What happens when Mick tries to make a violin out of a ukulele and strings from various different instruments? - The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

:: In fact it is now known by neurologists that art, music, prayer, and healing all come from the same source in the body.  They all are associated with similar brain wave patterns, and mind body changes.  They all are deeply connected in feeling and meaning.::  
- Art As Healing

There always seems to be too much to write about.  Each grain of any one idea collapses into another.  Like folding in egg whites, I have to be careful.  When that happens, my inability to separate threads in the chain, I just write crazy sounding stuff.  For a Creative there are no clear delineations between art forms though there may be an obvious gift for one over the others.  Take for example my friend Jacqueline.  She is a gifted painter with a passion for developing her musical brain.  After many years of cello lessons, she slowly began to cozy up with other musicians, and now records compositions she helped shape. 

Having used every excuse possible to not make art (nor play my mandolin) the Universe has lost all patience and pushed my harp right through the clouds.  Am I excited?  Hell Yes I Am!  I've got a lot of stars in my crown these days.  Just before the holidays I began working on a piece for Sailor Girl Lola.  Her family lost everything when Katrina hit, including art pieces I had given to her when we were girls and photographs from our time together in college.  As I was working on her piece and collecting photographs, it occurred to me that I could incorporate images of the two of us into this single work, creating a piece pregnant with significance.  I've just got the final image for her piece and will be posting the completed work soonish...tricky!   

With that small beginning, the tide is rolling in and washing away my blues.  My next piece is a commission for Lola's Best Friend, an incredible musician and composer, who recently received a gorgeous upright ebony Yamaha piano from his brother as a birthday gift.  The space above (don't you just love the sound of those simple words...the space above) the piano needs a little somethin' somethin'.   His work hits me hard in the heart, a beautiful  deep insideness that I can't wrap my arms around.  The images for his work will incorporate blood cells, native  bloodlines, the whispers of mutes, the tapping of silver tipped fingers and a soul filled joyous sorrow rich in texture and full of new promise.  I hope he loves it!

Saving the best for last, I received a call this week from the agency in Austin I worked for a few years back.  The City of Austin Art In Public Places has requested that I take my last project with our youth at that agency, Don't Let Violence Change Our World, and turn it into a sustainable outdoor piece.  That means it is protected by federal laws ya'll and can't ever be removed!  

Don't Let Violence Change Our World

The Project: The piece is temporarily living within the well protected courtyard of our secure compound.  I work for a domestic violence agency that is recognized as an innovator in the field internationally.  The piece will eventually be placed in our staff kitchen which faces a courtyard to a small apartment complex used by our agency for transitional housing.  It can't remain in the courtyard, which is the main entrance to our building, because it obstructs the receptionist view - you see, enraged partners sometimes attempt to find the spouse that fled, with children but without clothing, vehicle or birth certificates.

Each summer, the school based team I am a part of, works with youth who participate in a citywide initiative to give them work experience.  Most come prepared for a mindless task in an office building.  HA!  We take our captive audience and turn them into mini ambassadors, expecting them to take what they learn with us, back to their schools.

The Issues: Violence works like a stink in the room.  At some point, kids become desensitized to the odor of violence.  They become complacent and there is no longer an expectation of a safe school environment.  On the violence behavior continuum, the lowest form of violence, is usually identified as a word, such as calling a guy "gay" or a girl "bitch".  The highest form of violence, and the one that makes the whole school and community wake-up, is usually a rape, but can also be a murder of one of the partners in a teen relationship by the other.  Environmental hazards work similarly, especially as they relate to plastic waste.  The continuum is slow to be seen.  That plastic shopping bag that just flew out of your car and is now rolling like a tumble weed across the highway until it gets caught by a tree line, a fence or perhaps, blown over the fence to land in a cemetery along the highway, is in the lowest position on the continuum.  The Pacific Gyre, a plastic garbage wasteland, larger than the United States, is the highest form of preventable environmental violence.  More than likely, your little plastic bag, that caught wind and flew out of your car, is floating in the PG...trade winds, my darlin'.

