Life as an Artist: update 3

Hello there! I’m just rounding my third full week as a full-time artist, and I thought I’d give you an update on how it’s going. If you’ve been following my blog, you will have noticed some new projects popping up, and when I was first thinking of a photo to take for this post, I thought of scattering my desk with various said projects, but instead, I settled on a calmer idea:

This is a “to-do” list for my upcoming weekend. I have learned quickly that I still look forward to and need weekends, even when I’m doing something I love for work. While I do not spend the hours of the week counting down until Friday anymore, the weekend is still a much needed mental break.

Other than the reality of having many new projects going, how is it really going over here at Blue Bicicletta? Well, if I had to choose a word to sum up my Life as an Artist right now (at least the more business-y part), it would be choices. I find myself constantly faced with choosing—which projects to work on, which projects to let go, and which projects to plan on doing in the future.

While I love that I have no shortage of ideas, it is my current challenge to learn how not to drive myself crazy about making each little choice of how to spend my work day, and bigger choices of how to structure my career.

I’m often reminding myself that it’s also a choice to relax, be calm, go with the flow, and trust yourself to get the job done. I am trying to make that choice as often as possible.

On the flip side, I am so excited about all of the new art ideas that keep coming into my head, and I’m so grateful to have the time to pursue a number of them. The creativity keeps coming, and it really fills me up.

Happy weekend to you, and I wish you days full of inspiration and calm!

Oh, and for those of you new to this blog, you can see previous artist life updates here

Something New: a monthly art club!

Have you ever wished that a little pocket of creative inspiration showed up at your door every month to excite and delight you? Look no further because I have just started a monthly art club! I call it the Little Bits of Art Monthly Club, and I just unveiled it over at my shop.

You might now be wondering, “what is the Little Bits of Art Monthly Club? Well, let me take you on a tour.

If you become a member of the Blue Bicicletta monthly art club, you will receive a neat little packet like the one above, each month of your subscription.

Here’s a look at the contents of the very first month, December 2009. The contents of the package will vary each month, but they will always include:
-2 greeting cards or postcards
-a set of monthly to-do lists
-a pair of monthly calendar bookmarks
-a unique piece of miniature art in the form of a mini book (as you see here), or a tiny original drawing
-and a little packet of creative odds and ends (like little bits of patterned fabric, handmade paper, buttons, old postage stamps, words, quotes, and anything else I discover).

All of this will be neatly packaged in a handmade envelope (and shipped in a bend-proof mailer), and all illustrations are, of course, completely original and created by me.

Here are some more peeks:

December’s unique piece of tiny art is a little book I made called A Bit on Buttons, with button drawings, little facts on buttons, and even button-related expressions. The odds and ends packet will remain a surprise for each recipient to discover when the get their packets.

For cards in the December package, I will include one each of my new Thankful card and my Winter Poem card. Of course, if you’re from the Southern Hemisphere, you’ll get a less Winter-y card in exchange for the second.

To help you add a little more creativity to your day, I will also include some fanciful to-do lists and a pair calendar bookmarks.

To become a part of my Little Bit of Art Monthly Club, click here. I’m currently offering memberships of 1 month and 3 months, and if you get a 3 month membership starting this December (2009), you’ll get a fourth month FREE, as a little gift for being a part of my introductory month!

This would be a GREAT and unique holiday gift! If you are buying it as a gift, I will have a certificate of membership available soon that I can email or send to you or the recipient in advance, just let me know that you would like this when you place your order, or contact me directly.

I will take off my business-y hat now and say, I’m really, really excited about this new item/experience/cool thing and have been excitedly planning it and putting it together (and hinting at it on this blog) for the last couple of weeks. It is the bringing together of many of my interests in art and design (obviously), but it also brings in my hope to help people sneak a little more creativity and inspiration into their everyday lives. Thanks so much for sharing this view into this new project of mine!

One more thing: Monthly packets will be sent out at the beginning of each month, so you must purchase your membership by the 22nd of the month to receive your packet at the beginning of the next month, or else your membership will start the month after. Here’s an example: If you purchase a membership between now and November 22, you will receive your first packet at the beginning of December, if you purchase a membership between November 23 and December 22, you will receive your first packet at the beginning of January.

