Pretty Wonderful!

I recently retired from my university job as an art therapist. I decided to do this on my 60th birthday as a great gift to myself. I loved many aspects of the work but years of witnessing trauma, illness and death had taken their toll. Despite all the self-care I engaged in, I found myself prey to a variety of ailments which grew worse over time.

I love art therapy; that desire to heal is an innate part of my personality, but the balance is going to shift. Now, I'm spending most of my days in the studio making art. Occasionally,  I'll still facilitate art therapy groups, in particular the Young Adult Bereavement Art Group, which I helped to initiate.

Friends ask me how retirement is going and I answer--fabulous! I find myself as busy as ever, without having to commute and I get to devote the time I need to the craft and business side of art, as well as to the craft of art therapy.

One of the surprising joys of this transition is the ability to take time for things as simple as washing dishes. What used to be a drag after 10 hours away from home, now feels like playing with bubbles in warm water when I need a break.

In a few weeks, I'll take part in an exhibition curated by Sara Post at the Davis Art Center. Titled "Material Worlds," the exhibit looks at the materials that go into artists' work and the ways in which these materials combine with ideas to bring art into being. An enticing notion, I'm excited to see what will emerge. I'll be showing three different works, which take the botanical monoprints cut into trapezoids, rectangles and squares and piece them together, quilt like, on a hardboard panel.

Although I didn't anticipate it, perhaps the piecing together of these papers is a metaphor for taking my life into my hands and  reshaping it. So far it's working and my ailments are melting away.

Circle Game

There are  many things for which I count down--the time 'till I get to hit my studio again, a few days off or a get together with friends. My favorite: thinking about transitioning from the role of art therapist to that of artist and teacher.

I've used the circle in my work for many years and in my new series, Counting Down, I'm using the circle as a symbol to represent the act of counting. In Counting Down, the circle functions as a clock form, in which the circle is divided into four parts, each part slightly offset from the other.

The various circles function as a series of crazy clocks in which time flies both forward and backward; into the future and back into the past.

The pieced together circles are made using monoprints. This process serves a double function. I save many of the prints that don't quite turn out right. When I print over them with a solid color, you can see the shadow of images below--as if through a screen or a veil. They have an ethereal quality--as if you could almost touch them, but not quite, much like the future for which we conjure dreams, but can only guess what it will really feel like.

And I love the irony of the series title and the process. When I think of counting down, I'm looking at time passing, but I'm not in the present (how can I be?) Yet, on the other hand, the act of putting together the circles places me squarely in the present, neither reaching backwards into memory and history or ahead in the time that is yet to come.

This is what I love about art. It has the ability to transport us; as a viewer into the past or future, or, as the maker, directly in the place in which we stand.

Tiny Desk Art

How does an artist keep making art when the flow of life brings a series of not so fortunate events? That's what's been happening to me lately. From a fractured foot to a persistent virus, not to mention getting rear ended, was life conspiring to keep me from the studio?

With little time and less energy, it seemed that the obvious solution was to make smaller work. "But I don't want to make smaller work!" an inner voice whined. "O.K.,"-- I answered the voice, "but smaller work can add up." It occurred to me that I could use the same journal format that I'd been practicing in my recent work.

I approach my work in an additive way anyway, creating one print or collage and building on that with the next one, and so on; day after day. At the end of a run (determined by season or plant material), I curate them into a composition that adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

This time, although the size would be smaller, I could still use a sequential format. Then, the words "Tiny Desk Concerts" came to mind. I remembered that these were intimate musical events  performed live at the desk of one of NPR's music hosts, Bob Boilen.

Great idea! I figured that I could work the same way. During a break at the hospital or lunch, I could stack the key board on my computer monitor and employ the resulting 13" wide open space for art making. Tiny desk art indeed. But my patch was large enough to fit a cutting board. And where would I keep my materials? I slid open my file drawer, revealing a box of jasmine tea, some almonds and chia seeds, and added a pencil box of collage materials and a folder of colorfully printed papers.