The Link:  Being mindful of the stink, the power of word and the power of choice, moves one from routine acceptance, to a cascade of interconnected decisions.  Altering one behavior at the lowest level on the continuum, asking others to do the same, reduces the risk of creating a vortex of hatred or garbage that forever changes our ability to choose.  We cannot move the garbage now in the Pacific Gyre.  We cannot undo the taking of a young life.  We can prevent these issues from happening in other oceans and in other lives.

The Piece: The work consist of 750+ single use, mostly water bottles, packed into a 6' x 6' wooden frame.  A template of a "gyre" was created, colors assigned to eight sections, and calculated a need for 56 bottles per color.  Those bottles for the gyre were painted with enamel paint pens.  The rest of the bottles were left as they were.  In addition to the bottles the kids brought in, those saved from a Father's Day event hosted by our agency, we also collected 9 huge plastic bags of bottles from our local recycling center.  With 19 youth and 3 adults, cleaning, stripping off labels, painting, and installing, it took approximately 30 hours to complete the project.
 
This tri-coastal life is baring fruit.

Create the life you want!
The Broad

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On Becoming An Artist :: Where Is My Studio

::The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.:: - Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country

I like to look at the chain; you know, the way things are linked together in a seemingly disparate manner but really are very well maneuvered to bring your life into alignment despite yourself.  From setting a tangled necklace free, to linking the chain of events in a life, to seeing the interconnecting web of ideas which bring forth a new work of art, the relationship between all things is a passionate signature for me.

This past week as I was touring colonial homes in Merida, walking the fairgrounds at Xmatkuil, and listening to live music in Uman, I realized that all the images and all the words were for my job.  It felt strange that all these sights and smells did not belong to me, the collector of chains.  My job gifts me all manner of opportunities, enhancing my experience in the Yucatan, but I am living an encore artist life that is literally under contract.  

I sense acknowledging this is progress.  I've been without a studio and an art practice for several years.  Each day I make a mental note of what needs to happen in order for me to get back to the studio.  Initially, I believed I would start creating again once I arrived in Mexico.  That was well over a year ago.  Later, I used remodeling deadlines for my house in Merida as my excuse.  If I allowed it, the list would go on forever.  Fortunately, re-prioritizing what has been the shape of my life, my entire life, is not about allowing.  Art is about trusting the process.  

Though this particular kink in the chain has taken longer than usual to loosen, I never doubted that I would go back to work.  This process to get to a place where I can make art again is like a scrapbook crammed with textured bits that are complex, straightforward, and yet can only be fully appreciated with a sideways glance of the swollen spine.  The first pages are of the before, works I handed to others over the course of a professional art practice.  Scattered throughout this scrapbook, some taking up only the corner of a dogeared page, are the components of my art therapy practice.  In the last year the pages have shifted focus, incorporating the primary colors, the foundational elements to secure balance.  As I thumb through these imaginary pages I realize that all I want, what I set out to create with my move to Mexico, is to simply be what I am - an artist.  

In this past week, as I assimilated all that this scrapbook holds, strangers asked for my time and fellow artist stepped in their path.  New healers appeared in the community, allowing placement of my dual career upon a folded page, left loose, into the folds of the scrapbook.  

I am an artist with one clear image for a work.  Others will follow.  They always have.

Create the life you want!
The Broad

Before

Now

    

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Ask A Broad :: Secret Love Messages From Followers

::Every reader, if he has a strong mind, reads himself into the book, and amalgamates his thoughts with those of the author.:: 

- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

When G.W. was governor of Texas he decided to get tough on crime by approving Project Spotlight, a program implemented in the neighborhoods of our major cities with the highest level of recidivism.  I was awarded a three year contract with Travis County Corrections, providing once a week art and art therapy sessions to youth offenders,  i.e., gang members.  The young adults were great, and cherished an opportunity to tell their stories and the possibility of altering the course of the younger youth in their neighborhood.  The teens on the other hand were resistant and belligerent, as at-risk teens can be in general.  It was very difficult not to laugh out loud when the Garcia siblings showed up to the first class wearing contact lens that made their eyes resemble those of a demon, or when Cartoon Kid, aka Felix, insisted that I read his poem titled "F%ck You", which consisted of fifteen lines of only that phrase.  On the latter, there was no need for my laughter as the whole classroom began howling as I read the work with great gusto and variance of inflection.  You wouldn't believe how many ways that simple phrase can be interpreted!

