Sunday Funnies

Julia Cameron: How to Avoid Making Art (or Anything Else You Enjoy),

illust. by Elizabeth Cameron © 2005 - Tarcher (Penguin Books) paperback.

Aaaahhh, Sunday mornings.... leisurely brunch, brainy-enlightened weekend newspaper, adorable cherubs with freshly scrubbed faces ensconced in quiet but creative play, kitties fed, groomed and satisfied, curled up on the comfiest armchair.... sighhh....

YEAH, RIGHT!! Not at MY house this morning, or like, ever! Consequently, no artwork, no updates for you today. How about some funnies, though?

Here are some edited quotes from this cute little book pictured above by Julia Cameron, famed author of "The Artist's Way" tomes. I'm not crazy about her writings, but I found some of these little thoughts funny and pointed enough to be worthy of repeating here.

So, how do you actively avoid making art or anything else you enjoy? Among other brilliant (and oh-so-recognizable) ploys:

• by telling yourself you can only work in absolute quiet
• by going for the royal family's official portrait in your first year
• by throttling your joie-de-vivre every time it crows,
• by talking about it so you don't have to do it
• by considering the odds of selling your book/artwork/whatever you're making
• by demanding that what you do be absolutely original and totally brilliant
• by telling yourself your job prevents you from doing art and then working overtime to prove it
• by demanding fifteen free hours to create and ignoring the 15 minutes you've got
• by deciding you can't afford a drawing class, and buying new jeans to console yourself
• by telling yourself you don't want to be typecast, and turning down that acting job

Are you laughing or crying? What do you do to yourself to hold yourself back? Care to share and get it out of your system? Want to shine a light on one of these self-sabotaging schemes and bannish it from your life forever? No time like the present, my friends.

Laughter Being the Best Medicine

If you've been around this blog long enough, you've probably read about my friend and niece-in-law Hala's latest bout with leukemia. Since she never does anything half-a**ly, like her fantastic catering service Cocoa & Co, Hala launched a hilarious, witty, poignant and inspiring blog entitled "Halakemia" - a lebano-franco-english diary of her journey to recovery.

Inspired by Barb's last fun portrait of Hala, this is my take on Hala's latest baldie-portrait challenge. There's still time to join in the fun, and you can send Hala* or me your fun creations, you have until Sunday. Next week, all the portraits will be displayed on a "wall" in my gallery.

Love and laughter, faith and strength: This is what I think of when I think of you, darling Hala, you tough cookie you.

*Hala's email address is on her blog

Lift Up Someone's Spirits Today

This is my friend and niece-in-law Hala, she of the scrumptious edible artwork (read about her here). She's in hospital this week - again - and as you can tell from the bandana, although the head gear is very becoming, this is no walk in the park for her.

So this is my request, dear gang of photoshoppers and others, can you help me cheer my friend up?

Use this portrait below to create something fun and send it along or display it and let me or her know about it. This is her blog: http://hala2.blogspot.com/

Stretching To Wake Up

Drop the mask - © R. Koleilat, 2007

I've been thinking about things my doppelganger/separated-at-birth-twin Frances has been musing about - mainly how hard it is to reconnect with those parts of ourselves that require us to do the unthinkable: relinquish conscious control over what we want to do. This applies equally to my two intellectual passions: artistic expression and therapeutic exploration, which I believe are two sides of the same coin.

My "thing" has always been what can be generously termed as illustration, my medium of choice pencil and ink. But because these are unforgiving media that require focus, space and time, I've found myself less and less able to indulge... Paralysis and ankylosis ensued.

Wait, there is a happy ending to this sad story!

Now that I've been blogging, instead of worrying about what I cannot or won't do, I find myself enjoying "drawing" again - with, you guessed it, Photoshop. Such a convenient tool - no space or paper or babysitting required. And your point is, Rima? I hear Frances saying - well, if something looks too scary to do... do something else! And my point to all my friends that I've been corresponding with and discussed the "impossibility" of doing something "artistic": let go, let loose - things happen when you stop planning and thinking and measuring and comparing.

Now and Zen, Again (for Frances)

Can something old be new again? You bet.

Bamboo-©R.Koleilat,2007

I found a brand spanking new reprint of an old classic at the library: "The Zen of Seeing", by Frederick Franck, a book originally published in the early seventies. The book itself is a very lovely creation - it's not typeset, but handwritten (as all love letters should be, Franck tenderly explains) and illustrated with wispy, minimalist (well, zen) drawings, all by the author himself.

One of my favourite passages in this book touches on what I've been musing about here - that the innate artist in all of us is so easily silenced by those invisible shackles we collect through our individual lives. Here's what he said (capitals are the author's own):

"... WHO IS THE MAN, THE ARTIST?... HE IS THE UNSPOILED CORE OF EVERYMAN, BEFORE HE IS CHOKED BY SCHOOLING, TRAINING, CONDITIONING UNTIL THE ARTIST-WITHIN SHRIVELS UP AND IS FORGOTTEN. Even in the artist who is professionally trained to be consciously "creative" this unspoiled core shrivels up in the rush toward a "personal style", in the heat of competition to be "in". " Indeed.

(This quote can be found in the introduction to the paperback edition by Vintage, NY, 1973).

Now how to get out of a creative rut? or how to get some inspiration if you have no idea where to start?

I just remembered that there is such a thing as public domain images - images that one can use as a springboard for inspiration without worrying about the ethics of copying/copyrighting/cheating...

So I went looking on the internet (love ya, Google) and found an endless supply of sites that offer treasure troves of "free images". I'll be exploring this subject more in the near future, but in the meantime, here's an example of what one can play with. I didn't have any illustration for this post and was not in the mood to pick up pen and ink to do some zen-inspired drawing (I'm going through a terribly dry spell, but that's another story...).

So I decided to look around for a picture I could use, and found this nice one of a bamboo plant reflected in the water.

On Photoshop, I cropped it, used "crosshatch" to give it a sketchy feeling, changed it to B&W, infused it with muted colours, skewed it and added some "noise" to make it look like an old picture of something vaguely asian. Obviously, one of the points I am also trying to make here is that it doesn't have to be good - but it's good to practice!

Who Let The Cat Out?

Fauve © R. Koleilat, 2007

I did actually. Then spent the whole night waking up and going downstairs to see if she'll come back in. She did, eventually - at 5:32 am but with such dramatic scorn, I almost felt guilty. What I did feel was groggy (and very resentful) this whole drizzly, grey, sticky day.

Thankfully, the house was full of kids so after throwing heaps of junk food at them to keep them occupied without me, I made this to reconcile myself with Blossom (who spent her whole day sleeping in my bedroom).

Funny thing is I didn't set out with this cat in mind, but as I finished and looked at it, I realized that it could only be about her, my little savage beast.

Little Butterfly

So, no... I haven't been swallowed by some crater. Or abducted by aliens. Not exactly. Is there such a thing as Rebound Post-traumatic Stress Syndrome? Maybe I'll just invent that one. Talk about creative paralysis - I hope this will be over soon.

But that's neither here nor there. Here's my little photoshoped ballerina butterfly, by way of saying hi to sis's latest post from a parallel universe.

Colour Outside The Lines

Sometimes, the best intentions do end up leading the unsuspecting to that proverbial hot place. When my oldest was around 4 years old, I had her enrolled in one of those (famous name) preschools that falls on the more corseted end of the “by-the-book” spectrum.
My best intention of course was to provide her with a good start in her educational life – somewhere where her obvious genius could be harnessed and directed to productive ends (her mother had been ignominously stamped with the “could do better” tag on every single report card throughout her schooling – and beyond). Besides, this was exactly the kind of formal, humourless setting I had grown up in (hello, Collège Protestant Français de Jeunes Filles) and thought it was hence the best choice for my own daughter.
But then, I also signed her up for the extra-curricular “art class” taught by one of the teachers there. Now, mind you, the teachers at that school were absolutely well-meaning, and this one was intent on doing in this classes the same thing she did in her other classes: make sure her young charges could follow direction well and produce a disciplined result. In a nutshell, this is what the class was about: “Here is a yellow triangle, a red circle and a green square. Colour your triangle, circle and square the same way, and make sure you’re staying inside the lines”. See, that’s well-meaning, but completely misguided.
Reigning in a child’s attention in class to help her focus on completing the task at hand is a necessary part of formal schooling (although I came to realize belatedly a not extraordinarily helpful one at the kindergarten level). But reigning in a child’s imagination serves no purpose – no useful purpose that is.
So many adults complain that “they can’t draw/paint/colour” – I suspect it’s because someone, somewhere early on made sure they knew to colour inside the lines and to reproduce the exact model they were expected to copy. And stick to the same guidelines to govern the rest of their lives as well.
Today, my other daughter is enrolled in a cooperative preschool, where the teachers intuitively, implicitly, complicitly understand the value of a free hand – give the children the tools, a little guidance and let them explore.
Now, that’s a life lesson I want to live by.

War d’Oeuvres

“A nation without arts would be a nation that had stopped talking to
itself, stopped dreaming, and had lost interest in the past and
lacked curiosity about the future.”
John Tusa, Art Matters

(My very lovely and talented sister Neda, a collage artist, wrote this article for our Maraya Galleries Newsletter at the end of last summer)

War Collage 1982 Future Gaze: one of the first collages, used Marie Claire magazine, rubber cement glue, only light source: candle

Commenting on a commemorative “Art at War “exhibition he curated in his Chicago gallery, Nicaraguan art dealer Aldo Castillo remarked that “the history of conflict, aggression, and war shows no human evolution. We have not learned the difference between right and wrong. Nor have we learned […] that violence is no solution for violence.”

