Authentic Obsessions

Robin shares her life changing week at The Penland School, the importance of doing experiments to get to the truth, and the exhilaration of discovery and curiosity. Robin's lyrical, process-driven work is rooted in eclectic curiosity and the material surprises she discovers working with her finely developed visual vocabulary. 

Takeaways

1. It is important to keep doing experiments so you can get to the truth.

2. Pay attention to your materials and their ability to constantly surprise you.

3. Just make more time for it.

4. The more you learn about the business side of things, the more confident you get in your art making. And the more confident you get in your art making, the more confident you get in running your business.

5. “The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all and then stands back to see if we can find them. The hunt to uncover those jewels, that's creative living.” Elizabeth Gilbert

Mentioned

Robin Davisson

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Studio Lab intro

Thomas Gleaner aka Brad Thomas

Penland School of Craft

Emily Mason

Takeaways

1. You can’t say yes to everything or everyone.

2. The more structure you add into your week the more flexibility you have.

3. We make HARD a problem, but it’s just part of life. Without the hard you don’t have the good stuff.

4. It’s just a layer.

5. What’s the next right step?

Mentioned

Lea Ann Slotkin

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Cy Twombly

Lukas paint

Do You Want to Slow Down? Anna Sale on awe as an antidote to anxiety, on The Science of Happiness podcast

Lea Ann creates bold and colorful mixed media paintings and collages, focusing on the background layers, which gives her work a lot of energy & visual excitement and leaves little hints of magic peeking through to leave space for wonder and reflection about one's own story.  During our conversation we talk about nature, boundaries around our time, and how putting some structure in your week can be pretty freeing. 

Wanderlust, giving ourselves permission to do more than one thing and the inspiring non-fiction books that are holding our interest these days are just a few topics we chat about as we go down the beautiful meandering path of Tina Norén. Tina is an artist and designer, 2nd generation Filipino-American and mother to three school-aged children. Tina has designed and painted several murals, including 3 at elementary schools, as well as the mural in the Art Park at the Santa Paula Art Museum, where she also works part-time. Her art is bold and colorful and is often filled with meditative and therapeutic repetitive lines.

Takeaways

1. Consider saying no without giving an excuse or a reason.

2. Embrace the fact that your creative practice is helping you be a better parent and partner. 

3. If you often have kids or family barging in on you while you’re creating, try to find work that allows you to be interrupted.

4. Don’t say you don’t have enough time to do something just acknowledge that you haven’t prioritized it yet.

Mentioned 

Tina Norén

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Ruth Asawa

Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman

Unfollow Your Passion, How to Create a Life That Matters to You, Terri Trespicio

Essentialism, Greg McKeown

Atomic Habits, James Clear

From Strength to Strength, Arthur C. Brooks

Ten Percent Happier, Dan Harris

Takeaways

1. There is no overnight success. Everyone pays their dues, one way or another.

2. Every human being is unreliable in the way they tell stories.

3. Take pleasure in the striving aspect of the process. The fact that you worked really hard and accomplished the goal is the thing.   “It’s not the having, it’s the getting.” Elizabeth Taylor

Mentioned

Samantha Downing

Samantha Downing on Twitter

Samantha Downing on Facebook

Samantha Downing on Instagram

Parasite

I Care A Lot

Daphne du Maurier, author of Rebecca

Takeaways

1. Take everyone seriously but yourself.
2. Making art is an extreme sport.
3. Do the thing you'd wonder about the most if you didn't do it.
4. If you can’t see a way to solve a problem you have to trust that you’ll figure it out eventually. So don’t walk away, just keep looking.

Mentioned

Duncan Petrie

Duncan Petrie on Instagram

Birds with Hats on Instagram

Duncan Petrie on YouTube

Brian Eno on Broken Record

Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes

South West Coast Path

J. R. R. Tolkien

Duncan is a photographer using spare, striking composition and the best natural light to emphasize emotion over the literal image and truth over objectivity, in hopes that he might one day capture how it feels to truly see.

During our conversation Duncan talks about Sudoku and its relationship to being creative; being afraid of doing something poorly; why beginning is the hardest part; fear of stagnation; the relationship between good photography and enthusiasm and the magic of observing the little details that imply so much more than what they actually contain. 

Phoebe Gander is a landscape, abstract and still life painter, inspired by the beautiful ocean, skies and landscape where she lives with her family in Wainui Beach on the east coast of New Zealand. Phoebe started her journey of self-discovery by carving out time for art to help her overcome severe panic attacks and anxiety. Nostalgia, solitude, vulnerability, texture and light are themes that reoccur in her art. During our conversation she talks about the importance of listening to the niggly voices, her love of light and shadow and her insatiable curiosity.