No matter how many hat tricks I pulled out I never got these babies to come on board the love train.  By our final project, collage works that would be exhibited in a rather significant contemporary art gallery in Austin, I had grown weary of the group think imagery.  Apparently, it is very dangerous to have an individual voice when one is part of a gang.  At the end of that first evening of image collecting I decided to pull a Johnny Carson on them.   By wrapping my pashmina around my head, I transformed myself into "Carnac the Magnificent".  I tipped each of their manila envelopes of images to my temple and guessed the contents.  "Let's see.  Yes, I'm getting a very clear image of women dressed in revealing clothing, expensive cars, lots of bling-bling, and bottles of booze.  Am I right?," followed by dumping out the contents to reveal my accuracy.  If individual thought puts a gang member on red alert status, a teen who is thought of as a copycat is dead meat.

Considering the number of visitors each day, News From A Broad post are rather slim on the comment side.  Each month I receive a number of questions sent to the News From A Broad email address.  I've been answering these in a general way through the post, as well as being more specific in my private correspondence.  Here is a sampling of the questions I've been asked followed by my replies: 

A Broad From Canada ask, "Do you know anything about driving down with dogs?  We have four dogs and are not sure which hotels will allow that number.  Does it add cost to the hotel room?"

I paid a hefty fee for a special letter from my vet, written in English and in Spanish, to bring Mimi the Cat across international borders.  No one at the border crossings nor immigration stations ever asked to see this document.  As far as I'm concerned, I could have created a letter myself and had it in hand if necessary.  I don't know how many animals are allowed during your immigration.  What was once true for me, or any expat in Mexico, may no longer be true for you so check a qualified site on immigrating with animals before you drive them down.  I would consult with YES.   

I've always stayed in the No-Tell Motels when traveling through Mexico.  They are sometimes referred to as the "sex motels" because they rent by the hour.  Sounds like a sleazy choice but they are really convenient, easily recognizable and economical.  They generally are in plain site from any highway, walled off and often resembling famous places from around the world.  They average about $350 MXN for a full night.  The best part, in my opinion, is that they have secured garages attached to your room and don't care how many trained monkeys you bring into the room.  During peak travel season there will be plenty of US and Canadian plated vans, packed to the roof and loaded with 4-6 family members making their way through Mexico to visit relatives.  I've never felt unsafe during one of my stays in a No-Tell Motel.

A Broad From Texas writes, "We are driving down in November.  What route did you take when you drove down?  I've heard that it is dangerous to make the interior trek and that it will add days to our trip."

I considered taking the coastal route as I had never done that in my many years of driving through Mexico.  However, with all the incidents along the border and on the coastline, I decided that driving a familiar route was safest, and in this way I would immediately recognize if something was amiss.  However, if you have never driven down, driving through Texas might feel scarier than driving through Mexico.  I certainly have never seen a bunch of deer parts hanging from an open tree in Mexico, nor a huge collection of crosses embedded in the lawn of a Mexican courthouse. 

The route you take is totally up to you and I cannot guarantee safety.  With that said, I prefer the interior route.  I avoid topes, i.e., speed bumps, the possibility of fiesta traffic, and small town police officers looking for bribes.  The highways in Mexico are comparable to those North of the Boarder (NOB).  It's easy to spot Pemex gas stations for fill-ups and restroom stops.  Many are attached to restaurants, OXXO and occasionally, a pharmacy.   The other reason I prefer the interior route is because topes slow down the trip and are hard on my vehicle.  With the Autopista Arco de Norte opening a few years back, there is a complete bypass of Mexico City and a direct lead into Puebla.  It is an incredibly beautiful drive, often crossing canyons and spectacular views of napole fields.

Create the life you want.
The Broad

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Art Therapy for Broads Abroad :: Sand Tray In A Saucer :: Exercise #15

 :: In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior.  In play it is as though he were a head taller than himself. ::

- Lev Vygotsky,Russian psychologist, 1896–1934

When Mamère, my grandmother, passed away I inherited all of her gardening gear.  Her zebra striped overalls, once worn as a Mardi Gras costume, hung loosely on a bent nail in her gardening shed.  Her shed was a moss and ivy covered structure made from old storm shutters.  Art deco designs were embossed along the edges of lovely white clay pots of many sizes.  The smallest held a handful of dirt, another a tiny rake. Under a group of cupped seedling pots, a copper penny flattened by a trolly somewhere along the New Orleans' Carrollton-St.Charles streetcar line.  Buried under a two legged table screwed to the wall were her strawberry pot, and two nested and badly chipped bird bath bowls leaning against a single stand.  Everything was where it had always been.  MaMere's own scent clung to the walls.

