they are done. I wanted to do the Scavenger Hunt but fell short on one or two things. Maybe I'll try to get it posted....

SOOC

w/all the edits, and a resize

SOOC

All the edits

G2W: 11 (SOOC) Flower

Falling so far behind on all my projects!  I claimed that there were no flowers here at all, although my husband pointed out a hundred opportunities that I missed.  Oh well, these turned out simply lovely.

Walking In This World: Week Two and Three

Walking in this World is an online, 12 Week journaling journey, guided by the framework from the book of the same name written by Julia Cameron. 

Week Two:  Proportion

This is the week when we set forward on our journey by re-identifying our identity as Artist and began the process to shift ourselves into that identity.  I re-learned that I have always wanted to be nothing but an artist.  When I was a child, this is how I defined myself; and my family was very supportive of this.  However, none of us knew what to do with it.  I come from a working class family, we set art aside to make ends meet, or we used it to help us do what we needed to get done that we can't afford to buy (make curtains, sew clothes, give presents).  My basic offerings were accepted if they fulfilled a semi-practical function.  And so I continue to struggle with wanting to make things that are relatively functional.

Beyond this, I can't seem to make the leap to the next stage, whatever that may be.  I can't ignore that inner call, but I also can't figure out what to do with it.  Cameron writes "something is telling us to make art.  We must trust that something."  She also states that "when we are ready to transform, transformation will come to us."  Great, but again, what do I do with it?

My favorite exercise in this chapter asked that we write a letter from our adult selves to our inner artist.  Wow, this was an enlightening letter.  I wrote that I put my artist self aside to learn to be a healthy grown up, learning discipline and how to be in control.  I realized that being creative makes me emotionally vulnerable, and forces me to balance and recognize the more intense sides of myself, both joyous and painful.  I think that art making is not actually about making something semi-practical - it is really about keeping my own self balanced while entering into the act of being creative.  Cameron anticipates this and shares:

When we are changing sizes, we feel large, clear, and powerful one day, tiny and defenseless the next.  We feel euphoric and then we feel enraged.  This is good.  This is healthy...If you are panicked, tell yourself, "Ah! Good sign:  I am getting unstuck."

Week Three:  Perspective

I found this chapter a little odd, and struggled to get into it.  I thought that Cameron spent a lot of time talking about how artists are mislabeled "crazy."   This feels like a perpetuation of a misbelief:  an artist designs our clothes, our furnishings, our television shows and movies, our magazines, not to mention the art on our walls.  Maybe I'm naive, but I just don't see artists as "crazy".  And then she debates art making as therapeutic, not therapy but states she does not want to talk about the mental health system.  While I greatly respect most of what is written and I can roll with it, I get the sense that she had a terrible experience with psychiatry and therapy, saying things like "therapy aims at making us normal" and that many therapists "are controlling and intrusive in their premature questioning and direction." 

While I see where she is coming from - and sometimes she is right - I need to say something.  There are therapists, like myself, who don't operate this way.  I wish I could tell her that, on a daily basis, I do "stand knee deep in the rapids of the human condition, accepting that life, by its nature, is turbulent, powerful and mysterious."  I am an art therapist, and I strongly believe that is is possible for art to be both therapeutic and therapy.  Great thinkers who are both therapists and artists have been writing and researching on the topic for many years.  Being a therapist is hard, painful, aching work.  I hold it akin to art making, and sometimes deeper than.  There, I said it.  Since I entered this field, I find art easier to do. 

She also asks us to make a list of 50 things that makes us angry, and challenges us to identify action items from those angry items.  I made a choice not to make this list.  I get the point, but the journaling pages and my perceptions of her attitude towards therapy are stirring up the waters enough for me.  I know exactly what makes me angry; I pride myself on actively changing it on a daily basis.

I'm sorry to be such a lame-o on this one, this chapter just didn't sit with me well.  Maybe I just over think everything!

1. How many days this week did you do your Morning Pages?

Over these past two weeks, I've done my pages every evening except for a shortened version last night because I wasn't feeling well.  One night, I even talked my husband into trying writing!  I enjoy it because it is literally a dumping out of thoughts.  When I wake up in the morning, I am focused on what needs to be accomplished, and by the end of my day, I've done most things on my list.  I just feel more clear and a lot chiller.  Conversely, I am not spending much time on art making.  I don't know why.

2. Did you do your Artist’s Date this week?

Yes. Both weeks I wandered around and took photographs.  And totally lost a ton of awesome ones when transferring my images to my computer.  Boo.

3. Did you do your Weekly Walk?

I've been able to do this also.  Yesterday, my husband and I walked around Jamaica Way Pond and I took a ton of photos.  I'm trying to build in time at work to take walks too!  That is sooo much easier said than done.

February Reverb

On a winter Sunday I go to clear away the snow and green the ground below

April, all an ocean away.  Is this the better way to spend the day? Keeping the winter at bay

What were the words I meant to say before you left?

When I could see your breath lead where you were going to

Maybe I should just let it be and maybe it will all come back to me

During the month of December (and in my typical style, overflowing into January), I followed along with daily prompts through reverb10.  Each prompt was aimed to stimulate your reflection over the past year, and to set goals for the new.  The folks at reverb are sending out monthly prompts to keep the thinking going.   

