LYN BOYER

Meet Bean, a diminutive black rescue dog with a randomly crooked smile. Bat Dog impersonator, she races the wind cape flying – when she’s wearing one, and in her mind, I’m sure of it, when she’s not. Bean races. In the dark.

As artists, we may on occasion run headlong into a period of personal darkness. Creativity slips through our fingers, we instinctively tighten our grip and plunge over an emotional cliff, watching the last vestige of inspiration fade like smoke. Darkness closes in.

THE DOOM WHISPERERS

What just happened? Our sextant failed us and we lost sight of our North Star. We lost trust in our instincts. We lost faith in the wind of our spirit and started believing the Doom Whisperers. They’re like orcs…small, truly ugly, and out to suck the joy out of you. Anything or anyone who makes you doubt yourself, including yourself, is brokering doom. If we fall for it we furl our sails, cling to the mast, and start playing defense.

WIN THE DAY

How do we win back the day? We have two choices. Wait it out. Or, learn the art of racing in the dark. I’m not into wasting life, so waiting it out seems like a less than optimal option. I’m opting for racing in the dark. So, how do we go about winning the day in the middle of a pitch-dark night. And I mean win the day literally. Win the return of light, creative inspiration, excitement, and forward motion.  The wisdom of a diminutive dog has taught me we can play offense even before the light returns. We can race in the dark.

LESSONS ON RACING IN THE DARK

During an Excellent Adventure at the mostly abandoned dog park, Amanda, Bean dog’s mom, donned a headlamp, clipped on Bean’s night beacon, and unclipped the leash. In the face of darkness, the beaconed Bean flew off into the night at top speed. Uphill, downhill, then circling like a drone creating sky art on the 4th of July. The Bat Dog impersonator then sped back to the safe harbor of Amanda’s headlamp before heading off to race in the darkness again.

That blow-out-the-carbs headlong dive into happiness, smack in the middle of darkness, suddenly seemed way more attractive than my own personal darkness, the creative malaise I’d been blindly stumbling around in. Either I needed to become a dog, or learn to approach life more like a dog. I set about to apply the lessons of how Bean, apparently a Yoda among dogs, transmuted darkness into light.

1. The Night is Your Friend

Our artistic careers will cycle through day and night. Success and Sabbatical. Get used to the nights. Night is a friend, not an enemy. We can learn to love night as well as day. The air is cool. The sky is full of stars. Night is mysterious and holds different possibilities than day. Night is not so crowded with other people’s thoughts and opinions. It gives us a chance to return to our own instincts. We can learn to trust our inner creative voice again.  We can find images floating at the boundaries of consciousness that want to be painted. Truly authentic creations, not images contrived to sell, win, or impress.

2. Count to Ten

If you feel like you’ve been plunged kicking and screaming into a creative night, give yourself a minute.  Take a breath. Count to ten. Grant permission to set your brushes aside temporarily while your inner eye adjusts to the darkness. It’s time for a bit of nuance. If we can overcome the paralysis and sense of dread being plunged into creative darkness brings we win the option of learning to race in the dark instead. Play in the dark even. Look up at your figurative night sky. Stars! Stars can guide us home. Use the nuance of your new night vision.

3. Rocks aren’t Bears

Use lessons you learned during your artistic daytime to help guide you during your artistic night. Bean learned while racing in the daylight that the rocks she would bound off racing in the dark were indeed rocks, not bears. When you are trying to navigate creative darkness, realize that something that appears to be a looming bear might just be a rock. It not only isn’t going to eat you, you might be able to turn the rock into a launching pad for an exciting new direction.

4. Find your Lighthouse

Part of Bean’s bravery came from knowing that there was a light to guide her home. The beacon of Amanda’s headlamp was the safe harbor to circle back to in the dark before launching out on yet another adventure.  It takes a bit more energy to race in the dark, so find your personal lighthouse. It will guide you into harbor.  Fill it with whatever things feed your soul and put wind in your sails. When a beacon lights your way, you won’t have to search for ideas. The ideas will find you.

May you find creative adventures and the fun of racing in the dark!