There is a sequence of 3 letters: prn, medical shorthand for the Latin phrase: pro re nata, or, "as the thing is needed."

I love that phrase "as the thing is needed," meaning not always, not every hour or even every day, but when you need it. And that, for the time being, is how I'm making art.

Opening a Studio

 

I wrote earlier about how I jumped at the idea of joining the Davis Artist Studio Tour. It didn't take long until I got into the nitty gritty of the details. Oh my gosh--I'm out of storage area! Time to comb through books and framed pieces and empty frames. Four bags of books head off to the library sale. Several obsolete frames and posters make their way to the ASPCA. After dusting the shelves, there's literally more room to breathe--and more room for art making.

When you take on a group project like the Davis Art Studio Tour, you invest some money up front. This could be a disincentive, but for me, its already proved its worth. Widening the circle of the artists I know has been wonderful--as well as practical. DAST divides itself into committees in order to organize the event and I found myself on the social media committee with artists Betty Nelsen and Adele Shaw, both talented artists and amazing human beings.

In addition to meeting new folks, there's the super plus of group energy. When you have 30 artists all planning "save the dates,"studio shots and art shots for Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, there's a lot more incentive to jump in and go with the flow.

So I've taken the jump and ordered a print rack as well as a complicated device called a "transfer gun 3M adhesive dispenser," which allows me to mat prints at a good pace. I'm excited. I've also discovered new Ampersand panels that I can use for mounting prints and all I need is a good weekend to dig in and begin to stockpile my work. Perhaps this one is as good as any!

All Hands on Deck with Palliative Care

Every so often, I think that it's time to take a break from my blog. This happens when I feel like I'm reaching for topics and even though life seems to be full of them, I can't see the forest for the trees.

What I know is this: I've got a presentation for our Pediatric Palliative Care Consortium here at UC Davis Children's Hospital that's scaring the pants off me--nearly. Because instead of playing it safe and using Powerpoints to hide behind, my co-facilitator and I are going to ask people to break up into groups and interact with one another.

That's not such an unusual thing in the art therapy world, but when you switch to the academic and medical world, there is an increasing distance between the tangible and the virtual.  In a recent New York Times editorial by Richard Kearney, entitled: "Losing our Touch" he notes,

In medicine, "bedside manner" and hand on pulse has ceded to the anonymous technologies of imaging in diagnosis and treatment.

All around us, we are showered with information from ubiquitous social media (of which this blog is a part), wherein we remain at a discreet distance from whoever is providing information on the other end. Now in classes, we often face computers instead of professors. And as you gain professional status, you frequently find yourself in your own office, trying to engage a in webinar, which tends to lull you to sleep rather than enliven the finer points of a subject.

During our part of the day, I want the participants to experience as much as possible, the kind of immediacy that occurs when one is faced with a palliative care patient; the overwhelming feeling of questions that you have no idea how to answer such as : "Is this diagnosis dangerous?" and reaching deep down for some untapped source of strength.

Full humanity requires the ability to sense and to be sensed in turn: the power as Shakespeare said, to "feel what wretches feel":--or one might also add what artists, cooks, musicians and lovers feel. We need to find our way in a tactile world again. We need to return from head to foot, from brain to fingertip, from iCloud to Earth. --Richard Kearney

To this end, we've reserved a room that has tables facing each other rather than toward the front of the room. We'll divide up into groups and tackle a case that involves the anticipatory grief that patients face upon diagnosis. Then we'll take that case through the course of an illness to hospice and beyond, to bereavement.

I hope to model the kind of direct hand to hand care that we want practitioners to offer patients. To do that we want to identify inner strengths, the qualities that each of us possess which allow us to enter tough situations and to be of service, no matter how daunting the circumstances. We'll lay out a banquet of images and after explaining a simple SoulCollage technique, we'llask people this question:

What quality do you call on within yourself to support children and families in their grief?

We'll invite them pick images that speak to them, to their soul, about the qualities that give them the strength and compassion to approach and support families and children at the this crucial stage of life. Can you imagine what will happen if we share these qualities with each other?