February's Prompt is:

One month into 2011, what question(s) are you living?   Are there any prompts/questions that arose during #reverb10 that are still resonating in your life?  Are you living new questions?

I realized that even though I followed through all of the daily prompts, I hadn't been quite as specific as I meant to be in setting goals.  I will say that going through the prompts made it possible for me to move firmly into this new year.  And I like the way things are going.  I've set aside a lot of things that were very bothersome during the year, and am more and more focused on now, the present, and me.  With pride, I share that this is the first year of my life (or at least my life in Boston) that I have not felt like I was going to die midway through winter from seasonal depression.  And I am trying on what it means to be an artist and an art therapist while feeling stronger and more centered in my body and thoughts.

I still think about the idea that we each have a Core Story:  this blog has served as a way to start bringing all these lose pieces together and I'm really starting to feel like a more unified, cohesive whole instead of my scattered, jack-of-all-trades, directionless self.

Also Achieve:  I secretly set the goal of having twenty kind readers follow me and when I checked today, I had sixteen.  Sixteen!  You all rock!  Thank you for taking a risk, and a minute on me.  I appreciate it more than I could ever express.

I still think about if I made a mistake about not taking the job.  I worry that I chose the right One Word.  That is just me, I worry.  And finally, I was really taken by the tool, New Years Goal Questions for No Goals Creatives, which ultimately asks what does your best self yearn to do, what is your best self called to do?  I'm still trying to hear the answer to that question.  Maybe if I could get past all the worry and just be.

My question now is:   

How do I incorporate as much art into my life as possible, and how do I share it?  

I am following intuition a lot lately, following signs, taking cues from the universe.  If I can fit it in, I will try to.  But I recognize that I will be taking a new risk soon, and I wonder how to prepare for it, whatever it is!  Thank you for reading and viewing.

 

How I lived a childhood in snow and all my teens in tow, stuffed in strata of clothes

Pale the winter days after dark,  wandering the gray memorial park, a fleeting beating of hearts
What were the words I meant to say before she left?
When I could see her breath lead where she was going to
Maybe I should just let it be and maybe it will all come back to me

January Hymn, the Decemberists

G2W: 10 (SOOC) Yellow

Another week of Good to Wow!  I also just realized that I've been calling it Now to Wow or Shoot and Edit, I don't know why, so many apologies for that.  Our fearless leaders lead us through technique tutorials every week, and I am learning so much on a subtle level and I want to try new things.

I had so much fun this week!  I kept spotting yellow everywhere, and wanted to take pictures all week.  I could make a whole project out of yellow.  Who knew?

We adventured around town on Saturday, with me stopping every two seconds to grab another shot.  Does anyone else find they have a frustrated husband in tow?  I'm trying to get gutsier about taking images on the street - its what I like, and I'm constantly seeing amazing opportunities but chickening out.  Here are some of my shots...Which one to edit?

Scavenger Hunt

I'm trying out some new techniques to resize my images for the web, using the unsharp mask and now I'm hosting my images on Flikr.  All totally an experiment for me, so bear with me.  But, I'm totally proud I was able to do the Scavenger Hunt again!  This week was a fun combination of wandering around the city and exploring a park within the city - on top of the city!  Wow, what a view.  I'm participating in Now to Wow, and was able to grab a ton of yellow images (I'll share tomorrow!) and Walking in the World, so this ended up being my walk and artist date (also more about that later).

Vanishing Point

I stopped in the middle of crossing the train tracks and yelled to my husband to keep an eye out for me!  I love taking vanishing point images in the city, the streets, transportation, the buildings, all lend to good perspectives.

Square Crop

Took this at Panera.  I ended up blacking out the light outside of the textured squares.  I love the squares within the square within the square crop!

Under

While taking this picture I kept thinking of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds:

Cellophane flowers of yellow and green,

Towering over your head.

Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes,

And she's gone.

I have no clue what the correlation is. But this building is a landmark in our 'hood. I love it.  

A bit too purple though, eh.

Welcome to the Jungle

Calm

A beautiful day Saturday, two musicians were playing at the top of the hill, the reverberation of the violin bouncing across the houses as we spied like children.

S&E: 9 (PS) Spring

Okay here goes...a lot of images!  Please tell me if you see differences, feedback is really appreciated.   The lesson for the week was how to resize and sharpen for the web, and recommended hosting outside of Blogger.  See?  Things I don't know.  I was infinitely thankful for this tutorial because I have noticed that the image that shows up on this blog is never the same as the one that I worked on in Photoshop.  So frustrating!  I need to learn more!  And I can't quite get my brain around unsharpening.  But I'll keep trying it.

SOOC, Uploaded through Blogger

Edits:  I did the usual, and then did a Gaussian blur to the background and added a little bit of texture.
Hosted on Flikr.

The above photo re-sized for the Web.  Hosted on Flikr.

With Edits, Resized for Web + Unsharp Mask at 30% Opacity, hosted on Flikr

Final, uploaded through Blogger - I'm a believer.