Where do I begin to talk about this creative genius? Again, one of my guilty pleasures (which I never actually feel guilty about) is watching the You Tube channel ehow home of P. Allen Smith. I have never had the privilege of meeting this man, but I love him nonetheless…
He has about two hundred educational videos posted, and they comprise a “how-to” for home life. Many of them don’t interest me. I don’t plan on raising chickens or ducks, but there are so many great ideas. What a fabulous way to spend a snowy morning.
Here he showcases an artist’s studio, a subject I’ve been threatening to feature in my blog for months now. So, let’s get started with this, but do yourself a favor and click over to You Tube and watch more of his wonderful videos! You’ll be glad you did…
Small space? No problem. No budget? No problem. Don’t let your limitations define your creativity! Look at what Charlotte Brown does with 300 square feet…
Inspiring…and fun. She makes a cozy, comfortable and functional home.
Here’s another great one, with an entirely different feeling:
One of my favorite guilty pleasures is the Canadian shelter magazine House and Home. Lucky for us, they also boast a television program available online at houseandhome.com/tv as well as a YouTube channel…(insert THANK GOD for technology here.)
This morning, watching some of the hundreds of videos available, I came across this terrific illustration of living in your artwork, and how dramatically it can effect the space around you…enjoy the next five minutes, and then, go play house…
The fourth vignette makes MY heart skip a beat…which is your favorite?
Now just a few months shy of coming full circle in my year at home, I whittle away at the enormous task of putting my house right after the Smoking Sociopaths moved out and the potential sales have all but evaporated…
Thank You Nancy Allen for sending me the Apartment Therapy article about ridding the house of cigarette smell…daunting, but I have incorporated most of these helpful methods, and it is abating…next week our weather is due to be, once again, unseasonably cool. I will use the suggestion of running the furnace with it’s new filter and all of the windows open. I have had all the carpets replaced or cleaned, the duct work cleaned, have thoroughly scrubbed down all of the ceilings and walls with vinegar, and have now repainted…since the above mentioned moved out just three weeks ago. It has been a lot like work.
Let me just mention that as the profit from the house sale will be my payment for this labor, I am sure to be losing substantially…lucky for me, I LOVE THIS WORK!!! Well…I love the painting and I love the sheer joy of arranging and putting together interior environments…I feel like I am gluing together one big delightful collage to live within…with purpose – the purpose of supporting and encouraging the creative life of a budding artist- in this case, me…(Insert big smile here.)
And as Mies van der Rohe said, “God is in the details…” Tell ’em, Mrs. Blandings…
I “borrowed” this video from one of my very favorite blogs, Content In A Cottage…all’s fair in love and art…
Shortly after the first of the year I began attending a class, a women artist’s support group really, based on Julia Cameron’s brilliant book, The Artist’s Way. When the twelve week program came to an end none of us wanted to stop, so we continue to study with the sequel, Walking In This World.
Any of us women – along with millions worldwide who have studied and worked through these lessons – will tell you, it is life-changing. In my case, it has been life saving.
We meet once a week. We discuss the chapter and our experiences as we work through the tasks, how we are effected by the insights. We offer ideas, support. And although we are careful not to problem solve for each other, problems do seem to resolve themselves mysteriously throughout the following week…it’s uncanny.
Of course, what we are really doing is showing up, being present, learning how to relate differently than the ways that let us down in the past. Somehow we know this is a great privilege, to be here together at this time, and that growing up is a lifelong process.
Susan Steadman, oil on canvas by Lisa Perrine Brown
As we gathered for class last night I complimented Lisa – extraordinary woman and artist – on her choice to paint the living room ceiling of her Victorian home a luscious peacock blue. “Ceilings should always be a color”, I said…and then realized that most of mine are white. It is the first of my homes where I have not painted the ceilings. It is the first home I have never really made my own. My name is on the mortgage, but I’ve never “taken ownership”…it is a house to me. It has never really been my home.
Yesterday, cleaning out a basement shelf, I came upon a box I had never UNpacked since moving in 9 years ago. It was labeled “studio” and contained art supplies. What a metaphor! I had unwittingly packed up my own heart, taped it securely shut, and stored it neatly away on a faraway shelf…
Lucky for me, the heart waits through our slumber to awaken again like a child on Christmas morning. Every morning, Christmas, in our true home, our true heart…where the ceilings glow and the walls shine like diamonds.
So…continuing with the story of how I morphed into Mary Poppins…or, maybe, as my Mom used to tell me: “Learn to spell guru, and then you’ll never need one: G.U.R.U”…
She would take me shopping for Betsey Johnson dresses for my back-to-school wardrobe, then paint a paisley or flower on my face to match my dress before sending me off to school in the morning…the headmaster would send me home for lunch to wash it off, and she would take hold of my shoulders, rotate me, push me back out the door and get that headmaster on the phone!
