CREATING THE JOURNEY: Making art is making the SELF or SELVES

FORMING THE SELF

Hallelujah for the JOURNEY! Hallelujah for ART MAKING! And Hallelujah for creating the JOURNEY through ART MAKING and sharing it with community!

As the creator and administrator of "The Daily Creative Practice," a Facebook group with more than 600 members (join us here), I have the privilege of witnessing how CREATIVITY can be expressed in multiple forms of ART MAKING. Sewing, science writing and illustrating, jewelry forging, drawing, painting, photography, teaching, dancing, and playing all emerge from the SOUL! Yours, mine, and others!

On The Daily Creative Practice (DCP), we have a blog or art making prompt each Monday written by one of our group members. Called "Monday Funday," members are invited to respond some time during the week by writing a blog and posting a link on the DCP or crafting a shorter response in word or image and posting directly on the DCP.  This week's Monday Funday prompt was written by visual artist Diana Toma: 

Why do we create art? Take a minute today to get present to what is so for you in this question. You can do it right now - take a deep breath, relax. Let the answer come to you from the peacefulness of your inner being. Why do you create art? (see the rest of the prompt below)

My answer? 

I MAKE ART TO CREATE THE JOURNEY, TO MAKE THE SELF
 

ART IS ME IS MY JOURNEY IS YOU (Art by Hallelujah Truth)

My visual art and writing creates me. Images and words "tie" me to something concrete, visible, and communicable. When I broadcast my creations to you--the other--we connect and through our co-created community, my existence is expanded.

Yes, my ART MAKING is the expression of SPIRIT. This language permits others to see and hear me and to either respond or fashion something original from themselves.

MOTHER TURTLE. We become ourselves by the choices we make. I choose to make images and write to make myself tangible. Mother Turtle here represents the four directions of a compass. As we each seek our true north, it is good to stay centered in our hearts. At the center of Mother Turtle is the symbol of me, Hallelujah Truth, the four-petalled flower. (Art by Hallelujah Truth)

ONE SELF

By writing and drawing images, I create WAVES of SELF in our large shared ocean of consciousness. These Hallelujah Truth Waves crest near you, you, and you--permeable and dynamic. 

I create art to create MYSELF or SELVES.

That's Coffee With Hallelujah! SOUL BLOG with me and share the reason for your art making! I want to know.

From Diana Toma for Monday Funday on the Daily Creative Practice
When an answer comes, keep asking. Don’t get settle in any specificity, keep inquiring, until you feel so inspired by your own findings that you get chills. Goose bumps. Feel in awe. The purpose of this exercise is to connect deeply to what moves, touches and inspires you.

Picasso once said “The meaning of life is to find your gift and the purpose of life is to give it away”

ANOTHER SELF

I personally believe the act of creating, the creativity behind an artwork, is crucial for personal happiness and satisfaction. I paint because there’s nothing else I would rather do. I paint with my eyes, with my imagination, with my hands. I look for beauty all around me. The way the light drapes over my water cup. The way my daughter’s eyes squint a little in the morning right after she wakes up. The way a ray of sun feels on my arm. I love to observe. To look at something without judging, analyzing or dissecting it. Just notice. Observe. Wonder. I pick up the brush and take emotional notes of my observations on a surface. Painting is poetry on canvas. Ahh the moment the water is moving from wet to dry, the way the backwash slowly expands, tickling my soul with every wet area in which it spreads carrying color, with a life of it’s own.

RED IS MY LANGUAGE: Partly because I speak heart

RED IS MY  LANGUAGE (art by Hallelujah Truth)

RED. Recently this color has become my language. I speak HEART, and RED expresses my nouns, verbs, and objects so very well for me.

In my box of watercolor pencils, my beloved tools, I possess many REDS! Their names dance along their sides singing to me like studious German women visiting Paris cabarets. Here are a few to illustrate:

Karmin Rosa
Dunkelrot
Kamiumrot Mittel
Scharlachrot
Pompejanischrot

To begin a drawing, I often pick out a more subtle red to stroke out the draft, to caress an image into being. She might be called Venentian or Indian Red. Or I might invite Sanguine.  Perhaps their cousins may be summoned like Terracotta or Burnt Ochre. Whoever assists me at this stage melts away with water and becomes something more or less as other colors join us. 

If you haven't dabbled in the pages of Color: A Natural History of the Palette, you might enjoy learning about their histories. The chapter on RED that discusses in detail the use of the female cochineal beetle for obtaining a vibrant RED (that is even used in Cherry Coke), also gives broad, general meaning of RED: 

"For many cultures red is both death and life--a beautiful and terrible paradox. In our modern language or metaphors, red is anger, it is fire, it is stormy feelings of the heart, it is love, it is the god of war, and it is power. These are concepts that the ancient color coders understood very well. In Comanche the same word--ekapi--is used for color, circle, and red. Which suggests that in that Native American culture at least it was seen as something fundamental, encompassing everything."

I SPEAK HEART! (art by Hallelujah Truth, from this blog entry)

Yes, ekapi! COLOR. CIRCLE. RED. Yes! RED is more than my language. It is who I am and it is the realm I inhabit.

That's Coffee with Hallelujah! SOUL BLOG with me and tell me about your favorite color and why that is so!

Acknowledgment: Thanks go to Jes Gordon for writing the first Monday Funday blog prompt for the Facebook Group, The Daily Creative Practice. Consider joining our group and participating in our Monday Fundays.