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Fruits Series : Self Control / Mixed Media Surrealism

Part 3 of my Fruits of the Spirit series is here! Though I had the vision of untangling yarn from the very beginning of this piece’s conception, I had originally thought I would stitch the yarn through the canvas. I ended up just gluing instead because with the thickness of the yarn I wanted I was concerned about so many large holes ruining the integrity of the canvas and making it sag. I learn something new with each installment!

As mentioned previously, this is my first time doing any spiritual based art really. Though my art is often symbolic and evokes emotion, religiously derived concepts are typically not something I use my art to discuss for apprehension of the messages not being accessible to all viewers. Though it’s not a requirement for art by any means, I prefer when my work is able to resonate differently with each individual viewer and connect with everyone in some way. However, over the last couple of years so many different things kept pointing me in this direction for my first series since over 5 years ago when I showed at ArtPrize. The concepts explored are things that we all deal with, and principles that lead to a healthier mental state no matter what your belief system.

For the idea of “self control”, it was important to me to focus on the mind because that is where it all starts. It’s not about following a list of bad things and good things, it’s not about living this somber existence where you are depriving yourself of anything pleasurable, it is about transformation and mental renewal. It is about wanting to become your truest, most full self and unlocking all of your untapped potential.

I have started drawing the figure for the 4th, and this time I will try to actually get some footage while in process which I kept forgetting to do with the first 3! Thank you for following my journey!
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Artist Bio

What To Do When Your Brain Says “NOPE!”

Some spicy discussions are happening about what classifies as an actual disability, and when accommodations are reasonable just as we’ve tied up Disability Pride Month after a video of a distraught young woman shared an unpleasant job interview experience. She was allegedly yelled at by the interviewer after being asked if there would be leniency and accommodation for her time blindness. Being tossed around are accusations of faking disability when one is really just lazy, “this never used to be a problem!”, comments of how this younger generation has no resilience or willpower, and more.

I’ve worked with individuals with disabilities for over a decade now, and I can say that time blindness can be a very real thing. It is often a symptom of ADHD (though, nothing is across the board – I also know people with ADHD that are early for everything!). It is fair to say we are seeing more cases of ADHD now, which is why this and other issues may seem more common. Whether that can be linked to the different way we interface with technology compared to the past, diet, the fact that are school system is built upon making children sit in one room and listen to someone talk for 6+ hours, or other factors I’m not going to get into because I’m not an expert so what I have to say would mostly be speculation. I also think it’s fair to say we as a society are struggling with resiliency, but I’d also argue life has become exceedingly more complicated, and resiliency is really a moot point when your brain just won’t cooperate with you on a given task. I’ve had employees work under me who I would legitimately have to remind on a weekly basis when they were to come in to teach their class, even though they taught at 2:00 on Tuesday for example, the same time every week for 4 months. At first I thought they were putting me on, until I realized they honestly couldn’t get a handle on remembering their schedule, even sometimes after writing it down.

I have my own “stuff” as we all do, and I can tell you there is nothing more infuriating and painful than repeatedly being told you’d be better at something if you’d only try, when you have poured every fiber of energy you have into trying only to see no improvement. I have a funny little thing that is referred to in layman’s terms as “location blindness”. What’s interesting is, usually people that have this acquired it due to traumatic brain injury, but I just got lucky and have always been like this. I have the complete inability to retain directional information or orient myself in space. I have always had an above-excellent visual memory, so it isn’t like I don’t remember what different places look like, I just can’t fit the puzzle pieces together. It’s all details, no big picture. I have to use GPS to get to the same grocery store I’ve used in town for the past 10 years. When I was first learning to drive, I noticed things just weren’t clicking into place as I’d assumed they would, so I would study directions to places I frequent like one would study for an exam. It did absolutely nothing for this almost straight A student … I still couldn’t tell you how to get from point A to point B. If I get up in a restaurant to go to the bathroom, I have to very deliberately focus on the exact turns “right, left, right again…” that I made as I left my seat and repeat them in my head the whole time like a mantra or I won’t find my seat again, which is always super embarrassing. I recall asking my doctor about it and her saying though the degree to which I seem to have trouble is not as common, it’s not dangerous just wildly inconvenient.

