Heartsong Studio

    

Do you shudder at the thought of marketing your art ?  Is the very idea of promoting your work somehow foreign to your sensitive, artistic side ?

Well, you aren’t flawed, over-sensitive, or even lacking self-confidence. Your repulsion of trying to make yourself more attractive is a good sign that you’ll make a great job of marketing your artwork.

Marketing art is the bane of many artists. It feels like a totally unrelated job to being an artist.  But the sharing of your work, the letting go of your creations is the completion of the creative cycle.  It makes room, literally and figuratively, for the next
step in your work’s journey.

Showing your work isn’t about making it or yourself more attractive.  It isn’t about guessing what types of art people want.
Any attempt to make your art or yourself more attractive comes across as artificial or manipulative. 

When did you last feel the urge to do something unusual, like buy a piece of art ?  Did you jump right in without another
thought because it was so attractive ? 

I don’t.  If I get the urge to buy someone else’s work, I’m very cautious until I’m quite sure that I’m going to love it forever,
that the image really speaks to my heart, and stays on my retina. That’s what makes it a safe buy for me. 

It’s the same for everyone, buying anything of importance.  Buyers want safety.  They already know what they find attractive.  They need to feel safe enough to trust that pull from their heart. 

The fact that you feel repelled by coercion is a wonderful guide. The viewers of your work are very much like you.  They don’t
respond well to being talked into, or completely ignored, any more than you do. 

If you find someone who’s lost, your impulse is to help them find the way they’re seeking.  Your impulse to help will guide you to connect with your viewers’ needs, and allow them the support and
spaciousness to feel sure of their impulses.

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Doing what you love and marketing it are close to the same thing. If you make the art you truly love, then helping people who also love it to feel right about buying it will be providing them with loving support.

Now until they’ve become a paying client, you don’t want to give away a fortune in attention.  Just a little attentive listening
will put them at ease.  Listen for what they need.  It’s in their words or lack of them somewhere. 

If a potential client asks you about your work or yourself, of course you should answer them.  It’s often subtle hints that tell you what they really want to know, and how much they’re just being polite. 

Once they become clients, then they give to you in return, and you have a reciprocal relationship which could easily continue in
future.

Your artwork also goes out into the world, encourages other people to find meanings there, and your creative process continues to thrive. 

Marketing - showing and selling - doesn’t have to be a tainted or coercive business.  Doing what you love and marketing it with love can be part of connecting with the wider world.

Selling your art work is a perfectly natural part of the creative cycle.

Do you have a difficult time getting out of your head when making art ?  How can you create from your heart when you are so used to being responsible, and taking care of everything ?  I share your plight in this, and hope you’ll find some light shining through the cracks in this article.
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“Why Control is a Limiting Illusion”
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My sister could always go out on any lawn, bend down and pick up a four-leaf clover.  Every time!  She drove me nuts with her “luck”. Then, I would go out  and look for hours, and never find a single one. 

I read somewhere that there is a much larger percentage of four-leaf clovers than I would’ve imagined.  So, why couldn’t I
ever find one ?

Somehow my sister had no ego stake in her ability to find four-leaf clovers.  It was perfectly natural to her.  The moment your goal becomes to be someone special, it becomes so important, that you are blinded to the bigger view.  Your real goal is to be the one who finds it,  rather than taking part in the magic of finding.

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You need to have some concept, feeling, or idea before setting out to make a piece of art.  But if this crosses the line of partnership,  then it can turn into the illusion of you actually controlling all of your creation, without a chance for the subject to have a say.  Just as in any relationship, that kind of control stunts the growth of the partnership. 

This “I am the creator” attitude is actually bound up with quite a bit of fear, I think.  By being used to scarcity in some way or
other, this person feels compelled to have to do it all. . . to take it all on.  

While so burdened with responsibility, she cannot even notice all the beckoning ideas, variations, possibilities that are right in front of her.  So many opportunities are lost because the doorway between her heart and the heart of the painting is clouded.

What is the price of holding onto control so tightly ?  Have you seen paintings on display which look rigid, and somehow predictable?  They look like they were pre-planned, and they probably were. 

But real living things and ideas grow organically, and have many nuances and anomalies which got there naturally.  An interesting piece of art grows the same way.  With the help of an artist an idea is allowed the space to breathe and grow into an entity of its own.
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Once I had a commission to paint “my rendition” of a photograph of the client’s home on the prairies.  I took on the challenge, because he had said I could do whatever I wanted with it.  Quite the confidence in my skills ! 

But of course, this was very tough to do with only the photo to guide me.  I’ve never seen that place, so I had nothing to go on beyond the photo, except his description of what it had been like.

