Back in 2010 I gave my second ever presentation as an artist-speaker, called Daily Practices for Artists, looking at the tremendous value they have for our creativity and our “real” work, the forms they can take, how to figure out one that is both appealing and suits your circumstances.

So recently I decided to take my own advice (haha)... again.

I revived an old, not-quite-daily practice from 2009, my Colour Diary. Over the course of ~100 installments, I mixed and painted maybe 1,000 or more colours, into stripes of various widths. 

The original project evolved over time, and ultimately changed me. I never looked at colour the same way again. I was never as limited in my colour thinking (or colour experience) as I was before the Colour Diary.

Each page was improvised. I would begin with a starting point – one day it was the colour of the peanut butter I’d looked at over breakfast – and then respond. 

They also became composed paintings in that I would not work left to right, I would decide on a position and width (they were always vertical stripes on a horizontal piece of water-colour paper, of identical size each time), and both respond to the colours already mixed and applied and to the relative sizes and positions.

Occasionally I would play specific formal colour games, whether out of curiosity or because I didn’t feel inventive enough that day.​

Coming back to the New Colour Diary (or Covid Colour Diary), it was an appealing idea to return to it, to play almost entirely with colour again.

Life has been very demanding, between the pandemic situation, the resulting overhaul of our (my husband’s and my) business(es), family medical crises, personal health issues and on and on.

All of that has made time for studio practice difficult and irregular, but it is essential to my well-being, never mind my professional practice! A bite-sized daily practice is exactly what circumstances demanded.

My first change to the original project was to make it digital, so it would be a manageable time commitment for me. Then as soon as I thought that, I knew I wanted to give it a dedicated Instagram account, to share it with the world, or at least that tiny part of the world that either knows or stumbles across me.

So that is where you will find me, posting these little colour meditations, every day whenever possible. My first goal is 100 days, as in #100daysofcolour, and then we’ll see after that.

You can visit it here (even without an Instagram account): 
​https://www.instagram.com/kims.colour.diary/
​Just click on an image to see it larger.

If you have any trouble viewing it there, I have a Flickr album as well, though I do not update it daily:
https://flic.kr/s/aHsmR7BVqf

I hope you will check it out, and that you’ll enjoy it!

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!

I was delighted to be featured in episode 36 of Stella's Studio on Camoes TV, a show about art and artists, music and musicians. In it I talked about and showed some of my work, I also demonstrated a process I work with a lot.

To prepare for shooting the video, there was the "excitement" of getting my upstairs studio space looking presentable – not to mention my own self, lol – anyone else here find that isolation has made their appearance standards slip a little?

The studio clean-up was necessary because making a TV appearance during the COVID pandemic is a little different than my experiences in the past. The show's crew could not come to my house but neither could I go to their studio, so I had to shoot my own video segments, which the show then added to with still photos, video effects, and most importantly, editing.

My video skills are rudimentary (better than they were a year ago!) and I didn't have much time to shoot my segments, but despite that, and some resulting technical issues Stella and her team made it look much better than I feared, and I am quite pleased with the result.

Here is a link to the episode:
tinyurl.com/yb53th78

My portion of the program starts a at about the 4:45 mark and lasts for 7 or 8 minutes.

I hope you enjoy it!

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.
​

Above is a wonderful TED Talk on the power and importance of disruption in creative work, with some amazing and famous examples (i.e. the resulting work is famous, the fact that disruption made them possible isn't). This is in fact the source for my title “Play the Unplayable Piano”.

Watching the video will be 15 well-spent minutes of your life – how much of our life on the internet can we say that about? 

​It makes me wonder if I should show it at the beginning of all of my courses – might be a good way to warm up creative thinking and help prevent the instinctive resistance that can arise when I introduce something new. 

Disruptors are an important factor in how I work as an artist as well as how I teach although I've usually referred to the “randomizer” in my brain. A better name for it is “disruptor” since that expresses its effect as well as its role.

