Inspiration and Creativity: Junk it!

 

 

“One thing I k now for sure is that to be a successful artist, you must start with the simplest proclamation: I am an artist. It’s a basic assertion, but seeing yourself as an artist—legitimate and genuine—can be transformational.“– Lisa Congdon

  With life being stressful and causing anxiety, like it is these days, let alone adding personal stressors and anxiety that comes from emotional longings and wounds, we can feel like we are in crises mode all the time.  Even having days that are boringly everyday and we have little to stimulate us, or we see little to inspire us, to uplift us, to give us reason to feel like life could be easier, mor adventurous, more filled with joy, we can turn to creative processes.  It is one of the reasons that I do some kind of art every day.  Art journaling is one of the best ways to start a day and make sure we control the lethargy factors that lead us to feel unfulfilled and sense a lack of purpose. 

A Junk journal is a great thing to have on hand for those times when you need a boost and will help get creative juices flowing.  It is also an emergency lethargy-inhibitor.  A junk journal is a handmade book of recycled materials where you can ‘play’ with bits and pieces that we collect along the way.  I keep one going all the time for those moments of some kind of creative despair.  For June, I will be using an easy homemade junk journal made out of old cards, magazine pages, used art papers, and sharing those processes and pages with you.

One of the benefits of Junk Journaling is that you are practicing creating, allowing free-flow inspiration to make sense of emotions, of daily happenings, of memories…no competition, no foreseen outcomes,   and the benefits of play that we so seldom seem to have time or take time to have happen.  Since the journal is one that is for play, it is absolutely not about perfection or competition. 

Side benefits of Junk Journaling is that it, alone, can draw us out of lethargy or negativity.  (I suggest to do it first thing in morning for a few moments, or to leave it open and ready throughout the day … and, me, all through the night… so you can slip to it ad do a bit of work on a page.) Just a few minutes will start the change.

Another benefit of Junk Journaling is that, as you work on a page, or pages, you begin to realize that you begin to learn new things about yourself, your feelings, and how to express them without words. 

As the days go on, you will sense a sense of personal growth in that your focus expands and learning new thigs, new ways of expression, begin to heal and stimulate personal growth.  You will begin to feel life and self as more vibrant and you will be drawn more and more to do some creating in your junk journal.  Learning new things, experimenting, and the inner thought processes that happen as you are working begins to open up a whole new world of possibilities to you in your everyday life. 

Junk journaling is all about using the ordinary to create what can be extraordinary insight through types of meditation, declaration, contemplation by having no allowance for a critical voice to say you are not doing it right.  It is a JUNK journal.  Anything goes.  Your journal can be about whatever you like, whatever comes up, and there is something empowering about taking short bursts of time to allow for expression. 

Start a box of junk papers.  Grab some old magazines and an old book of some sort that has interesting text or old drawings, etc.  That box is your treasure trove for a junk journal.  Mail slips, receipts, napkins, suddenly the world is full of things you can recycle. 

Beware!  It is addictive and you may feel like you have become a hoarder.  But, when you sit down, there is a whole world of possibilities sitting in your box of collect junk. 

Let’s get junky for June!

©Carol Desjarlais 5.24.23

 

Feelings And Creativity

 

 

“An artistic person taps into the destructive emotional energy of guilt and shame and the longing to love and be loveable and transforms these powerful emotions into a creative force.” - Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

For some of the great painters, there was anywhere from a bit of madness to absolutely insane, but that does not mean that we all are blessed with such.  We are often inspired by strong emotions of some kind and we express those emotions through our artistic endeavors. Many of us are eccentric.   Most of us get lost in the process and for some, it is this escape from reality that we crave. 

When we are creating, I believe we move into unknown spaces and places of our soul.  Sometimes, we scratch t scabs in there.  Sometimes we are trying to extract strong emotions that we have not been able to express and thus apply healing through release.  Sem move into that place to create some kind of order to the chaos that simply living, today, surrounds u with.  Some merely seek the comfort found in that space.

Moving into that sacred space opens our heart an mind.  If we have not found a way to enter there, our focus is narrow and we are unable to give or receive that which is holy. 

Emotions need to be sat down with, have tea with, spend some time in the silent language of creating.  Think WITH them.  Allowing them, those emotions, an opportunity to express themselves, and they become a gift to us as we acknowledge and allow them the opportunity to have their say.  Yes, sometimes your artistic endeavor that rises from that space, is not always esthetically beautiful, but it is soulfully beautiful.  Emotions are an intelligence that we rarely take charge of and they are roiling and boiling beneath the surface of what we do, how we think, what we believe, and how we act on those things.  We are not powerless to our emotions.  We have always been in charge.  We have merely silenced a great deal of them and they are growling and weeping and evident in our lives whether we acknowledge them or not. Within the depth of our emotions, we find knowledge and as source of inspiration we may never have really tapped into without substrate before us an a brush in hand.  (Or anything we use to express ourselves.)  Without acknowledging our emotions, all of them, we lose our passions, we have to persist, dear artistic sisterfriends, persist, and enter into the most sacred space of all:  the space holding our un-expressed sacred emotions.

©Carol Desjarlais 5.24.23

 

Smells Aid Creativity

 

 

Many of us have kept some kind of cloth from our beloved’s life after they pass.  I ha my father’s “little green sweater”.  I have some of my mother’s crocheted throws.  I have some clothing of Man Hans.  When I feel a need to be reminded, I will draw these swatches of cloth to me and still, after two decades, one decade, their scent is still there.  It opens my heart in some way.  

 Funny story, well, sad story, is, that, in the rush,  the clothing I saved of Man Hands were his joke shorts and one sock of a pair he had at the end.  I do not sniff them for memory, but it does remind me of the laughter we always shared.  My youngest maternal sister gave me a throw that my birth mother crocheted.  I wrap myself in it to remind me that I do belong to a tribe.  The scent of rain.  Newly mowed hay remind me of my father.  A warm barn full of milk cows on a cold night reminds me of my grandfather.  Chrysanthemums remind me of my grandfather’s funeral.  Peonies remind me of my mother’s glorious garden.  It is flowers that evoke memories of my mother and make me feel close to her.  I think flowers are most evocative.

Smell is key to memories of person, place, thing, events and can be medicine as well.

When one is depressed or anxious, you can burn frankincense in order to enlighten oneself to an artistic way of healing those feelings in artistic expression. When you are trying to bring a long past memory into focus for expression in art, you can use oil of grapefruit or rosemary to help you.   My favorite is holy wood/ palo santo to ease me into a more fluid intuitive work. 

What scent is most evocative in helping you move more easily into creating?

©Carol Desjarlais 5.22.23