Another struggle that’s a bit less important, wheels and I are not friends. I just barely learned to ride a bike without training wheels before junior high, and I never learned to roller-skate or rollerblade. I made renewed attempts during COVID lockdown when I had copious amounts of time on my hands, and made 0% progress sadly. I recall countless roller arena end of the school year parties growing up, because 90s kid, where I was sitting on the sidelines trying to look like I was having fun and well meaning adults would come up to me and say, “Well I feel bad that you’re sitting here by yourself, but we all make choices about what we want to spend time practicing …” If looks could kill, well …

Oftentimes I wonder if these two funny little mental blocks are related, as both seem to have to do with orientating oneself in space, one physically the other mentally. Who knows … The whole point of these odd little tales is to illustrate the fact that sometimes our brain just says “NO, I WILL NOT,” when it comes to certain things. It’s more difficult when the things our brain refuses to do are common skills that it seems like the majority of others have no problem with. Most people that don’t understand a mental block or question its validity aren’t actually trying to be jerks, they just honestly don’t know what they don’t know. And yes, it’s ok to ask for accommodations and sometimes it will be necessary. However, when we can come up with tools and tricks for ourselves to get around our brain’s refusal it’s not just about pleasing other people. Doing this will also make our own life way easier and less stressful. For my location blindness, aside from using GPS I can when possible check out new locations ahead of time if I have to be there for something important, and leave early enough to accommodate for directional errors or unforeseen circumstances like construction that may throw off my route. Saying “Well, I guess someone has to drive me everywhere because I can’t do this” would only hurt myself and my ability to have a life at all and enjoy opportunities both professionally and for my own pleasure. With time blindness, alarms and reminders can be set to assist with being ready. Even if you have to set 15 alarms before work in the morning, one for waking up one for brushing your teeth, another when it’s time to make breakfast, and so on to dictate the schedule of your whole morning routine… do what helps no matter how silly it may seem to other people. Conversely, when someone shares that they are struggling with something, believe them. There’s not really any logical motivation for faking a difficulty when of course we’d all prefer that everything came easy to us.

I had the wonderful opportunity to lead a community mural in Madison Heights for their ADA Pride Celebration the end of last month, the prompt being “If the inside of your mind were a physical place, what would it look like?” This concept really connects well to these thoughts I’ve just discussed … We don’t know what the landscape of each other’s minds looks like, so listening before assuming is always best.

I will be part of a show at Creative 360‘s satellite location in downtown Midland opening mid this month that celebrates neurodiverse creators and creators with disabilities, so if you are in the area be sure to visit!

What is a struggle you have that you wish there was more understanding about? Let me know in the comments.

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Music and Film

Barbie Is Amazing, A Confession.

I have always loved Barbies, so I figured why not weigh in on my takeaways from the Barbie movie, everyone else is doing it. I’m one of those Barbie people that no one thinks would be a Barbie person … It reminds me of the time my first blind roommate in college didn’t tell me until about halfway through the year that she loved Hello Kitty and watching America’s Next Top Model because she thought I would hate it and judge her. As it turns out, I did indeed already love both of those things (although, let’s be real – ANTM turned out to be toxic as hell, like most reality TV). Maybe it’s because I usually look like the photo on the left when I’m not just in an oversized T-shirt, leggings and glasses, rather than the picture on the right. I owned the book I am posing with long before the Barbie movie, by the way, as well as 2 other coffee table books about Barbie. Part of me has always been a little bit embarrassed about my love for silly girly things meant for children even now as an adult, but as we will come to learn, there is not just one way to be a strong woman.

I even themed my 20th birthday party around Barbie, complete with a very low-budget DIY photo booth with flowers growing out of dreams as a prop, hence the cotton poof clouds. Very conceptual. I am dressed more like the 3rd unknown member of The Dresden Dolls than Barbie, but hey, I just wear what I like. My personal style has never been definitive.

Some minor spoilers ahead, but nothing major, nothing you wouldn’t already catch on to from the previews. I didn’t expect this movie to have any depth whatsoever, so imagine my surprise when both myself and my friend I attended with cried twice. Let’s get one thing straight right away, the visuals were eerily accurate. The sets were like being in Honey I Shrunk The Kids (haha, another 90s nostalgia reference) and walking through your Barbie playsets (Side note, I never had a Barbie house house… my Barbie had a mobile home, which was unfortunately not featured in the movie.). Even the clothes were all replicas of actual outfits throughout Barbie history. The writing was not perfect, and I felt the main “real world” human characters, a mother and daughter, were pretty flat which was a bummer as I really like America Ferrera. Still, there were some great moments with her character here and there. She’s a Mattel employee, and some of her secret “weird and depressing normal people problems” themed Barbie designs that she would never show anyone were pretty amusing. She’s a busy mom who doesn’t have a real sense of who she is, her daughter is just a girl that wears black all the time and defines herself by how angry she is and how she doesn’t like anything including her own mother, so like I said, not ground breaking character development but it’s really about the dolls anyway.

I don’t want to give a lot away, so now I’m just going to list my specific takeaways from the movie. Before I do, I have to address the outcry from grown adults who likely never played with Barbies in their life, that are just obsessed with how much they hate this movie because it’s anti-men… In this movie there is both the Barbie World and the Real World – it’s like Toy Story but with 2 parallel dimensions. In Barbie Land, women hold all positions of power; the heads on Mt. Rushmore are faces of the original Barbie (the founders haha), the Kens just kind of hang out on the beach looking attractive. They don’t even play volleyball on said beach, they cheer for the women when they play. They are quite literally just accessories, which is a riff on how kids play with Barbies. We all know we only pulled our Ken doll out when it was time for Barbie to go on a date and that’s about it. It’s also Mattel kind of making fun of itself because hasn’t Barbie held every job ever invented simultaneously for years? There are multiple comments from the dolls that are some variation of, “Barbie is responsible for fixing all of the real world’s problems because we empowered young girls to be super confident and have everything they want!”. I am not sure whether the problem is that people are taking what is made to be tongue in cheek literally, but between the little slightly sarcastic jokes there was actually a lot of depth and positive messages. It was also great to see a variety of different Barbies (and Kens) populating the land with different races, styles, sizes, abilities (though the wheelchair Barbie was never shown in any of the neighborhood scenes, probably because none of the dream houses are accessible. But moving along…). This was always one of my favorite things about Barbie… all the choices! Though different body types was not an option in the 90s yet, I was never the kid that had an arsenal of all blondes (that model, played by Margot Robbie, is lovingly referred to in the movie as “stereotypical Barbie”). Barbie was really the only doll I saw growing up with that much variation in appearance. With other dolls you only got the choice of a white doll with blonde hair and blue eyes or a black doll (usually with poker straight hair for some reason) and that was about it.

So without further ado, my takeaways from this movie were:

We need everyone. Each person has value. A society where men are in charge of everything isn’t healthy, but nor is a society where women are in charge of everything a better option. Everyone should have a voice.

Change is nessecary, even if you are living your dream life and feel like everything is perfect. Without change you don’t grow. Easy and carefree isn’t always best.

Women’s obsession with embodying and portraying perfection is killing us. The more we play along, the more society will continue to expect it. It is not our job to be everything to everyone at all times, and it’s ok to just be average.

Being a strong woman doesn’t mean you have to be unkind and purposefully intimidate others, can’t present more feminine, or can’t show transparent emotions… there are all different types of strength.

Choice feminism is crap (Choice feminism = the idea that any choice a woman makes is empowering to women simply because she is a woman and she made said choice. This is a super popular ideology right now that I just HaaAAAaate.). Again, I don’t want to give too much away, but at one point as Barbie Land gets tainted by some ideas brought back from the Real World, some Barbies that were formerly doctors and presidents may or may not start serving the Kens beers in little maid costumes and profess how this job is so much easier and so much less pressure, and it still makes them feel confident so is it really bad? I already know not everyone is going to agree with me on this one, but everything a woman does is not inherently empowering simply because she happens to be a woman. There are some choices that are just never empowering or good for women. I’m looking at you Only Fans and amateur instagram “models” posting your bare ass on the internet, but anyway… moving on.

Don’t discount your mothers. Women have a whole world inside that you know nothing about, oftentimes because you haven’t been interested in learning about it or haven’t been paying attention.

Your worth cannot be determined by your relationship to other people. Whether you have a good or bad day, a good or bad life cannot be dependent on how other people react to you and interact with you.

Overall, I was shocked to find this movie that I thought would just be a simple 90s nostalgia trip to be very deep and positive, with a decent amount of content to unpack. Actually, the only moment that made me go “yikes!” a bit isn’t being talked about at all, which is odd. When the Real World starts seeping into Barbie Land, it begins changing the toys themselves and we see a snippet of a new commercial for “depression Barbie”. The ad quips that she comes with unwashed clothes since she hasn’t gotten out of bed for a week, and the panic attacks and OCD accessories are sold separately. That was in pretty bad taste and could have been handled differently in my opinion. My friend and I both looked at each other at that point and just said what the @#$% are you serious… Not sure how that made it past the edits.

On one hand, I kind of enjoy that people are taking more time to read into the messages pop culture is sending in even the most seemingly trivial facets, because movies, music, toys … these things do to some extent shape our culture. However, we should try to do this without the outrage. If you watched the movie and want to let me know what you thought, shoot me a comment.

Who was your favorite Barbie growing up? Glitter Beach Teresa was definitely my girl.

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New Work

Fruits Series : Gentleness / Mixed Media Surrealism

A year later, I have finished the second installment of my Fruits Of The Spirit series, Gentleness. (Visit this link to view my first, Peace.) I certainly don’t plan to take an year to get to each installment of this 10 part series, but I spent 2022 dipping my toe into a lot of new things career-wise, and ultimately deciding what my personal goals were and how I wanted to go forward. I was also focused a lot on teaching art and developing curricula, which helped propel what I’m doing this year forward. Having time once again to revisit my own personal art has been like going on an exciting vacation, and I think I like this 2nd installment even better than my first! Below is a video in which I give some extra background on my thoughts behind this piece and the series itself.