​How has it shown up in my studio? How do I even choose instances?

​There was the time I decided to take on my least-liked colour, so I kept working with pink until I stopped disliking it. Pink functioned as a disrupter in every painting I put it in, until it became just another colour in my palette.
​
Or the time I decided to work with a brush that had hardened, caked-on paint, instead of throwing it out, then made the best paintings of my life to that point.

To be more creative, introduce something that disrupts your familiar.



​Disruption is uncomfortable,   even excruciating, at first, because the things that make us           comfortable are familiar.

Top: video of Tim Harford's TED Talk on How Frustration Can Make Us More Creative. Above left and right: Over and Over and Chair with Swatch #1; both examples of work that included disruption as part of their process.

Every residency or workshop I have taken has disrupted my normal practice, sometimes enormously, especially when being far from home was combined with a really powerful mentoring situation.

More often I am inclined to take on things I don't know how to do as aspects of a project where I do know how to do other parts. Like last summer's charcoal figure drawing mural at the Art Gallery of Mississauga; or the chairs I am working on now.

My first efforts to use fluorescent colour was a powerful disrupter, both challenging and fun. When I introduced it in a class I was teaching, I got the full range of responses: from those who giggled with amazement at being completely out of their comfort zones and delighted disbelief at what they were producing, to one who refused to try even a drop, and of course everyone in between.

​There are a couple of things about disrupters that we need to remember, whether they are an old friend or a scary stranger: they make us far more creative as we struggle to adapt to them, discover new things because of them, and they are uncomfortable! They may even feel excruciating at first, but that's natural, because the things that make us comfortable are familiar.

Here is a detail from my new painting "Hearts are Wild" now showing in 'RED' an exhibition which opened yesterday (Saturday January 30) at Renann Isaacs Contemporary Art in Guelph, Ontario. 

'RED' is a group show of square-foot paintings by 50+ artists, all united by the colour red. 

Among the group are artists I know and admire such as Kal Honey, Cole Swanson and Seth as well as luminary Ron Shuebrook, so I'm in excellent company! 

If circumstances weren't preventing me, I would be working on more paintings in this vein (so to speak). I'll just have to figure out how I can keep thinking along these lines but in my sketchbook instead until I can get back into my studio.

If you have a chance to visit the show, please let me know what you think, whether in the comments below or via the contact form or on social media. It's worth the drive to Guelph!

The decorative knots you see here were made years ago when I was too sick to do much of anything, even, most of the time, to make simple things, but I longed to, and every now and then I had a day when I could break through the thick, dense fog of illness to actually make something. Like these knots. 

I found these while going through stuff in my studio, trying to make space.

There's no practical reason to keep these, but they tug at me and remind me how far I've come, what a gift it is to be well.

They also remind me how powerful that urge to make is in many of us. Making time for it helps us become ourselves again.

Anyone who has taken one of my painting courses, or even attended one of my talks, will have heard me describe my studio as a laboratory.

I call it that because I am always experimenting, trying out new ideas, but also testing very specific things like I am today.

Curry's Art Store has a relatively new line of self-branded mediums. I was disappointed with their first product about a year ago, but they seem to have re-formulated so I've bought their gel and medium+varnish products specifically for testing purposes.

If they turn out to work well then they will provide a lower cost alternative to the premium brands. Some of the cheaper brands are not worth their apparent cost savings because they simply don't perform well. That's why I test!

Stevenson (officially D.L. Stevenson & Son Ltd.) is another line to consider if you're trying to lower your cost while keeping professional artist quality. Maybe I'll discuss them more in a future post.

Personally I will use the premium lines like Liquitex and Golden for most of my work, but not everything I do needs the top product lines, and many of my students are looking for affordable options whenever they're viable.

If you work (or play!) with art or craft materials, do you have a favourite way of saving money that you wouldn't mind sharing in the comments?