Besides doing the morning pages Julia Cameron asks you to take yourself alone out on an artist date. It's meant to be alone time with your inner artist, your inner child, your creative soul, or whatever you want to call this part of yourself. Back in 1995 I would have trouble with these dates. They were hard for me to do and I would end up feeling so sad and NOT creative and lonely. Which was ironic because I've always been someone who is recharged by alone time and requires a certain amount of alone time to stay sane. But the artist date felt like pressure back then and I didn't find them very useful to my creative life. I suspect that I just was listening too much to my inner critic without recognizing how the critic was running the show.
Things have changed for me. I don't know what happened or how it happened. I'm not so afraid of the artist date. I think that having lived another decade I see how the passage of time and postponing or avoiding is just wasting more precious time in already too short life. So I say to the artist's date bring them on! I had already made a short list of potential dates after a micro brainstorm while I read Cameron's writing on artist dates. Some of those included going to a few museums, exploring some galleries I've never visited, taking a bird watching hike, and taking out my close up lens and photographing.
As I have been reading AW I have this thought in the back of my head "CLAY - get yourself working again in this media" I think AW will help me in many areas of my life -not the least of which is blogging - but I feel a certain single minded goal of recharging my passion in ceramic clay.
Julia Cameron says,
"As artists, we must learn to be self-nourishing. We must become alert enough to consciously replenish our creative resources as we draw on them - to restock the trout pond, so to speak. I call this process filling the well."Ever heard that quote by Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and The Physiology of Taste 1825
"Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are."What have I been feeding my creative soul in 2005? Well, blogs. A lot of blogs written by creative souls. Wow. No wonder I am so excited and passionate about finally creating my own blog. I've filled this well and now it is overflowing. So I ask myself in relation to clay and the artist way work - how can I restock the clay fish pond?
Then last night it hit me - For my first weeks artist date I'm going to go outside to make impressions of the natural world in slabs of clay. My inner creative soul started jumping up and down - yes, yes!!!! So I thought I would schedule an artist date for Tuesday or Thursday. Well, today when I thought of it - I got all excited again. I said why not now? Yeah, why not now - no sense in postponing inspiration. So, I announced to my husband I'm going out with my clay on my first artist date and out the door I went.
I made impressions of the cedar in front of my studio window. I made a really cool impression of a rock. My favorite is the pinon pine cone end. It looks like a star. I didn't spend a long time at it. But the important thing was listening to that child like side of myself that said "ooo, ooo, what would that look like pressed into the clay?" By the way, prickly pear cactus isn't easy to make an impression of without getting poked and it's not very interesting as an impression.
Something must be happening because as I was making dinner tonight (fajita stew) I noticed how much the veggies seemed to glow. The colors and the textures and smells as I chopped seemed vibrant. For me that is always an indication that the creative is flowing in me. To vibrancy! - To all the other AW bloggers!