War Collage Red: I did this collage in July 1983 using fragments of a medical review journal, rubber cement glue

Castillo’s plainspoken words resonated in my mind as I was reading the latest news about the war in my native country, Lebanon. Sipping my morning coffee, and furiously zapping through the latest blogs in all the languages I could read (or decipher for that matter), I was feeling myself slowly drawn into an abyss of jarred memories I had long forgotten …or conveniently suppressed.No longer was I sitting at my desk in my serene Austin home, java in hand, and thousands of kilometers away from a past I thought had properly stashed away in the confines of my own complex history. The past and the present were cruelly fusing into a nefarious surrealistic reality of death and destruction. The country where I was born and raised was yet again in the throes of war with Israel who, as it did in 1982, invaded Lebanon this summer of 2006, wreaking havoc and misery to life and property*. It was “déjà vu all over again,” and I was both a captive spectator and a reluctant victim now as I was then twenty-four years ago.

Facing this familiar yet uninvited “reel-ality” rerun, I turned back to Castillo’s commentary. The curator’s words, although well intentioned, were in fact quite banal. I had heard it all before. Cynical and blasé that I was, I could really not figure out what attracted me to remember this inane tidbit of words. And then, it hit me: it was not Castillo’s words which really mattered to me; it was what he did to transform the ugly reality of human aggression into an accessible visual display open for all to see. He, along with several international artists, participated in an extensive exhibition post 9-11 entitled “Art at War – The Artist’s Voice” which was held at the Aldo Castillo Gallery in Chicago in 2004. Having grown up in war-torn Nicaragua and having been sensitized to the current wars all over the world, Castillo set out to create a bona fide gallery with a social vision. His aim was to bring about a dialectic of sorts within the gallery walls and the outside world. The result was an impressive tour-de-force which attempted to give various artists the ability to explore the emotional dimensions of their collective harrowing experiences. More significantly, in my opinion, the exhibit helped in engaging all participants (artists and audience alike) in an ongoing public discourse of critical issues.

It was that particular exploration of the meaning of memory and war which had attracted me in Castillo’s endeavor. Art, in any aspect of our daily lives, is a vital medium which consciously or not is a repository of our inner subjective human experience. In other words, whether in war or in peacetime, art – in whatever form – is intrinsic in the way we understand and process the world.

War Collage 1983 Life in Black and White: magazines fragments, rubber cement glue

War Collage 1983 8 Minutes Today: I called it so because I did it in only 8 minutes


As for me, mixed within the somber war images flashing on my computer screen, my mind was resplendent with parallel yet pleasant, almost peaceful, memories. Through the caffeinated fog which mimicked itself as my brain, I was transposed to the summer of 1982 where I used to sit and create paper collages by candlelight (yes, by candlelight – since all electrical power stations were bombed into oblivion). Although we had no electricity nor running water, no hope for a better tomorrow, let alone surviving another day, there I sat. In my bedroom, on my bed, with the atrocious whistling of exploding bombs over my head, there I sat. I sat with my French Marie-Claire fashion magazines spread out on the floor, scissors in hand, and a half-empty jar of rubber cement next to me, cutting, tearing, and pasting images upon images. In the building stairwell –turned into an ad hoc shelter – I sat. Huddled next to my younger sister Rima, praying that the hundreds of 3,000lb-bombs hurled from the monstrous F-16 jets would somehow miss our family, there I sat, clutching my tattered magazines. I sat in the bomb shelters, next to crying babies and weeping mothers. I sat and I cut. I sat and I pasted. I sat and I dreamt. I cut images, shapes, colors of vibrant red and azure blue as if I wanted them etched in my memory for fear that I would never see them again.

Collage was my medium of choice. I had dabbled in it when I was six or seven years old, cutting though a very valuable gilded Persian manuscript in my father’s library of art books. If memory serves me right, my curiosity about collage was peeked, although my young ego was bruised because my parents were more concerned about some old book than my own artistic expression. Since that time, I have always had an affinity for paper collages. Its versatility and unrestricted nature suited my impatient temperament. Collage was fun and led me to unexpected journeys. As contemporary collagist Susan Krieg likes to describe it, collage is an organic form of art:” Every time you add something new to a collage, it reassembles itself and responds back;” collage is “a conversation between the artist and art.” Conversing with my collages, I felt empowered and alive…even if it meant surviving only for the next few minutes until the next round of bombing.

Long after the war ended, and decades after my “Persian experiment”, I am still creating collages, almost every day. I create because I am moved to do so. I was never formally trained as an artist. I do not think of myself as one. I am guided by my artwork, I do not guide it. My collages are ephemeral memories of a time and place in my life. It does not matter what I create. What matters is to simply create.

My art is not necessarily ennobled by lofty ideas nor does it pretend to be a medium of social change. My art just is. It is art (with a lowercase “a”) which guides my life vision. I do not think about my art. I just create. Just as German philosopher Martin Heidegger spoke of “dasein” as existence, or as being in the moment, I think that art – in whatever shape or form-- is very much necessary for the temporal coherence of being and doing.

To exist is to create. I create art. I consider myself to be one of the lucky ones.