And another thing she used to tell me:
For a woman with very limited resources, she knew how to get her point across.
She would have LOVED the other Mary Poppins, the Lady…
Yesterday, I alluded to the nicknames Resourceress and Mary Poppins. They are both actually nicknames that two different friends have given to me over the years.
Now, as it happens, I have always been a huge Mary Poppins fan…my Pinterest board titled “the real Mary Poppins” is a reference to my personal belief that we wise and creative women are all good “witches”, or alchemists, spiritual midwives, healers…in fact, I believe that not for the intelligence of creative women throughout history…well…I doubt the race would have survived THIS long. After all, it seems pretty obvious that men are trying their very best to wipe us off the face of…another day…
Mary Poppins was magical…a good witch, even though Disney didn’t blatantly portray her as one. We recognize each other, don’t we…and I like myself for admiring her more than the other Disney heroines…!
Anyway…it is the metaphor – strong, strong, metaphor that she can PULL ANYTHING SHE NEEDS OUT OF HER BAG!!! that insinuates her as every woman…as any mother could certainly attest. But mother or not, few women in our culture have not had to make something out of nothing, pull off a seemingly impossible feat in the stress of the day, and dress up the mundane while entertaining the “children” of all ages. Take the lead, git ‘er done…and don’t break a sweat, or a heel, doing it!
My Mother – an angel like Lincoln’s (the man knew…) – set a great example of grace under pressure. Damn she had a hard life. Good, but I sure wouldn’t want to trade places. Her mother’s was harder…and I know that you see it in your own heritage.
They truly were “resourceresses”…a word that I think my friend, the artist Richard Schemm, made up. He likes to make up words, but also, he has extraordinary women to appreciate in his life. He will tell you: we resource. It’s what we do.
Once I drove from northern Michigan to northern California. I was staying with friends in San Fransisco, but never having been to their NEW home, they decided to meet me at the highway and lead me from there through the complicated streets…so, we stopped for dinner at one of the chain restaurants that congregate near the exits. We ate, and preparing to leave, Debi said, “I have to stop on the way to the house to buy one of those phone jacks that adapt a single jack to a double”…I reached into my purse and pulled one out. She smiled knowingly, and called me Mary Poppins. It just so happened to be the very last thing that I grabbed – along with the phone- as I was walking out on my deadbeat husband, heading off into the distant unknown…
“Everybody’s been there, everybody’s been stared down by the enemy”…I often feel quite foolish here, as I write and post these missives. I am in the sixtieth year of my life, and I feel like I am beginning to express myself honestly after a lifetime of holding back. The shadow was winning, sucking the life right out of me…my history of silence was not doing me any good.
It seems to me that the youth of our culture are so very much smarter in so many ways, and yet I see them succumbing to the same demons of my generation. The addiction of codependence pervades our consciousness and looms larger than life. It’s a paper tiger, but a strong addiction never the less. We risk a painful, slow extinction if we do not wake to it’s evil.
And yet I sense theurgy…evidenced by the creative renaissance in music and in art. When our very existence is threatened everyday, when we feel increasingly powerless, how else can we respond but to become increasingly creative? We had better enlarge ourselves to beat that tiger at his own game. We owe it to ourselves, and to our youth.
So…say what you wanna say, and let the words fall out. I want to see you be brave. I want to see you…and Thank you, Sara.
Well…I’m heavily in like…I had not been a Michael Buble fan until seeing this clip. He handles a heckler, expands himself and performs a random act of kindness and generosity.
I took this off of my new favorite blog, A Thousand Shades of Gray. I know nothing of this writer, Jill Salahub, but do yourself a favor…check out her sweet, well written blog…you’ll be glad you did.
She says people are sick and tired of being afraid. I know I am. But I am in it, this “shitstorm” of shame and guilt and fear…the street fight of my life. Vulnerability, come to find out, is my greatest strength. And I am blessed with “move the body” friends who I can count on to show up for me no matter what; I have won the friend lottery. They live in vulnerability, too…and I am learning how to show up for them; that is my greatest moment of honor. As Brene Brown says, that is when I am aligned with my values, and courage is my value:
Anyone who has been around me for any length of time has heard me quip, “I’d tell you my whole story all at once, but then you might not buy my book.” and they laugh…finally, perhaps, at the age of fifty-nine (damn, I wish I’d have gotten wiser younger!) I am beginning to realize that I need to choose more carefully those with whom I can trust my story:
The bottom line here is that I want to live wholeheartedly. Perhaps for the first time in my life I understand the stakes. None of us are getting out of here alive, but if I cannot have less fear in my days, let me meet those days with courage and the grace to show up for the street fight armed only with vulnerability.
A Painterly Home 