Once upon a time there was a class of kids. An art class.
One girl who didn't pay much attention in class was seriously focused on drawing.
For 20 minutes she kept her head down working on her paper.
Her teacher was curious. He walked over.
What are you drawing, he asked.
I am drawing the face of God, she said.
Surprised, the teacher said, But no one has ever seen the face of God.
They will in a moment, she said.
...“That biblical story about the seven good years and the seven bad years? That happened to me,” Ms. Soberats, 77, said in an interview at her home in Jackson Heights.
“I think their sickness helped me cope with my blindness. Because I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about them. How much they were suffering, how much they were going through.”
...“I feel your face, your hair, then I’ll ask you: ‘Are you light-colored? Or dark? Is your hair blonde or brown or black?’ ” she said. “So with asking and touching, then I’ll get an idea of what I have to work with.”
“It surprised me that the human mind can do whatever it wants if we work toward it,” Ms. Soberats said.
Read and see her vision on LENS.
Austin Kleon, an artist, writer, observer and thinker gave a talk about what he wished he'd heard as a young creator.
He expanded his ideas and wrote a book: Steal Like an Artist
He said: This book is me talking to a previous version of myself.
These are things I’ve learned over almost a decade of trying to figure out how to make art, but a funny thing happened when I started sharing them with others — I realized that they aren’t just for artists. They’re for everyone.
These ideas are for everyone who’s trying to inject some creativity into their life and their work. (That should describe all of us.) Reposted from Brain Pickings.
Steal Like An Artist on Amazon.
namaste on new year, new day, new moment.
elf sits with boua mon, a weaver in a village across the mekong. they met in 2010. she is gentle and kind.
her smiling laughter is infectious. women sit, sharing food, stories.
she looms silk threads. click, clack. click-clack. diamond designs. abundance.
She had duende, a fundamentally untranslatable Spanish word, literally meaning possessing spirit. It signified a charisma manifested by certain performers—flamenco singers, bullfighters, elves, seers, weavers—overwhelming their audience with the feeling they were in the presence of a mystical power.
The Spanish poet Garcia Lorca produced the best brief description of duende: “Years ago, during a flamenco dance contest in Jerez, an old woman of eighty, competing against beautiful women and young girls with waists as supple as water, carried off the prize by simply raising her arms, throwing back her head, and stamping the platform with a single blow of her heel; but in that gathering of muses and angels, of beautiful forms and lovely smiles, the dying duende triumphed as it had to, dragging the rusted blades of its wings along the ground.”
Little Wing followed a tribal trail to Lacilbula, where, after weaving morning pages she returned to the Rio Guadalete river below the pueblo flowing from the Sierras to Cadiz.
The battle of Guadalete was fought on July 19, 711 when 7,000 Yemenis and Berbers led by Tariq ibn Ziyad defeated the Visgoth King Roderic.
Rio needed cleaning. Thick autumn yellow, green and brown leaves trapped between rocks clogged river sections. Liquid backed up to mountains beneath fast gray storm clouds. Using her walking stick, she clamored down a slippery slope and slowly worked her way up the Rio clearing sticks, leaves and stones blocking the flow. One leaf could do a lot of damage.
There were green maple, silver aspen, brown oak leaves. Old black water logged decayed colors danced with fresh green and orange pigments.
She was the unimpeded flow. A child playing near water and rocks in her dream world. Serenity and sweet water music. Rocks, stepping stones. Small pools and meditation zones of where she felt peaceful. Bird music darted up the canyon.
She cleared leaves long past twilight, staggered up the muddy incline facing the Rio in silent gratitude and performed healing chants next to a bare Aspen tree. She passed a ceramic Virgin Mary statue illuminated by melting red candles in a rocky crevice behind a locked gate.
Mary’s blood flowed over jagged dolomite gray stones flecked with green moss. She collected a hemoglobin sample for future weaving, crossed a stone bridge and returned home. She lit candles, started a fire, relaxed in her favorite chair enjoying a deep breath before bleeding word rivers to dye loom fabric.
The loom was her instrument of transformation and wool the hair of the sacrificial beast which women, by a long and cultured tribal process, transformed into clothing. This suggested how weaving skirts the sacred and the violent. Why her power at the loom was both derided and dreaded, transformed, like giving birth, into a language and symbol, a metaphor with new, positive ends.
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