Colour 2025 - See it, Feel it, Express it

Colour mapping, originally inspired by an online workshop by Tansy Hargan, became a daily practice in December of 2023.  Before then, I dipped in and out of the practice every several months.  After managing to colour map my surrounding landscape every day during that month of December I was confident that I could meet the challenge of colour mapping daily for an entire year. Knowing that life often gets in the way of my best intentions, I gave myself one option for those days when it just couldn’t or wouldn’t happen.  I permitted myself the exception of mapping a day from memory as long as I mapped it within twenty four hours.  What I didn’t expect is that allowing this exception led to a variety of ways that I’m now able to put colour mapping to use in studio work, travel sketching and in the way I see colour as I walk, drive and fly through my environment. I watch colours change as a result of time, weather, season, location, memory and my own mood.

At the end of 2024 I came to a crossroad.  I had major decisions to make.  One of them was whether or not to devote my time entirely to my own work, closing down my website and my online teaching so that I could take full advantage of this fascinating new colour awareness. I decided it was going to be okay for me to go offline.  I’m seventy-three years old. I want to continue growing as an artist as fiercely and as furiously as I possibly can.  My website renewal comes up in about a month.  A week ago I made the decision to shut it down. I was happy with that … or so I thought.

There was something that made 2024 a breakthrough year in spite of having lost a lifetime of my artwork, reference materials and many of my precious art books in a flood in early January of 2024. It was the weekly, live sessions of Art Book Club Sketchbook Story Time that I hosted on my website’s Artist’s Journey Community.  At first there were just two of us … then there were three … at the end of the year there were four.  When I began the community I felt for sure that there would be at least a dozen or more artists who would love to join us.  There weren’t … and it still was the most looked forward to night of the week.  We shared favorite artists, newly discovered artists, our fun sketches, our miserable sketches.  We laughed, we complained, we talked about art and talked more about art … and even more about art.  We talked about our journeys as artists … how we either fit art into our daily lives or struggle with fitting it into our daily lives.  We support one another and inspire one another.  Our little group of four was what helped to get me through one of the most difficult years of my life.  Those three artists helped to keep my fire burning.  I can’t give that up.  I don’t want to give it up.  I want it to still exist for me, for Jill, for Carol, for Suzanne … and for any artist who might benefit from it and for whom it might keep the creative fire burning.

After a sleepless night of letting my imagination wander through the options of how I might keep the website going while NOT stealing my precious time and resources, I decided that I would renew for at least another year … with a few major changes, the details of which I’m currently working out.  I am a one-woman show …. I do all the content creating, the filming, the video and audio editing, the marketing and keeping up with all the constant changes in the software and apps that I use to do it all.  That steals a great deal of my studio time and my contemplation time. 

As I move forward, the only solution to maintaining my sanity and personal artistic growth is to limit what I offer to one ever-evolving course in the exploration and application of COLOUR sharing my own evolving journey as I move forward into new territory.  It will work both as a course of study and as a community of artists.  It won’t be slick, it won’t be perfect but it will be very, VERY real.  Since I have over a hundred online courses already available on my website and on Skillshare, I can direct artists to those fundamentals (which are available to them for free as members of the community) so the time we spend together in live sessions is about the here and now, where we want to be and brainstorming what we’re doing to get there … or at least to be headed in the right direction.  This is the kind of community of artists I love.  The internet offers us the ability to connect with one another around the world.  Jill is from Wales, Suzanne from Luxembourg, Carol from Vermont and my home base is in New Jersey. We gather together online every Monday … evening for Jill and Suzanne, afternoon for Carol and me.

The daily practice of colour mapping will continue, heading in a slightly different direction.  It will take the reality of what I see and expand it by exaggerating, tempering, reversing, neutralizing or over-saturating it … and then … applying it in one way or another in my studio to create something that evolves from reality but includes the expression of my personal feelings and experience as altered through the filters of my emotions, my history and my imagination.  I know this is a high goal for me to set for myself.  I have nothing to lose by setting it this high and I have everything to gain by working toward that goal.

The release of my upcoming plan will be on or before March 1, 2025.  There will be a number of different options available to artists to become involved in either the course version of it or the course/community version of it.  There will also be options available for the art student/starving artist, having never forgotten living in an attic loft space without heat in Boston eating quiche morning, noon and night.

The journey of an artist is difficult … and I can’t think of any other journey that could be as rewarding and fulfilling.  It’s not only my successes that have kept me going this long.  It’s also my failures.  It’s the failures that proved to me my resilience and the insistence of my inner artist to keep her creative energy, her life force, going … even when it was only a trickle.

Knock and my door and I will welcome you in.  You may come, you may stay, you may go … you may watch, you may listen, you may speak.  You may agree, you may disagree.  I ask only that you be as authentic as you can be and that you commit to setting your inner artist free and that you share your journey and be open to connecting to other artists and to contributing your thoughts and ideas with the artists within the community.  I suppose those are a lot of demands.  Crones are allowed to make demands.  As a crone, I’ve earned that right and now I’m claiming it.  Crones have a lifetime of experiences, knowledge and wisdom to share.  I look forward to sharing mine in this new chapter of the journey.