This summer Arts Etobicoke was kind enough to ask me to hold an online studio visit with them via Instagram Live.

After months of lockdown it felt like another way to connect up with people and community online, much like my Virtual Studio Parties, and Kal Honey's Virtual Collage Jams (which I co-host).

Studio visits are fun, in fact I love seeing the insides of other artists' studios, what kind of space they have, how they work in them, how they organize them and so on. Not to mention what they are working on in there!

So you'll get to see some of all of those things in my video, which is on Arts Etobicoke's Instagram account.

​Here is a direct link: www.instagram.com/p/CDeniKDpkrE/

It's almost exactly an hour long. In it you'll get a peek at some experiments, a longtime hobby of mine, the view out my windows, what my painting table looks like and plenty more. Plus I answer some questions from attendees.

While not yet up on their website or YouTube channel, I'm sure it will be sometime this fall, and I will update the link in this post once that happens.

​I hope you enjoy it! Please let me know in the comments if you would like to see more.

DATE CHANGE:
Virtual Studio Party will return two weeks later,
on Saturday, October 3 at 2pm.

My co-host Kal Honey and I are taking a break from some of our work responsibilities for several weeks, including the Virtual Studio Parties, free weekly creative events on my YouTube channel, that have seen us through the first few months of the pandemic.

It has become something that we, and numerous regular attendees, have come to treasure, for the creative time, the conversation, and for the community experience.

While we are on hiatus, there is a YouTube playlist of 24 videos available on my channel from past parties. They are there for you to enjoy whenever you feel the need for some creative time with friendly company, in the comfort of your home (or at this time of year, possibly your cottage).

Here is the link: https://bit.ly/31HtbOm

Meanwhile, in the coming weeks, you can expect more posts here in the blog, and updates in the Teaching+ menu above, in my Online Offerings.

I've got my Fall term planned out so I'm busy writing and making web pages for each of the courses I will be offering. Some of them are up already with everything but the materials lists, which I'll post in late August.

UPDATE: All of my Fall courses are up on the website now!
Click here to see what's available.

Finally, if you haven't made it to one of our Virtual Studio Parties yet, I hope you can make some space in your week to attend one live on a Saturday afternoon this Fall, or else by watching or listening to a replay. And if you know anyone else who might enjoy it, please share the link with them.

Creative time, creative community, a friendly artist making things – and it's free! What's not to love? I hope you'll join us!

As I re-build my business, not quite from the ground up, (the foundation remains, but the structures above must be replaced), I find I am spending a lot of time in the realm of not-knowing.

Life under pandemic has changed our rhythms and routines, our customary locations, and how we spend our time. My husband and I (but especially him) used to spend way too much time driving from place to place, because our work was in-person but also in a variety of locations.

Now by building up our tech and online skills, there is so much new and in flux but so much less by way of complications and travel. We just have to adjust to frequently re-arranging our home and studio to accommodate all the new virtual events and courses.

But looking deeper than that, I realize I am accustomed to spending a lot of time in that place of not-knowing, whether I'm developing new work for an exhibition, or at an earlier stage even, when I am excavating in order to discover new ideas in my studio, it is imperative that I enter that psychological space, or I will not get to what matters or what's new. Neither I nor my work would grow.

Other artists may work differently, but I think most have to work like that at some level, (and not just artists either!) or they would not make discoveries. And without locating something new, something fresh, where would art be? It would not move forward, nor would it deepen.

Spring is a season of the new: new growth, new life. And as this weekend is one of sacred spring festivals, Passover and Easter, it may be the perfect time to contemplate this.

​Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Before I tell you about that though, I want to share with you some thoughts I wrote to someone who needed help and emotional support through her distress at feeling unable to focus, unable to work, unable to settle. I feel it too. So many of us do, even if not all the time. So here is what I would like to say to you:

Nothing is normal right now. Nothing. So be gentle on yourself for not being able to work, and for feeling scattered. That is a natural response to feeling the anxiety of our crisis situation and even trauma and grief at the loss of normality.

We humans adapt to amazing things but to stay healthy in the full sense it is important to do gentle things that nourish, calm and ground you. That will ease the transition to the new normal, and you will feel better for it. 

Activities that get you focused on your body are especially beneficial: movement of any kind and focusing on your senses instead of your thoughts whenever you can, or for part of each day.

Do something with your hands, go outside for a walk if you are healthy (and keep your distance from others). Above all, have patience with yourself and those around you... even for the times that you – or they – lose patience :-)

.  .  .  .  .

On March 20, I started holding Virtual Studio Parties online, via YouTube livestream so that anyone with high-speed internet, no matter how unconfident with their computer, could take part.

It’s a no-cost creative gathering for anyone who’s missing the experience of community, is feeling isolated or anxious, or wants to have some gentle fun in the real-time, virtual, company of others.

People have said it's really helped them and it's something they look forward to now.

If this sounds like it might help you, or just be fun, visit my Virtual Studio Parties page.

​Do you have a suggestion for self-care during stressful times? Please share in the comments.
​

Part two of this blog series is up!
​To go directly to it, click here.

The 2018 In Situ multi-arts festival took place November 8–10 at the Small Arms Inspection Building (a former WWII munitions factory now partially refurbished as a creative hub) in Mississauga, Ontario.

'Hearts in Place' was a whole-room installation comprised of: ten 7-foot high scrolls, eight of which were transfer-printed (a hand-pulled process), two were hand-painted; two paper-and-fibre "veined" panels (centre); two veiling textile panels; one built-onsite sculpture/assemblage which you can see a sliver of light from at the centre of this photo; and the wall behind me as I photographed the room panorama was a mural drawing which I drew a portion of as a live performance each of the three evenings of the festival.

Like the first In Situ festival in 2016, this was an extraordinary experience and a creative high, but with the benefit of central heating and running water!

I am still exhausted from the experience of preparing all of this new work, performing and then taking it all down just days later. As a result I will keep this entry shorter than I might have, but will share with you some photographs. Thanks go to the numerous – generous – photographers and friends, (all credited individually), who made this possible, documenting when I could not.

​Many thanks to the many people who came out to experience the festival and visited my room! If you were there, please let me know what you thought in the comments below.

My hands aren’t beautiful and elegant like some of my friends, or elegantly or funkily manicured like others of my friends or students. They're not even young anymore.

I do think there is a deeper beauty in them though, in what they can do, express and make.

I talk with my hands.

I draw, paint, print, assemble, and de-construct.

I perform with them when I do photo shoots, the gestures they can make are vital in the full sense of that word, and full of meaning. As a child I learned that traditional Indian dance is as much a formalized language of hand gestures as of any other kind of movement, and I can understand that despite my natural disinclination to formalized anything, lol.

My hands are very plain-looking, but beautifully capable, working hands.