Write Art Life Art Write

This year for the Village Fine Arts Association Poetry&Art Night I will be submitting 3 paintings. For the last two years I've submitted 6 poems, and won 4 awards. I told my therapist who gave me a card to join a writing group a few years before I entered PAN "I'm not a writer." And one step out of the first gathering, I wrote an article that was published. I  told an art friend years ago, "I can't do watercolor-it scares me." And here I am, creating the best art I've ever done. Medium. Where your art lives you live. Poetry & Art Night in Milford, Michigan was started by Thomas Lynch and Suzanne Haskew. The art and writing scene I have been blooming blessed to drop into is in Milford, Michigan. If you are unfamiliar with Thomas Lynch's work, get familiar now. This minute I figured out how the universe works. I have goosebumps. My birthday is coming up, I'll be entering the 65th rotation around the galaxy, and by golly, I just this minute figured it out. I couldn't go to my first watercolor class with Jeane DeHann, because Dad went into the hospital with congestive heart failure. She is an artist I admire. And Barbara Weisenburg, a gracious member of the VFAA, and an artist who created two paintings I own, called to offer some alternatives. She miraculously offered to teach me what I would have learned from the class. Miracle. Stuff turned into rich soil, into growth into harvest. We struggle each day with stuff. Our stuff recently is Dad's fall on Feb. 2, working to get physical therapy in the house, my brother with Alzheimer's being freaked by the new stuff, me wondering if I can do all this without combusting, and damn. Here it is. Dad is here because that's what my parents chose. I'm here to give my brother a good quality of life. And subsequently understand that parents don't have a clue with kids, no matter what age, and forgive and forget, and learn to love in a different way. That fear of dying is stupid and wasteful when we can carry each other over. And that's what Thomas Lynch and Suzanne Haskew did with their lives and their work. In art and writing. Carry each other over. And wasn't this always there? Except for the awareness. Rosemary Jozwiak told me 10 years ago "all you're missing is faith in a good outcome."
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Published on February 13, 2015 21:28
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message 1: by Natalie (new)

Natalie Hang in there Linda and keep creating - I love the way life shines out of your art and your writing! You truly prove to me everyday that thought+life+expression=real art! and artfulness of living!


message 2: by Linda (new)

Linda Robinson Oh thank you, Natalie! A friend and I were discussing the paintings that we're happy with when we're done, and what we decided is that if we create with love, what is created is art. The books I like are those that the author feels deeply, and chooses to share. I have to change this blog post. Thomas Lynch is still alive, still sharing!


message 3: by Natalie (new)

Natalie My dad has been painting this winter after a long hiatus. Some of this paintings are not perfect and have errors that are not perfectible - his 87 year old hands that could once perform surgery do not always cooperate with a paint brush these days.

Each of this new year's winter paintings has a subject and an intended recipient before he begins. I've been trying to get him to do more re-work and more versions in an effort to help him regain the technique he needs to perfect them. Your post gently instructs me that these paintings are just as much art as the work he did 40 years ago when technique came naturally! I think I should just keep returning to buy more paint!


message 4: by Linda (new)

Linda Robinson They are! Creating is the art, in my mind. What we love to do keeps us immersed in life and living. Your father might like the Nita Engle book "How to Make a Watercolor Paint Itself." It's totally freeing - she pours paint, picks up brushes rarely, and uses her knuckles, fingers, tissue and a knife to move paint around. Magnificent free art!


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