There has to be a breaking away time, the earlier the better, when the original inspiration or source idea needs putting out of sight. Then you can get into relationship with the subject, and it with you.  After the initial fear of flying blind, a working
relationship takes over, if you give it a chance. 

I’ve always suffered under the illusion that I had to be responsible for nearly every outcome.  Making this break had always
been fearful.  It meant giving up control.  And even though I knew intellectually this is an illusion, the body’s memory is like an
elephant’s.

If you don’t make this separation early enough, it soon becomes an exercise in technical copying.  The result is as shallow as this sounds.  Separation time is always haunted by fear, however slight.

It is actually letting go your illusion of control.  One approach to letting go, that works for me, is to remain curious.  Let
yourself be surprised.

I had to physically get into the scene of my commission.  Eventually, it started to grow on me.  It was through the physical
relationship of painting an 8 foot triptych that I couldn’t see the whole thing until I went out my studio door, that the piece
took on a life of its own. 

Once I stopped running back and forth, I literally, physically, got into  relationship with it.  I had to trust its own spirit
to guide me with a gentle, willing heart.

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I used to haunt secondhand shops, and once had a rash of finding cashmere sweaters for under $5.  It didn’t happen at first.  I had to “put in my time” of just plain looking at everything. 

Once I noticed this streak of “luck” though, it stopped dead.  Never happened again.  Why ?  Because I had bought into the
illusion of control — that it was something I could make happen.

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It was the four leaf-clover all over again.  And it was every stiff, uninspired painting I’ve ever made too. 
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Creating from your heart, in cooperation with your head, takes genuine humility.  It takes a willingness to find the unexpected, or the unknown ; to risk living your connectedness in the flesh.

As long as you cling to the illusion of control, you will keep finding yourself ultimately bored with the results.  Nothing
ventured, nothing gained is as true for making any art as it is for any other part of life. 

Don’t overlook the buddy system.  To find a buddy to share your stuckness can help immensely.  Others can often see in us what we are too close to see in ourselves. 

The subject of control is one with which I have a vast wealth of experience.  I’ve found it is the biggest threat when not
recognized by the owner.  Once recognized, it can be melted with the heart’s gentleness, patience, and time. 

You cannot surrender, in fact, but you can stop not surrendering.

Celeste Varley
“Oh! for a horse with wings” -Shakespeare
Let our hearts sing and take flight!

      
Do you toil and sweat over artwork, while envying other artists who seem to just create effortlessly ?  See if you can find a Valentine in this article by Celeste Varley.

“The Hard Work of Becoming Spontaneous”

Do you remember seeing those love scenes in old movies, where the lovesick Romeo stands under the damsel’s window serenading his heart out ?  Love came so easily in the olden days, at least in our
fantacies.

Really effective works of art which grab your attention at a glance,appear to be made spontaneously too.  When you see these works, do you automatically envision the artist standing at the easel, sort of
throwing on the paint with wild abandon ?

You might also imagine that this is a kind of talent, which is probably born intact in a “real” artist, and which you apparently
don’t have.  Else, why would you need to struggle to achieve any work with meaning ?

It all looks so easy.  Spontaneity is a lot like Love.  In order to receive it, to reflect it back, you have to be able to give it. 

Have you ever admired a consummate actor ?  The kind who seems to be just being himself spontaneously ?  Or a wonderfully fluid dancer drifting across the stage as though on angel wings ? 

Actors go through long periods of learning to inhabit a role.  The impressive roles are actually not acted, in the sense that the
actor is not pretending.  Actors need to find an actual experience that closely relates.  The emotions they show are entirely real. 

When an actor cries, the tears are real, though the situation may not be the one being portrayed.  He has to search out his past experiences with as similar a feel as possible, bring it to heart, and then actually live that emotion for real. That’s why good
acting is so convincing - because it isn’t pretending. 

Easy flowing artwork is effective for the same reason. It also has a long history behind it, you can be sure.  Like universal Love, it doesn’t just pop out willy-nilly every once in awhile. Any effective art has to be the product of a real response of artists to the subjects they feature.   It only looks easy.

Love only comes from our Inner Being which has found the profound value in everything, also usually the result of experience and growth.  Many poets have extolled the pain and virtue of true love.

Often this comes after many years of hard work.  Just like fluid dancers, who come off stage and bathe their raw feet, they aren’t
hiding the pain of experience, but rather embracing it.

Real mastery results in art that looks easy.  But not with tricks. Tricks are phoney. To pursue tricky techniques is to waste valuable time, and to focus on the wrong end of the stick.  No lover worth wooing would fall for cheap come-on lines either.

Masters in any art do not make a goal of looking easy, they work long years, with discipline, so it becomes “easy” in a sense. 

All artists are practising what they love.  To do what you love is to come closer to being your authentic self.
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Success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.

