Play Money

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It's tax time in the US. For a lot of people, just the mention of the T word is enough to pull heads down and shoulders up, ducking incoming audits. I have been blessed with an amazing professional tax guy, Frank Lehman, who encourages a humor-filled, low-stress approach to the grim task. I actually look forward to sending him a colorful decorated page of numbers each year (highly accurate, of course) and he does the rest.

A while back, I decided to levy an art tax on myself. I tithed 10% of everything that came in from art into a separate savings account. Eventually I'd cash in my Creativity Credit and spent it directly on time or materials to support art just for me--work that was private from the projected judgment of the marketplace. It didn't take long for this exercise to shift some chronic victim-headedness around that old song "It's soooo hard to make a living as an artist/writer." There really was enough, though I was well below the poverty level at the time.

I've suggested this kind of thing, with variations, to people who feel stuck around money in their creative lives. The number 10 has a powerful mojo--see post Ten Minutes, and get more in Art Love, the thank you gift for a sign up to my more or less monthly newsletter, StinkwaninkaNews). Ten percent, ten dollars, even a dime, can be used to joggle the grid of scarcity belief, to open some space and reconnect with the flow that money symbolizes.

What could you buy to support your creative life? Roses for the dancer/author/actor etc. in you, making this your opening night? A new pencil? A card of someone's work that inspires you? A book? Take yourself out to a museum. Give $10 anonymously to someone else to thank them for their creative contribution. Give away the new pencil--does that make you feel even more supported? Let us know what else you think of, do it, tell us what happened.

Papaji tells of sitting by the Ganges with a pile of coins on one side and a pile of pebbles on the other, alternately throwing one and then the other into the water until all the money he had that day was gone, including bus fare home. What could you do to practice the realization that pebble and coin are the same offering, picked up and returned into the holy river of life?

Make a dime into the moon in a sculpture. Color on a ten dollar bill, collage it, make it beautiful, put it on the wall: it's just a piece of paper, fine rag paper, with some dull green ink pattern for a background. (This exercise works best with a bill big enough to matter to you as money.)

Does this sound illegal? Like tearing off the tags on a pillow? Maybe what's really illegal to the conventional mind is the freedom of remembering that money is only a shared idea of value--it's all made up! it's numbers, paper, metal--play money to play grown-up with. However convincingly dire your financial situation is looking, can it hurt to open yourself to a comic or creative view of it?

I invite you, in the medium of your choice, to make some kind of art money. Voila! You've made money from art. Send a picture of what you created to judespacks@gmail.com (unless you tell me otherwise, I'll assume it's ok to publish it in the future). And tell us what you experienced. For more, check out Rich (how someone freed herself from hatred of the rich and what that meant) and Enough (on an artist's realisation of her own abundance).

May you prosper in every way. Kiss your tax return as you pop it in the mailbox.

Gallant Fox portrait

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I recently finished this oil portrait, commissioned by Christie Dennis, of her late husband Rodney. It was a very sweet project to do; I knew them as family friends when I was growing up, and had been warmly acquainted with them in adulthood, too--in Maine and Massachusetts.

Here's a little bit from a eulogy Christie wrote:

"Gallant Fox was a talented and charming racehorse in the thirties whose quirk was to be unpredictably diverted by something that caught his interest, and was known to stop mid-race to follow the trajectory of a bird flying overhead. As some of you know, I taught Rodney to drive--something I perhaps should not admit to--which brought us one day to the intersection of Brattle Street and Route 16, with the light turning green and Rodney at the wheel. The jockeying and turning of the cars and the fact that they didn't collide so amazed Rodney that he forgot he was driving and came more or less to a halt, to much resonant annoyance. I called him Gallant Fox. He liked that...."

Here's some earlier stages of the painting, and a close up:

Equinox: Balance

Daffies, oil painting 8x12" (available)

It's the between-season of Equinox, a time of endings and beginnings, the balance-point when night and day, rest and activity, light and dark are equal. How does that reflect in the balancing act of your life and creative process?

Are you taking enough time on and time off? What about lights and darks--is there a bit of strain from always looking on the bright side, or perhaps a weight of over-confronting the difficult? Are you exploring the full range of contrast available to you? Or are you more into the mid-tones of moderation?

Three Daffodils, fabrics

If things seem to be on tilt at the moment, it might help to remember that most guidance systems (e.g. navigation systems on planes) function by being off-course almost all the time (and correcting). Every step we take involves a tiny tumble through space in free fall, teetering from one foot to the other. Being on-target is made of being off, balance is created from imbalance in motion.

Two Daffs, fabrics

Did you see the wonderful TED talk by Harvard brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor on what she learned when she had a stroke? (You can watch it here). She experienced a blissful, creative expansion of awareness from her right hemisphere when her left hemisphere was damaged. Then she spent 8 years recovering her power of speech so she could tell us about it.

Creativity depends on allowing the linear, verbal, conceptual left brain to relax its dominance over perception. (Read more about this in the article Looking). Then the intuitive, present-moment field awareness of the right hemisphere can express itself.

The left hemisphere serves by negotiating practicalities and execution. The right brain is quantum physics, the dreamy don't-know world of possibilities and potentials; the left brain is Newtonian, down-to-earth, cause and effect. Creative process dynamically juggles both in an equality that doesn't even need to compare and contrast.

To those in the Northern Hemisphere, Happy spring. Here's hoping your creative life is blooming

Maine to North Carolina

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Giving Away

I'm still in the process of giving away 50 things to celebrate my 50th birthday. (Read original article). 39 things have gone.

I've enjoyed many delicious moments in the process, and so, apparently, have the generous receivers. Several people have told me they want to do the same for their birthdays.

Sometimes there has been an exuberant feeling, like flinging confetti into the air. Sometimes it has been very tender, seeing someone else's dear hands cherishing an object I was no longer really seeing, like this egg I'd decorated on the theme of Hexagram 3 of the I Ching--Difficulty at the Beginning.

Eclipse

Lunar Eclipse fabrics 36"x14" '97

'Nother Valentine