Cold Days for Arts Sake

I am an advocate for hiking any time of day, but I think that morning is the best time to hike or walk anywhere. The air feels cleaner in the morning, as if the movement of awakening life forces stirs up the air molecules and makes them less pure.

Today is a cold day outside. Fifteen degrees with a windchill of 1. For those readers from warm climates not familiar with the term windchill, it is like the difference between your refrigerator and freezer, except you have to walk through. So I will probably stay in and make some art.

This year my sense of time is all a flutter. Even though I have accomplished much, I have done a poor job of holding myself to a schedule.

I’ve always let myself believe that art “happens when it happens”, that it creates it’s own schedule and a creative person needs to follow the path of artistic pace. This is somewhat true, often times ideas and images arrive unsolicited and I feel the pull to get them down on canvas or paper. Unfortunately, the time is not always convenient.

This week I participated in an open zoom studio. Our moderator was Frank Juarez of Art Dose Magazine and a teacher and artist. He is well immersed in the Wisconsin art community and helps bring opportunities for artists of any stage in their career.

https://artdosemagazine.com

Frank brought us together in Zoom format and gave us the chance to not only be together and talk about art and life as artists, but also talk about have been and are currently working on now. It was a great chance to meet new people and even though we were separated by miles, it felt like we were near.

Sharing this process gave me the chance to relearn that being with other artists is a catalyst for creative movement. I found that I can still create on cue and I know that I can slowly start to work on schedule more easily.

I left the meeting feeling refreshed, as if I’d just given myself a long meditation or walk through the clean morning air. I learned a lot and was surprised at my own knowledge that I could pass on. We all know more than we think we do, most learned from life lessons, and it feels good to be able to pass that knowledge to others.

Today I have given myself the gift of time to make some art. Life is good. Time is sacred. May your days be filled with blissful productivity.

Jenny

P.S. I did take myself out for a hike in the Caledonia Conservancy, being underdressed it was a quick, fast paced hike. But It was a needed escape in to nature.