Takeaways

1. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
2. Paint what you see, not what you think you see.
3. Listen to those niggly voices.
4. Reframe the act of creating from outcome-driven to process driven.
5. "If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.” Edward Hopper

Mentioned

Phoebe Gander

Phoebe Gander on Instagram

Phoebe Gander on Facebook

Julie Battisti on Instagram

Embracing Neurodiversity with Phoebe Gander podcast with Susan Nethercote podcast

Permission to Paint and Embrace My True Self with Phoebe Gander on The Laura Horn Art podcast

Edward Hopper

Marissa Huber is an artist, connector, and creative instigator for the Carve Out Time for Art community and co-author of “The Motherhood of Art.” She works primarily in water-based mediums like gouache and acrylic, cut paper, and digital mediums and is interested in exploring memory, space, and color in her paintings and surface pattern designs. She creates playful & colorful patterns that aim to bring people a moment of delight, and a bit of sunshine. Marissa is passionate about keeping it real – if you need any evidence of this just check out her reels on Instagram - and encouraging others who are not full-time artists to make the most of their time and circumstances. Her greatest joy (besides her kids) is connecting with kindred spirits over an experience, a funny story, or shared dreams which makes her feel positively lit up. She believes in taking her dreams quite seriously but tries not to take herself too seriously. During our conversation Marissa talks about commute chats, not overthinking, and searching for meaning in the big and the small things.

Takeaways

1. You can do everything, just not at the same time.
2. Don’t overthink everything, this isn’t dating in your 20’s.
3. What you choose to do or what your life looks like is up to you but there's no one right way to have a creative life.
4. When your life is a spaghetti mess just think of that one thing that you can do to nudge yourself along the path. And snacks help.
5. Artists are resilient problem solvers and comfortable in the vague place between the uncomfortableness of not knowing what's next but having the trust that we can figure it out because we've done it so many times.

Mentioned

Marissa Huber

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Carve Out Time for Art

The Motherhood of Art, by Marissa Huber and Heather Kirtland

Heather Kirtland

Range, Why Generalists Triumph In A Specialized World, by David Epstein

Mike East

Artist Mother Podcast

Artist Residency in Motherhood

Mondo Beyondo

Josef Frank

Nancy Gruskin on Savvy Painter

Liz Dexter is a mixed media artist and architect who spends her days finding beauty and joy in the imperfect, unfolding layers of our lives, and discovering awe and wonder in our midst. Liz develops her paintings using many layers of acrylic, collage, plaster, image transfers and glazes – sanding, scraping, and cutting into them along the way to see what is uncovered.  She is inspired by the continually transforming world around us by weather and age - crumbling stucco, rusting metal, peeling paint and vine-covered walls - the built environment being consumed by nature. During our conversation, Liz reveals her thoughts about decay, art pods, and the pain of self-promotion.

Takeaways

1. Your artistic voice is already inside of you
2. Sometimes “ready enough” is the point you where you need to put yourself out there.
3. Just do the next thing in the art that needs to be done.
4. Live your definition of being a good person.
5. Consider creating an art pod.

Mentioned

Liz Dexter

Liz Dexter on Instagram

Liz Dexter on Facebook

Chroma Collective Gallery 

Chroma Collective Gallery on Instagram

Val Hubbard

Barbara Weir

Emily Kame Kngwarreye

Poppy Dodge is an abstract painter and a Color Maximalist who delights in creating harmony and balance using all the colors. Her work explores her obsession with stacking color and shapes and is influenced by modern improvisational quilting and abstract collage. Poppy says: "I approach painting intuitively and am entirely process driven.  I like to think of my work as color celebrations; a stacking of playful color conversations joyfully stitching my life experiences together. We talk about newsletters, tea, the “Ladies of Yet,” and why it can be discouraging to make content solely to be seen instead of for

Takeaways

1. It’s got to get ugly before it gets good.
2. Persistence and obsession keep you going forward.
3. Remind yourself that you’re on Instagram for opportunities and take your ego out of it.
4. Add the “YET.” Don’t say I haven’t done that, say I haven’t done that YET.
5. A big studio is great – but if you’re scrappy you can carve out a space anywhere.

Mentioned

Poppy Dodge

Poppy on Instagram

Poppy on Facebook

Poppy on Pinterest

Gee’s Bend quilting retreats

Hand Yoga Club on YouTube with Heidi Parkes

Frankie magazine 

Oruaiti Reserve hike, aka the Kupe Trail

Lynn Giunta

Lisa Congdon

Bisa Butler

Alison Watt has worked as a biologist on seabird colonies, an ecotour guide, has published a novel, a work of non-fiction and a book of poetry. She teaches painting online and in her studio on Protection Island, near Nanaimo, British Columbia.

Alison is interested in where science (especially biology) and art interface and her paintings are informed by landscape and botanical forms. As a self-taught artist who has been painting for over thirty years, Allison relates to both the dream of making the paintings we see in our minds, and the frustrations of mastering the tools, techniques, and mindset to achieving them. Alison is not interested in moral instruction but in illuminating new ways of seeing.

During our conversation, Alison talks about creative destruction, informed intuition, and how freeing it is to paint without brushes. 

Takeaways

1. Paint as if neither your time nor your materials are valuable.
2. “We grow small when we try to be great.” David Hockney
3. Our job is to have an authentic relationship with what we’re making.
4. Take some time to pause and look back at what you have created.
5. Visual imagery can slide underneath language right to the heart.
6. Create a lot of opportunity for unexpected events.
7. Every layer makes it better.

Mentioned

Alison Watt

Alison Watt on Instagram

Alison Watt on YouTube

Artwork Artplay

Alison Watt on Pinterest

Dazzle Patterns, by Alison Watt

Triangle Island, Anne Vallée Triangle Island Ecological Reserve

David Hockney

Joni Mitchell