Does the mention of discipline clash with your idea of art ?  Successful artists practice discipline all the time.  Like Lovers,
they don’t wait until Cupid or the Muse is upon them.  They go to the work regularly, five or more days a week, with an open heart.

This is the reason why art societies or groups who meet on a regular basis are so effective.  They support one another in their resolve to stick at it.  Like-minded people are also great providers of unbiased observation of your work, when you ask.

But most of the hard work of becoming spontaneous grows out of solitude and long years of ongoing introspection and growth.
Life’s experiences, if we can learn from them, are made for growing wings.  A happy balance of solitary work and sharing makes for on-going growth.

What artist hasn’t found a lovely passage in the work of another and longed to be able to make use of it ?  Envy is the sincerest
form of flattery.  Envy and flattery are about outer appearances.
To admire the art of another is one thing.  But to find your own meanings is to make space for the love from within.

Inspirations come and go.  They are like crushes, or being besmitten.  They don’t last, though they certainly can refresh.
The more you welcome them, the more they will come your way. 

But, like butterflies, they will elude you if you chase them.  Yet turn your attention to other things, and they will come and
alight softly on your shoulder.

Inspiration can be the nectar that eases the work that you love, towards spontaneity.
“May the beauty you love be what you do; there are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the earth.”  Rumi

Celeste Varley
“Oh! for a horse with wings” -Shakespeare
Let our hearts sing and take flight!

“How Simplicity Can be Perfection”

Do you ever wonder if you have a perfect work of art in you ?  You know, when you feel a really juicy inspiration coming over you . . .

So everything is going along swimmingly.  You’re in fine form, just painting, carving, or potting up a storm.  But then you start to get giddy with pre-success.  Maybe you don’t even notice when you’ve crossed that invisible line. 

Sort of like at a party, when you’re telling a story and don’t notice it’s time to stop. If you’ve galloped ahead in making a piece of art, stop the moment you sense this happening. 

We often get into a kind of losing game of trying to make an image “work” somehow, by adding just a little more of this, or maybe another area of that.  When in truth, we’ve gone way past the thing that doesn’t work.

Whipping a dead horse never brought it back to life.  Knowing when to stop and knowing when it’s finished aren’t necessarily the same thing.
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Do sculptors have a clearer task of finding the right balance of simplicity ?
 
When  Michelangelo was asked how he sculpted his statue of David, he was reported to have said : “I just cut away everything that wasn’t David.” 

Sculpting is often a task of taking material away, while painting is a task of adding more and more.  So, you need to approach that point of no return with caution.  It’s a matter of becoming sensitive to the flow of energy, both yours and that of the work.

When you begin a carving, a song, a meal, or a painting, there’s one subject or point you have in mind to convey, like a main topic of conversation.  A satisfying conversation usually centres around one topic.

But have you ever been involved in a conversation where everyone talked at each other, and no one really listened to anyone else ?  Each was upstaging the other for attention.  Wasn’t it hard to listen to ?  Where did you focus ?

There are works of art like this; a cacophony of attention getting objects, and no one centre of focus.  A work of art which is made with everything in equal detail is like a conversation with everyone talking at each other, and no one listening to anyone but himself.

A meaningful work of art, like a meaningful conversation has a clear heart connection with a single subject at the start, without pre-conceiving the whole work ahead of time and choking the life out of it.  

A clear feeling or response at the start is a key to supporting the whole work throughout its growth.  A living thing has to reveal itself as it develops, even to the artist.  But if nothing seems to be revealing itself, forcing it with false enthusiasm will only make things worse.

The heart doesn’t get giddy.
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It’s the mind that gets jazzed up with its own cleverness.  Sometimes it’s the busiest of minds which are working hard at covering up something hidden within. 

If joyous, bounding enthusiasm isn’t streaming out of your work in progress, then what’s needed isn’t more action, but more connection. 

Sit with it.  Go inside and reflect in the mirror of your heart, what it is you need.  The seeming slowness of response is no indication of your work empty of possibilities.  It may very well be a sign of an imminent breakthrough or insight.

But if you’re like an anxious parent who pushes her youngster to excel at something before it’s ready, you will deny the individual uniqueness of your creation. 

Even the rhythm of the process of a work of art is highly individual.  Feel your own rhythm through your breath and heartbeat.  Slow down your eager mind, and help it to listen to the truth of your heart. 

A satisfying and effective work of art also has a unique life of its own, separate from you the artist.  It can grow, given enough spaciousness to develop naturally.   If you see into your work with innocent eyes, you will find what needs to be added sometimes, but more subtely, what needs to be left alone.

It isn’t easy, to be simple enough to be good.
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It’s much harder to take away, in painting, than to add.  In sculpture, adding might be almost impossible.

