Hope you have had a marvelous summer. This summer I started on a journey to become a Soul Art Guide. Soul Art is a journey of discovery with lots of art techniques to help you discover your own creative soul. This is a marvelous program created by Laura Hollick (http://www.soulartstudio.com). Sometime in the Fall I hope to have finished the first certification, which will allow me to facilitate soul art classes to help anyone with their creativity - more on that later. The goal of the Soul Art journey is to “ tap into our own creative spiritual mastery and let it become a sacred gift to the world” as described by Laura Hollick. Anyway, I am on this journey and so I thought I’d share some of the process with you.
One of the first things you need to do is to make sure your space is clean and uncluttered so that you will not have any blocks to your creativity. Needless to say, I really know this from experience but I let my studio become horribly cluttered with over 10 years of trying many materials and painting a lot of paintings. I realized that I no longer wanted to come into my studio because it was too cluttered. So I have been very busy for over a month cleaning out my studio space. It's turned into an enormous project that needed the garage cleaned out to get some needed space to store things.
I have to say that it really has been an enormous release and I feel rejuvenated. I thought I’d share with you somethings I’ve learned about clearing your own space and a few tips on products you can use to clean your art space. It really helps when you feel overwhelmed to just start making piles. The ones that helped me the most were: 1. Give Away or Sell 2. Throw Away 3. Keep. You might want to add another pile for Can’t Make Up Your Mind. I really felt overwhelmed and did not know where to start. It turned out that I did not start in the studio but started making piles in the garage. Pretty soon I was able to take carloads to Good Will and even start a Dump pile. When I finally got to the studio it was so much easier because I had a place to put the things that I use infrequently.
One of the problems I faced in the studio was that I had neglected to clean my floor for a number of years and it had dried oil paint. I don’t know how I let it get in this state but I knew I had to get it clean. Originally I wasn’t worried about the floor because we had put down Pergo and I thought it would clean up easily. The trouble is oils are very different from acrylics and I had switched to oils several years ago. Here’s a short video to show you what I discovered.
You can also check out 22. Roaring Camp Caboose for some comment on the spiritual side of letting go (www.CafaRelliArt.com/blog/).
I did get some Plein-air painting done this summer too. Our Plein-Air group went to Davenport Beech, which was quite lovely with nice wild flowers. Check that out below: