Friday, August 13, 2010

Community supported art

When an amazing composer writes music, a cd is made, the radios carry it, the everyday person gets to listen, their lives are enhanced and the musician makes money. A good equation. No one says its low art or high art. It is simply art for a particular audience.

Why is the visual artist not doing a similar pattern? What can we learn from musicians? There has got to be a way for us, the talented ( and yes I mean YOU) to move out of this ridiculous ART STAR mentality, and get back to WHY art is made in the first place.

To enhance the human spirit.

So, let's say your art enhances the spirit of all mankind. Why are you afraid of making your work accessible to as many people as possible? At a value price point that can allow you to make money but also allow the everyday person to own it? Why are we as a community not finding ways together to thumb our noses at the "retail" gallery system that sells "exclusivity" and innovating quality and exceptional "inclusivity" instead?

Let's create a marketplace of louise nevelson quality art that every person can have and evolve from their experience with it. Let's get back to the temple art, and the community shaman whose visuals and images enhanced the live's of every citizen.

A while ago I wrote about the CSA movement. The community supported agriculture. I love it, I'm a part of it. I recognize that if I pay someone for my food, I'm happy and eating healthy. I know there is a way for us as artists to do the same.

I want to create a CSA movement in the visual arts. Are you with me?

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Staying Calm

How do we stay calm under duress? To feel empowered instead of afraid? Empowered. To be fully in our power. Power within brings an amazing strength. Power within is not power over. Makes me take a deep breath as I type. That's a clue.

True power has nothing to do with the ego, with things around us or what we have. It is a sense of being - an at home feeling with the perceiving - that we are our truth. Not that we are doing our truth. A subtle difference, and yet everything is in that distinction. We are not in truth the perceiver or the perceived. We are simply prior to all of that.

Dave and I took a walk along the waterfront today, and he reminded me that all of the psychic phenomena that I have experienced in my life, was simply the dream illustrating a path through the dream to something prior. I love that awareness, and agree.

I find it calming.

And how do we manage that awareness? It's a tall order that can happen instantly. All messages in meditation and psychic phenomena can lead us within the dream to understand that the dream is simply a phase. We can go beyond it. But it is the route we take, the personal myth that our dreams illustrate that takes us there.

I find that calming as well.

Beyond to prior - that is what some refer to as the source.

This is where breathing meditation helps tremendously. We can feel empowered by knowing that we cannot control the biography around us, we can witnes it and be the essence that is the witness simultaneously. Deep breath. It is all in the script really. We simply need to live it in awareness. Everything holds a lesson for us about our karma and our work in the world.

I find that to be very calming. And down right joyous.

I've been asked to teach 2 courses in Spring 2011 for the School of Visual Arts Continuing Education department, a course in visioning and one in fund raising. The core of both need to be on "staying calm." How do we create calm in our careers and in our art projects? How do we teach ourselves calm in our life planning and search for meaning? How does our sense of calm impact our art projects for the world and the communities benefit?

Staying calm. In a world that is collapsing around us, I think the best answer to "what do you do? is "I stay calm".