Natural November

The first day of November here in northern California, was a beautiful sunny day, and we thought it called for a hike—so we headed up towards Lake Tahoe for some natural inspiration. My husband (who is an outdoor guru) chose the location: we started out at Wrights Lake in the desolation wilderness and hiked up to two nearby lakes called Grouse Lake and Hemlock Lake.

What a gorgeous day—the temperature was just fine—t-shirt and pants weather with open blue and sunny skies. Perfect for lying on a rock and letting the breeze and sun carry you into a nap (one of my favorite outdoor occupations). The thing I noticed most was the expansive amount of quiet. I live in a pretty small city (Davis, CA), so I can’t complain about big city noise, but I must have needed the quiet because I really felt the luxury of it. Here are a few pictures that unfortunately, don’t really capture the feeling of walking outside in the quiet sunny afternoon, but isn’t that always the way.

Giving Thanks

Thanksgiving is fast approaching for all of us in the U.S.—woohoo, I do love this holiday of rejoicing and eating. A while back, I started thinking about that age-old Thanksgiving question “What are you thankful for?” and here is one of my answers, in a card:

I know that we all don’t say this enough, you can never say it enough. I am thankful for all of you reading this blog, and for my amazing friends and family who are always there, no matter what, and for all of the people I see who are making life happen, because they are inspiring me to make my life happen. I mean it! If I ever doubted that people are out there to support me, my recent wedding (see this post about it) proved it to me, big time. I mean people came out of all corners of the country and worked like crazy to make my wedding happen. It was amazing.

I have often been asked about where I get my ideas for art, and I have to say (and have probably said it here before) that most often I make things that say something I need to here. This is one of them. So get off your bum and thank someone. Give them a call, send them a letter, text them for gosh sakes. Or you could send them a card!

These cards are now available in my shop—great for Thanksgiving, the holidays, or any old day of the year!

October Love

The weather here is so fine—I wish I could put some in an envelope and send it to you, but this is the best I can do—greetings from by back yard.

I hope you are all having a wonderful day and appreciating the out of doors, rain or shine.

Free at Last, and the Public Library

I think the public library is my temple, my church. It feels like a holy place to me—so many voices whispering across the quiet rows of books.

Today was my last day at my office job, and while I could be talking about that milestone, instead, I feel like talking about the public library, how it fills me with a quiet rejoicing, an endless sense of possibility. Maybe it’s because the library is more concrete—it is what it should be—something that you can depend on, a safe place. On the other hand, endings are hard to talk about because they are never what you would expect them to be. Even when you want the thing to end (you’ve been praying for it to end), it’s still disorienting.

You may be asking yourself, “what do libraries and quitting your day job have to do with each other?” The answer is, exactly nothing, except the fact that today was the last day of my day job (the final tether was snapped, allowing me to become a full-time artist) and to celebrate, I went for a quiet afternoon in the public library: collecting books (I praise you Mary Oliver, I think I’ve fallen in love), reading magazines, and in general, breathing in that buzzing amount of knowledge and thought that hangs in the air above the stacks.

Before going to the library (my first act as a free woman), I had a nice lunch with my now former bosses and coworkers. They were just so nice, as they always have been, giving me a twinge of guilt for not liking the job better, or at least accepting it while I was there. This does not nullify the insanity of the job, or the insanity of me being in the job (as I was so, so, painfully wrong for it), but it’s almost sad in a way when you wish to run out of the building cheering, and jump on your bike like a bandit, and never look back, but instead your office takes you out to lunch and gives you gifts. I am thankful that they were so kind, but my conscience didn’t feel like I deserved it.

But now, I am free at last, and tomorrow marks my first official day as a full-time artist. Can I hear a hooray echoing out across the blogosphere? Technically, I’ll be leaving this weekend for my other big transition this Fall—getting married, so the rest of this week is going to be more of a tying up of loose ends than a beginning of a new career. But stay tuned as I am most definitely going to fill these next three days with as much joyful creativity as possible. I will be back tomorrow, with something creative, but will be announcing later this week a three week holiday for wedding and honeymoon.

Serendipity and 3 Letters

I believe in fate and letters, and last Friday these two things crossed paths. As you may have noticed, I love letters, and I keep seeing wall hanging collections of large letters and drooling. I have been trying to wait patiently until a day when I have some expendable income and can add to my small collection started with a gift from era.