When you arrive at the heart of the work, simply stated, it doesn’t look simplistic, but rather uncluttered. That’s the goal which isn’t simple to reach at all.  But you’ll know when you really see it, that it is enough  -  simple perfection.

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away,” wrote French writer Antoine de St.-Exupery.

What are your experiences with simplicity ?
Would you take anything away from, or add to this article ?

Celeste Varley
“Oh! for a horse with wings” -Shakespeare
Let our hearts sing and take flight!

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Do mistakes haunt you ?  Do they creep into your work when you
least expect them ?  And then, what can you do if they spoil the
whole thing ?

If you sometimes tear out your hair when you’ve made a mistake,
this article “Out, Out, Damned Spot !” by Celeste Varley might give
you hope.

It’s not so bad if a mistake happens near the beginning of a piece
of art.  If you notice the colour of a certain passage is a bit
“off”, instead of going ahead on another area while you think it
over, just stop.  Don’t work on anything else. 

Until you fix the “off” passage, it will influence everything else
you do.  Even when it’s nowhere near what you’re working on. 
Everything you do after the “wrong” passage, will be also off
balance with the whole.

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What is a mistake actually ?  Is it an accident, a chance
happening, an error in judgment, or an unfortunate coincidence ?
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Mistakes are only mistakes by your consent, and by your definition.

Mistakes are like dirt.  Do you know this definition of dirt —  
Dirt is misplaced matter — hair on butter ;  butter on hair.

Did you ever consider a ‘mistake’ may be trying to tell you
something ?  Turn round your work and upside down.  View its mirror
image.  See what might be hiding there in your  ‘mistake’,  wanting
to find you.

Like Amerigo Vespugi, you may have been looking for the Orient and
bumped into America by mistake.  So give this new world a chance
before making it walk the plank. 

Seriously, consider the possibility that ‘your’ mistake could be
trying to tell you something you might not know.  Do you make a
mistake, or does a mistake seek you out ?  It’s a corollary to the
“no such thing as coincidence” theory. 

The theory goes like this:  There are some disowned or orphaned
images that are floating around in universal creative energy.  They
want to be found like the American continent wanted to be “found”.  

Maybe the one that finds you does so because there’s some new
possibility you need to see. 
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One little ‘mistake’ could hold many possibilities.
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“Out, out, damned spot !” cried Lady Macbeth who was haunted by
blood on her hands after taunting her husband to commit murder.
Mistakes can sometimes haunt you with messages that you are unable
to hear at first.

Besides  showing you that what you did wasn’t ‘right’, and do
not try this again, it could be showing you a whole continent of
unexplored pathways.
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“Mistakes” are not always bad news though.
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Before you cut off its head, and cover up, or correct your mistake,
take care to see the hidden gifts that may possibly be there.
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Okay, so sometimes a mistake is . . . well, just a blooper.
Occasionally, a whole piece of artwork will seem like one great big
mistake.  It simply doesn’t work. 

Again, do not gesso it over too soon.  If you want to go on with
another project, would it hurt to let this one rest awhile, hidden
from view ?

One day, maybe years later, you could be pleasantly surprised at
this gem.  You can always gesso it out if it’s on canvas, and start
again.  With a thin coat of gesso, you could see an intriguing form
showing through, like looking at cloud formations.  If you see
something new there, nab it.

If it’s a watercolour on paper, you can always cut it up and start
again, recycling it in a collage.  Nothing is ever really lost.
Mistakes can be blessings in disguise.

When Dr. Alexander Fleming, bacteriologist working in 1928,
accidentally had a  dish growing bacterial culture contaminated by
a culture of fungus, his “mistake” turned into the discovery of
penicillin.  This was the single most influential discovery in the
history of medicine for combating infection.

Sometimes you can make a mistake on purpose.  This is one way to
disarm the fear of a blank white canvas or paper.  Then, like
reading your own palm or tea leaves, let your dream eyes turn it
into a talisman. 

True mistakes take you by surprise, though, so is it cheating to
make one on purpose ?  I won’t tell, if you don’t.

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Argue for your limitations, and they are yours.
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If you insist on working on your weaknesses, guess what — they’ll
grow.  See your limitations from a different perspective, and who
knows what treasure could be yours.  Become intimate with an
aberrant image and you too are freed.

You know what you do well.  There are better odds in working with
your strengths, and at the same time, welcoming unexpected
“mistakes” as pointing out new ways to explore.  That’s learning
from your mistakes.

Experience is a great teacher.
Maybe the only one.
So, if you’re going to crayon on the walls, do it behind the sofa.

Did you spot any errors in this article ?
I’d welcome and value any corrections, typos, or omissions
on my website as well.
Now that I mention it, I’d welcome any feedback about anything ! 

Celeste Varley
“Oh! for a horse with wings” -Shakespeare
Let our hearts sing and take flight!