Author: journeyoncanvas

A Place to Stop and Create on Your Journey

This blog is an invitation to revamp your art making space. It’s an encouragement to create a welcoming place to stop and create on your journey. It’s a challenge to consider your own solutions. What will work best for you? This is a challenge to rework your space. Make it someplace where you can make more art more often on your journey!

Celebrating What’s Behind and What’s Ahead

Some of “what’s behind” is full of warm memories and grounding stuff that I want to take with me to my journey’s end. As I celebrate my 53rd birthday, I embrace the life I have ahead as well as “what’s behind,” and I feel completely and totally blessed. You will continue to see me obsessively paint the past, but don’t think that I am stuck there. I choose to be there, and I like it. Life is meant to be lived and remembered. Today, I choose to do both on my journey. Join me.

Busy, and I Like It!

I hear music, look at a photograph, study a painting, or enjoy a performance, and I am moved and changed. The experience is spiritual and intense. Suddenly, everything is transformed. I see that there is the clean water that we drink, and it restores. I also see creative expression that quenches the thirst of our souls. Both refresh us. This blog explores creativity’s power to revitalize and reinvigorate us. I also encourages the “creatives” who release this power to the world.

Art Brings Me Hope on My Journey

How will you get through? What do you have on your journey that you can rely on? Consider the power of creative process to ground you and give you a way through these challenging times. How can art making help you make sense of things as you take the next step into tomorrow? How can creative process lead you on your journey and bring you hope despite uncertain times? I challenge you to find an answer to these questions and then share what you discover with others. Creative process is a gift that can be shared and encouraged. Find yourself an expressive voice and then help others find theirs. Let your art speak. This blog will help you get started on finding your own form of creative expression and helping others discover theirs.

Creative Process, Joy, and Peace

How do we find happiness? The proper frame of mind is often touted as the key. This can leave people feeling like a moral failure. The bills cannot get paid, the heat is turned off, or a loved one has just passed on. The idea of happiness can seem ludicrous to those in hard places on their journey. How do you find joy despite life’s challenges and struggles? Here are some thoughts for those of us who are trying to find peace amidst the storms.

“Today’s Me” is More than I Give Her Credit For

How do you use creativity to better understand your journey? Art has the power to reveal so much about who you are, where you have been, and what might be next for you. What can you create that can open your eyes and let you see a little bit more about God’s plans and purposes for you? How can you use that insight to better tell you spiritual story? This blog just might give you inspiration to explore this question.

Looking Back, Moving Forward

If you need to let go of something you’ve been holding on to, how can you do it in a way that lets you move forward? Your journey doesn’t need to go out with the trash. As you look back on your story, consider creative ways that you can archive the road you have traveled. Make a video, take some photos, or start a creation that lets you capture something meaningful about the trip you have taken. Share what you discover and what you create. You can do it here, or you can find another way. What I do suggest is that you tell your story. The journey has more power when it’s shared.

Swirls or No Swirls?

I do fear that others will think I am self-aggrandizing, but I’m coming to see that this is not right thinking. Imagine if all artists hid their work so others wouldn’t think they were self-promoting. What a waste. The creative journey is meant to be seen. Everyone is part of the process. Art is much about the exchange between the creator and the responder. I’m ready to more bravely share my journey on canvas. Read this blog and then tell me: Swirls or No Swirls?

Take a Journey Back to Move Forward

My creative process eases the angst I would otherwise feel about the passing of time. It is a true friend on my journey. How can you take a journey back in your own unique way? How can creative process help you as you make sense of the past and move forward? Dive into trying something new or explore a present creative process more deeply. Here’s some encouragement to get you started!

Looking Forward with Hope

Consider your journey and the internal work it has done for you. What work do you still need to do so that you can be ready for “What’s Next” and say goodbye to “What Was”? What steps do you need to take so that you can look forward with hope? Find a way to say “Goodbye” so that you can let go when it’s time. “Paradise Lost” brings me strange peace. It has been my way of being ready. It’s your journey. Find your way. Then, share what you learn on the journey.

Journey Down a New Road

Your journey can take an interesting turn. You can make something. It doesn’t have to look real and it doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else. Find your own way of sharing your story. I use birds, trees, swirls, apples, and objects to communicate through my work. What can you use to communicate your journey on canvas? Maybe this blog won’t compel you to share your journey here, but I hope it compels you to explore your options for sharing your own journey. May you find the freedom that I find when I create.

Hope is Here!

I see that every stroke I’ve made and every word I’ve written has been an attempt to sort things out for myself- to find my meaning. I see that my creative process has always been central for me. I understand that my spirituality has always mattered even though how I express it has changed form. The biggest theme, however, is hope. I’ve never given up on it even when my words and works were darkest. I have always been convinced that hope is here.

Grace Journey

I have walked in an emptiness, confusion, and disorientation for a long, long time: struggling to be at peace with all of this but returning to the same tumultuous place. I have finally crossed over from struggle to new peace. I can feel the line I have crossed over. I can feel the difference. I can feel the shift inside of me. I am so much less afraid of what’s different and so much less afraid of what’s different about me. I look back on this liminal space—this in-between space where I have tossed, turned and hovered for so long. With this retrospect, I now see its value. All those years of incubating have given me fresh eyes. They see something new and truer about you and me, and that is all together very different.

Traveling Together on the Journey

What’s so wrong about going back in time and visiting a place that you’re happy to be in? If my paintings let me do that, I’ve just taken a little journey and I’ll be back to the present soon enough! How does your creative practice help you on your journey? Does it let you go places you couldn’t otherwise go? Consider that in spite of the fact that we don’t even know each other, we will be traveling together on this journey. We do this through the simple act of choosing to go where our canvas takes us. Onward!

Transformed by My Story

My past, my passions, my spirituality and my present are all rolled into one piece of art. When I share, I pass that baton and my story reaches out to others. If someone is inspired to share too, it’s like ripples from a stone tossed in a pond: out, out, and out yet again.

Using a Journal for Reflection: Looking Back and Moving Forward

I write to keep things. These blogs provide a way that I can look back and make sense of things. When I am done writing, I have a sense of peace and optimism about moving forward. Today, I ponder my Peacock Collage. Peacock feathers pop up in my work fairly often. They remind me of my mom and my sister from my eyes as a child. This is my way to reflect and then to move forward with new understanding.