Storm sailor

Last week a fellow musician, who by the way has challenged himself to write a song per week, told me he'd written a song inspired by one of my paintings, posted above.  He even sang it for me. 

Art feeding art.

I don't know if I can adequately explain how encouraging and creatively satiating this was for my often starving artist's soul.  Dare I admit that my artistic self is often like a beggar, desperate to be fed with kind words about the value of my creativity?

Does anyone else feel this way? 

At the same time I'm thinking more about my need and my calling to be autonomous;  to create no matter what others say.  It's a mysterious paradox, this being made both for creative community and for independence.

This picture, by the way, was painted last winter, about the time I started this blog.     

Summertime trigger

Interesting to think over my art blog gaps and wonder why these occur.  This low key summer isn't much of an excuse.  I've had the time.  Our internet works. Our computer hasn't been stolen and I haven't even broken both arms.

In light of my most recent art blog gap I'm realizing I've had an underlying dread of summer for most of my life.  Funny how not blogging about creativity would bring this to light.  It's becoming clearer to me that this dread stems from so many childhood Junes when my restless father made his yearly announcement we might move.  Summers were when we travelled with him on his itinerant lecture tours. We saw many countries and richly cultured places.  And we watched my dad research possible relocations for our family.  Mercifully, I still spent most of my school years living in one place with  friendship continuity during school months.  Even so, by end of June, most of these friends, who attended an international boarding school where I was a day student, headed back to their parents and homes in other countries.  Summer strikes again. 

Now I'm wondering, since I do that a lot, if certain seasons trigger anyone else creativily, either toward increased freedom or toward artistic blocks.  And what might be underneath these triggers? 

Something very useful I've gained from my part time work in holistic health is that the more issues are acknowledged and identified, the simpler the correction for them is.  Time, or summertime, will tell if this is true for creativity.