I brought all of these things to my home in Austin, with only the strawberry pot making the journey to Merida.  The best of the bird bath bowls I once filled with birdseed.  Set atop a library card catalogue, the drawers were filled with many small objects, representing nature, the modern world and fantasy.  In this way, my family and friends curated scenes of their inner life in miniature.

Sand Tray Therapy holds very specific dimensions for the container, rectangular in shape, used by practitioners trained in this approach.  This exercise is an adaptation based upon my own practice.  The overarching goal in traditional Sand Tray Therapy is that the play leads one to individuation, or balance.  The use of circular trays serve to imprint an image of wholeness for each individual scene offering a comforting container.  In a circular environment you may play with the objects and regroup the individual traits, much as my grandmother did moving through the seasons in her garden.


Today's Secret Message of Love
Play!

Sand Tray In A Saucer ©  News From A Broad

Materials

• *A notebook for recording the completed scene during the process. (See Options)
• You'll need a container at least 16" in diameter.  A catch tray for a potted plant or a deep dish pizza pan work well.  Make sure you like it or you won't be inclined towards play.
• Fill for the tray can be sand, bird seed, or small dried peas.  Any fill that will hold the scene objects securely will work 
• A shelf, dresser, or storage tote with drawers to hold your collection of objects for scenes.
• A collection of objects, without consideration of size is best.  The natural world objects include shells, sticks, dried flowers, and any other item you find appealing.  The modern world objects are traditionally things found in a doll house, including human and animal figures.  The fantasy world objects are just that, fantasy.   
• Here is a short list: feathers, rocks, marbles, a string of beads, bottle caps, Christmas ornaments, wooden matches, fabric scraps,etc..

Process

• Create a scene in the tray.
• Use the Broad Dream Notes to process the scene.

Options

• *Use the journal from the Without Conclusion or Siesta Dreaming exercises.
•  Take a digital image of the scene in the tray.  Copy and paste it at the top of a word document, using the Broad Dream Notes outline for processing the scene.

Conclusion
This is a great family activity.  If the tray and collection of objects are to be shared, the creator of the scene needs to remove the objects and place them back where they are stored. Talk about teaching children to put away their things!

All the objects you collect, and the arrangements you create for your scenes are always right on.
Perfect!

Create the life you want!
The Broad

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Art Therapy for Broads Abroad :: Without Conclusion :: Exercise #14

:: The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. ::

- William Faulkner

Have you ever noticed that when a fairytale finishes with "The End", you have this stinking feeling that it isn't the end at all?  One of my all time favorite tales is of The Red Shoes.  An orphaned girl finds herself without shoes.  She collects scraps of various pieces of red cloth, stitching together a crazy quilt pair of shoes.  One day while journeying back to her hovel, a wealthy woman riding in a fine coach decides to adopt her.  The woman, disgusted by the handmade life of the girl, discards her clothes and her crazy quilt shoes.  On a fun little retail therapy trip, the girl spies a pair of red shoes.  The candy-apple-fire-engine-blood-rose-red shoes scream, 'Hey Biatch!  You NEED me!'

Though anything colored red has been forbidden, knowing the wealthy woman's eye sight is poor, the girl selects the shoes anyway and has the wealthy woman pay for them.  "Brilliant manipulation!" you may think.  However, the following day, as the girl attempts to leave a church, where the candy-apple-fire-engine-blood-rose-red shoes are proclaimed scandalous, the girl finds she has lost all control over her own movements.  The Red Shoes dance her nearly to death.  For years she has no way of determining her own fate.  Finally, in a fit of desperation, she instructs an ax-man to remove the shoes.  The shoes he cannot remove, but her feet fly off like the wings of Icarus.  

