Diving Even Deeper Into the Mysteries of Colour

2024 was an outrageously challenging year. I came to the decision to shut down my website and all of my online courses. However, in spite of it being a mentally and emotionally draining year, 2024 was also one of incredible breakthroughs and clarity in my creative process.  The decision to shut down the website was driven by my desire to focus totally on nurturing my own work and not be drained by the constant changes and updates that the website demands.

One of the most valuable experiences offered through the website was our weekly live zoom sessions of Art Book Club Sketchbook Story Time in The Artist's Journey community.  There were only four of us that met each week.  For me, our weekly discussions and sharing of ideas, artists we discovered, art books we loved and our current projects was a highlight of the week.  I was energized and inspired enough to get me through yet another challenging week.  I knew I could continue our zoom sessions without having my website. I decided to call it quits and simply enjoy life creating art, being curious and having adventures. In three week's time my website would be up for renewal and I would not renew it. I slept extremely well that night. 

Next morning I awoke, poured a cup of coffee and went to my office to check email and to post the recording of our latest Art Book Club zoom session.  Two emails from artists weakened my resolve to shut down my website. In the emails, the artists each shared with me ways that I had impacted their art, their own creative process as well as their thoughts about their own artist's journey.  

As some of you know, I'm working on a thirty-year plan in spite of the fact that I'm seventy-three years old. I've always believed that learning skills, though incredibly satisfying, is relatively pointless in the grand scheme of life if those skills aren't shared.  In today's crazy world, we need creativity to be nurtured as much as possible if we're to survive as a human race.  It's the desire to share with others the lessons I've learned by both my successes and my failures that has always brought me back to teaching, to creating StreetSmartGeometry in public spaces and to encouraging people to be more playful with pen and brush regardless of whether or not they consider themselves to be artists.  Imagine how much more I will have to share in during my next thirty years!

That night, I hardly slept at all, trying to come up with a solution to my dilemma. Do I shut it down?  If not, how do I move forward without resenting the time I spend battling the technology?  By morning, I had a glimpse at what might work.  After constant arguing with myself, I've come up with a solution and I'm committed to it until this time next year when the renewal date will again arrive.  The solution is Colour Play in Art.

In the process of sorting through files and making sense of what Colour Play will be, I found a multitude of videos, images, inspirations and experiments that I created over several decades. I smiled at what I did and didn't know at the time.  I'll share many of these archived gems throughout the upcoming weeks beginning March 1st in Colour Play in Art.  This new workshop/course is included in The Artist's Journey membership.  Artists can join when they want, take a break by canceling when they want, and rejoin when they want. This new offring is meant to be both a personal journey and a community journey for all who participate, including myself.  I am the facilitator rather than the teacher.  I'll be sharing my daily colour practice through videos and live discussion sessions.  All artists will be able to communicate with one another through a forum group where images, questions, answers, comments, artists of interest, etc. can be shared.

Part of this years colour exploration is continuing my daily colour mapping.  This year is already quite different from last year's.  This year's intent is to explore colour inspired by environment as well as sounds, smells, feelings, thoughts and imagination. The results will be applied in one way or another to my studio work and my daily sketching.  Very exciting!