Ever in love with mixed media, I used colored pencil for the face and hands, acrylic for the torso, sky, and water, ink for the birds and egg, and fabric for the mountains, sun, and flowers. The face, hands, egg, and bird were all one piece on mixed media paper. I finished this first, then cut it out and traced it where I wanted it on my canvas. Next I painted all the acrylic straight on the canvas. Once the acrylic was dry, I glued the paper piece down, and following that I used tracing paper to create patterns for all my fabric pieces and glued those on last. Gluing the paper especially is really a ‘trust the process’ moment. Even though I have done mixed media work like this so many times now, I always get nervous adhering the paper bits to canvas because there is a period while it is drying that it looks VERY wavy. It inevitably settles down once it dries, but that doesn’t help my nerves! For any artists out there looking to adhere paper drawings to canvas, I’ve found Aleen’s Tacky Glue works best after trying various super glues, Elmer’s, mod podge, special paper adhesive for scrapbooking, clear sealing mediums … After gluing I lay the canvas face down on a piece of vellum paper (to prevent sticking if any of the glue seeps out from the edges), and set heavy flat objects like books, boxes, etc. inside the frame to keep it pressed overnight. I use mixed media paper because it is a great base for any drawing medium and can even withstand a moderate amount of wetness, an important quality since I know glue will be involved.

I have started my 3rd part of this series already, and will try to be better about taking video throughout the process this time. Follow me for more updates as I go forward on this series, and I’m sure some other projects in between :).

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New Work

Happiest Places

Happy Spring, a time of new beginnings and new art! I had been working on this 3’x3′ piece since the beginning of the year, inspired by a photograph I took at the Japanese Cultural Center in town when I first moved to Saginaw. I used both metallic and traditional acrylics and fabric. Like my other mixed media landscapes, I chose colors that captured what I feel within the place I am painting, not necessarily the true colors from nature.

Most of my art is very heavy in symbolism and story. Those pieces are invigorating to work on, but every so often I need to draw or paint something where the process is more relaxing, and simply celebrates one of my happy places.

2023 has been all about finding my happiest places, not just physically but mentally as well. I had a series of consecutive high stress years that I didn’t even fully recognize as such until I reached severe, shutdown level burnout. I don’t think even the closest people in my life aside from my parents know how truly bad it got. Part of this stress was circumstantial and completely out of my control, but some of it came from the fact that I was trying to make certain parts of my life fit together that were just never going to, like that toy we give to toddlers where they have to fit the different shaped plastic pieces into the corresponding holes. No matter how long they try to push a moon shape into a star opening, it is not going to fit. One of the most valuable things I took away from therapy over the last 3 years was “Don’t live in the land of shoulds”. I had a constant internal dialogue of guilt and shame going, “___ shouldn’t bother me, I shouldn’t be so tired, I shouldn’t be getting overwhelmed, I should have ___ by now, I shouldn’t react like ___ …” There is really not much point ruminating over what should or shouldn’t be, because reality still exists and that energy is better spent doing what we can to change what we don’t like about it rather than chastising ourselves for how we are wired.

Starting in January, I made the big scary decision to make a career transition to entirely contracted and freelance work focusing mainly on different avenues of teaching, as well as other art and design related services. I read a short blurb I happened upon while scrolling before bed the other night that said we as humans basically operate under the assumption that everything is supposed to suck (“work isn’t supposed to be fun!” “life is hard!” “everyone is tired!” “no one gets to do what they want!”), but who decided that? Is this really the best way?

Don’t ever accept a life devoid of joy, but don’t run from struggle either. Yes, life is hard but we get to choose what kind of hard. Not in all circumstances but in many, we get to pick the “hard” that we want to deal with. I made a lot of pretty serious changes around how I spend my time this year, not only with the career switch but in the way I spend time socially as well. I’m an introvert/extrovert blend for sure but I do get some serious communication fatigue. I am no longer giving time to people out of feelings of obligation, and I am no longer wasting time on outings I’m not interested in just to please others. Never fear, I have actually not become a hermit! I still go out and do fun things and socialize, but I have a lot more energy and am a lot less stressed now when I choose to do so. These changes aren’t magic, things are still hard, but it is the right type of hard (for me) and that makes all the difference.

I love teaching in person, but not everyone that wants to learn some of my techniques lives in an area where this is possible so I am open to teaching private or group lessons virtually! If this is of interest, don’t hesitate to reach out.

What changes have you made lately that made you feel more joyful?

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