Now, if you have read the Handless Maiden, you know that this is not the end of the girl with The Red Shoes.  She may start out on a little board, wheeling around town begging for red fabric scraps, but in the next chapter, she will be recognized as the greatest red shoe cobbler in all the lands.  In a fairytale, hands and feet grow back, from infant to adult size, in the span of seven years.  Not unlike our own cells, the thrust towards the wholeness of living does not stop with an assault upon our bodies or our spirits.  

Today's Secret Message of Love
Allow the unexpected!

Without Conclusion © News From A Broad

Materials

• A beautiful blank paged journal.
• A pen molded to your hand.
• A few magazines.
• Scissors
• Clue Stick
• A desk placed near a window, preferably with a scene of your garden.  *See Options

Process
During the writing process, attempt to have no beginning and no conclusion.  One of the simplest ways to accomplish this is to not write the first and last sentences to come into your head.

• If you do not already have a collection of images for collage, you can begin one during this exercise.
• Select 2 images and glue them to the top of a blank page in your journal.
• Sit with the images.  Allow them to guide the process for a title to the piece you will write.
• Begin writing with the title as your opening line.  
• Attempt to complete 500 words.  This is of course easier to gauge if you are typing, but what fun would that be?
• No matter what the last line, do not commit it to the page.

Options

• Most of us do not have our desk and window with a beautiful view in the same room.  Find an image, as full page as possible, and tape this on the wall over your desk.  This serves as your inspirational view when you need a break from writing.

Conclusions
We are in the glorious middle of our stories and cannot be sure how they will end.  Narratives are dynamic, partial, fragmented and context dependent.  We are bound by discourse structures to a limited range of expression and understanding.  The stories that we form and that we share are created with other people and are told and retold in our everyday life.

Create the life you want!

The Broad 

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Art Therapy for Broads Abroad : Dance Party : Exercise #13

:: Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.::
- George Bernard Shaw

:: Almost nobody dances sober, unless they are insane.:: 

- H.P. Lovecraft

When I lived in Austin, I had a couple of goals - two stepping across Texas, and finding the best jerky in the state.  Every Thursday night I would head to The Broken Spoke, the oldest dance hall in Austin, and one of the places to introduce the world to a new style of music, Texas rock-a-billy.  

While I was searching for a small ranch in West Texas, I headed towards London, home to another famous dance hall.  With only 180 full time residents, this hamlet swells to twice its' size on Saturday nights.  Cowboys and hunters from neighboring communities, mark the small of your back with the palm of their hand, and offer an easy glide around a crowded dance floor.   

Though the Double Blind didn't land in London, there was dancing.  Along the winding ridge top above the creek, the open fields were covered in tall grasses interspersed with wildflowers that clutched small patches of barren ground like the first anger of a child.  My tires turned the creek bed into a quacking shatter, sending a hundred miniature yellow butterflies into a drunken blur.  Encouraged by their molestation of the prairie verbena, the butterflies were liberated, and swooned into a provocative dance against a wide sky.   

The compilation CD I played while crossing the hundreds of acres between the highway and my ranch gate began with Jollie Holland's Mexico City, and ended with Curt Massey singing the theme song from Petticoat Junction.  When the day came to return to my city life, I left as late in the evening as possible, and pulled away listening to the slow sweet voice of my friend, Nathan Hamilton.

Entrance to The Double Blind © Jessi T Walsh

Driving headlong into night
The only thing 
that I can see
Is a light rain falling in my headlights
The black wet road rolling under me
It tore my guts 
to hear you cry
It hurt my heart 
as well to see
The look of love that left your eyes
As you turned your face away from me 



Today's Secret Message of Love :
Make some noise with your fee!

Dance Party © News From A Broad

Materials :

• Music
• Mirror
• Motivation
• Movement

Process:  

• Turn that stereo system up full blast.
• Dance until you can't dance anymore!  

Options:

• Create a compilation of music that makes you feel fully alive and filled with joy!
• Create a compilation of music that reflects the life you are living now! 

Conclusions:
It's awfully difficult to be down in the dumps when you are watching yourself jump around to the beats that make you smile. Celebrate the joy of you!  Use the Broad Dream Notes as a guide for processing what you saw in the mirror!

Create the life you want!
The Broad

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