Muse Group Reunion

As soon as I got back home to Olympia over a week ago I was able to move into the art studio that I have been waiting for with great anticipation for the good part of a year. I’ll be sharing some pictures of that soon. But I am now finally getting around to sharing the last chapter of my California visit: an in-person reunion with my beloved Muse Group in Sebastopol.

Since I moved away nine months ago, these ladies, dear friends all, have continued to meet and share their passion for creative expression through mixed media art making. When I said I was coming to town for a visit, they rented a space at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts so we could do a Muse lesson like I used to teach before Covid. It was a rare treat for us all, vaxed and boosted and careful as we all are, we shared time and space and summoned the Muse! I shared poetry and we meditated. Then we stood up and put the whole body into expressive mark making on big sheets of paper with sticks and brushes and fingers while listening to music. 

This group no longer needs instruction for these techniques! We moved seamlessly into more painting and collage and then finished with a free write, harvesting words from the images which had come through us.

The day was a great gift to all of us. For me it bestowed blessings on a return to the mixed media Muse work I’d practically abandoned for the past months when my studio was under plastic in the garage. Now I can’t wait to get back to it as I unpack all the inks and acrylics and textures and papers and collage items! And this group will of course continue their rich creative collaboration with each other!

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Strung out and the antidote

Do you ever find yourself in the mood to scribble? What about drip and splatter? Well it doesn’t always end up making for a unified, let alone pleasing piece of art. But it always leads somewhere.

I thought I’d look at this recent mixed media Muse painting in pieces. This view turned out to be my favorite, because it illustrated the theme, which I didn’t realize until I wrote this:

Are you a bit strung out? Well yeah, aren’t we all. All bunched up together with our hair electrified, bleeding anxiety about climate and politics (impeachment?). Even  while we’re eating, we’re dreaming starvation And while comfortable in our homes, firestorms and earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes are breaking out in our brains. And we know there’s nothing much we can do now, too little too late…and the strings are knotting up and pulling on us and sometimes we can sort of ignore the discomfort and get on with lives of moving around in cars and on airplanes and discarding plastic and wasting food, and the knots keep getting tighter.. .

(More pieces of the painting here. . .)

Well, that’s one way of looking at what’s going on in our world. All quite true. But the artist has to be more agile, break it down, and look for other solutions.

Like the creature that appeared in Muse Group with an acrylic pour . I walked past it/him/her/them for weeks, until one day some words landed somewhere between my ears, and I was able to finish it, with great satisfaction.

So allow me to introduce the excessively silly and somewhat shy Grrrblop! antidote to despair.

A new six-week Muse Group starts Oct 7, and there is one opening left at this writing. I’m thinking we’ll do a “greatest hit” series of mixed media lessons. That’s the best antidote I can think of! If you’ve been thinking you’d like to come, don’t wait, cause we’d love to have you and the window is closing up fast. For more info and to contact me and register visit my website.