Well, as fate would have it—I won’t have to wait—because ask and you shall receive. On Friday, I was getting the mail in the shopping plaza where I work, and I noticed a man pulling giant letters off the building where a business has moved.

I couldn’t believe my eyes—he was just throwing them on the ground as if they were trash!!! Truthfully, some of them were getting broken because they were glued to the building, but I marched right up to the worker and asked, breathlessly, if he thought he would be able to get any of the letters off the building without breaking them, and if so, could I have one or two (or one million) of them, pretty please with a cherry on top?

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure—and I love treasures, especially when they’re free.

Here is my take:

They’re a little weathered from living on the outside of a building and getting painted around the edges, but I LOVE them.

I haven’t quite decided where to hang them yet, but I’ve been experimenting in different places. Soon, my house with be further infused with the alphabet!

Another Mary Oliver

Another Mary Oliver poem to share today. Last night, I was reading my new book of her poems again, and I realized what it is about her writing that is pulling me in these days—she reminds me of why I love reading and writing—I love those moments when you discover something so true or honest or mind-bending that it changes how you are in the world. Many of her poems do that so simply. They make you think of something in such a new way, changing how you see it forever. Thank you Mary Oliver.

White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field
by Mary Oliver

Coming down
out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel,
or a buddha with wings,
it was beautiful
and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings—
five feet apart—and the grabbing
thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been running
through the white valleys
of the snow—

and then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes,
to lurk there,
like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows—
so I thought:
maybe death
isn’t darkness, after all,
but so much light
wrapping itself around us—

as soft as feathers—
that we are instantly weary
of looking, and looking, and shut our eyes,
not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river
that is without the least dapple or shadow—
that is nothing but light—scalding, aortal light—
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.

Violets

I love the word and idea of violets. I don’t have any specific associations with the flower, but for some reason, the name evokes a very strong feeling in me. I can’t really explain it—there’s some mystical quality to it. Violets. Maybe I’m getting this association from literature, or movies, or something, but violets seem rare and precious, and yet, when I was looking at pictures of the flower for the most recent addition to my Natural Patterns Alphabet, these flowers seemed pretty common.

It is always amazing to me how a word can carry this entire other connotation. We have infused these seemingly random sounds with very specific meanings, both as a culture and personally. Violets connote to me a rare, delicate, unique, richness. I feel like this quality is almost inherent in the word, but I know that it’s my mind at work, and millions of minds before me.

And then again, perhaps you have a completely different association with violets—maybe your mean 2nd grade teacher (the one who made you stay after school again and again) loved violets, and so you hate them by default. The wonders of language! It’s very personal, and yet it has to be universal enough so we are actually able to communicate with each other.

Here’s my drawing:

“Violets,” 5 x 5 inches, pen and ink, available in my shop, or in my Natural Patterns Alphabet section

Mary Oliver

It seems that lately, I’m doing more art business than I am art! And so it must be sometimes—there is show logistics and emails and orders. I am looking forward to the Fall when I will be able to have more of a balance. So, no drawings today, but I will let Mary Oliver draw you a picture with a poem.

I love Mary Oliver—her poetry is beautifully organic and honest. She has this way of creating a beautiful natural image and then weaving it into an astounding message about life. I have mentioned her on this blog before, but recently one of her poetry books found me at a library book sale, and I felt like it was destiny!

Here’s a poem included in that book, a collection of poems about birds called Owls and Other Fantasies:

“Long Afternoon at the Edge of Little Sister Pond”
by Mary Oliver

As for life,
I’m humbled,
I’m without words
sufficient to say

how it has been hard as flint,
and soft as a spring pond,
both of these
and over and over,

and long pale afternoons besides,
and so many mysteries
beautiful as eggs in a nest,
still unhatched

though warm and watched over
by something I have never seen—
a tree angel, perhaps,
or a ghost of holiness.

Every day I walk out into the world
to be dazzled, then to be reflective.
It suffices, it is all comfort—
along with human love,

dog love, water love, little-serpent love,
sunburst love, or love for that smallest of birds
flying among the scarlet flowers.
There is hardly time to think about

stopping, and lying down at last
to the long afterlife, to the tenderness
yet to come, when
time will brim over the singular pond, and become forever,

and we will pretend to melt away into the leaves.
As for death,
I can’t wait to be the hummingbird,
can you?