– Lyn

NEW RELEASE – Liliedahl Art Video | “No Fear Oil Painting”™ – A Guide to Creative Brush Handling | with Lyn Boyer – Music by Dave Curley

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Some years ago I went through a period where a recurring element not only kept re-appearing in my paintings but would re-appear in pretty much the same location. It was utterly unconscious – and a bit disturbing – a glitch in the Matrix. It felt like waking up in the movie ‘Ground Hog Day’.

I was not only disturbed by it I was deeply curious about it. The answer as to why it was happening turned out to not be rocket science. I had found something that worked and the brain loves a well-paved highway. It was a safe solution. I could get myself a guaranteed pat on the back – even if it was only me standing back thinking, ‘Hey, that’s not too bad!’

Paralyzed by Applause…

As beings, we are deeply risk-averse. Our default is to seek safety – to repeat the thing that worked. It’s a deep and understandable instinct that we want to avoid failure and criticism and seek the warm nod of approval. I call it being paralyzed by applause. 

Repetition in any form can be either a conscious, powerful choice in service of a concept, or it can become the proverbial ‘highway to the danger zone’. The brilliant explorations of Monet reprising his water lilies or the kind of repetition devoid of risk and exploration that squelches the amazing creative beast prowling inside all of us.

What Scares You?

So, what can you do if you’ve become stuck on ‘rinse and repeat’? If I start defaulting to the safe zone I pose questions. I then work the problem to find an answer. For example…

What scares me? What am I avoiding?
What would happen if I used old furry brushes?
What would happen if I shoveled up the pigment instead of thinning it? What could I try that might communicate the noise and activity in a scene?
What would happen if I painted the painting upside down?
What would happen if only half the figure was in the picture plane?
What would happen if I put the center of interest in…shudder…the CENTER?
Could I make it work?
What would happen if…
And on…

The creative excitement will start seeping back and becomes its own reward.

The Good Fail…

There’s such a thing as a ‘good fail’. I walked into a gallery and saw a truly epic fail on the wall by someone who I know is normally an excellent painter. I’m pretty sure I did the “Huh???” family-dog-head-tip. My curiosity made me pause because I knew this person was normally not only a good painter but a very consistent one. I pretty quickly identified what wasn’t working in the painting and what I suspected was the cause of the fail. The painter had ventured outside of their safe zone and tried something new. They stretched. Granted, they had incorporated concepts they had not yet mastered so the painting was problematic. Though the solution had not worked, what I loved about the painting is that the painter had taken a risk. They had tried! That being said I might encourage painters to hold back from presenting those paintings publicly until the kinks are worked out. However, I suspected interesting new things would be coming down the pike from that painter once they hammered out the problems.

The Monster Mash…

If it has become a habit to circle back to an artistic solution that worked in the past we run the risk of applying it at an inappropriate time. I completely fell into my version of that low budget horror movie. I’d come up with a little formula for painting a specific type of scene that was a sure-fire way to make, not a masterpiece, but a nice little painting. It was confessedly a bit of an ‘arse’ saving move on my part at a plein air event I was nervous about.

Since I was new to the event and the location, I was feeling the pressure to produce. The tricks I’d devised were working famously and I was having that good, “I got this!” feeling going on until I slammed head-on into what was ACTUALLY in front of me the next day. The conditions had changed and literally nothing was the same. I reached into my little ‘Emergency Arse Saving Tricks’ bag and started painting like a banshee. It became clear in short order that my painting was a bit of a Frankenstein sewn together out of random parts. A few of my magic tricks, a couple of sprinkles from my formula, mixed with a few strokes of direct observation, topped off with a dash of panic. What had gone wrong? I’d mixed the past with the present. We must be present when we paint.

Go the Distance…

Many years ago I shared a subway ride with a truly great American painter that I deeply admired. We were quiet and then he turned to me and said. “Lyn, don’t ever stop looking. If you do, your paintings will eventually become cartoons.” He was not referring to ‘looking’ in the sense of slavish copying but looking in the sense of a deep and direct observation that leads to an understanding of the structure, essence, gesture, radiance of the forms around us.

I never forgot that moment and the truth of what he said has become more evident over the years. It has pulled me back from the edge when I have been tempted by the ease of drifting into painting formulas rather than asking myself to go the distance and look to see if there might be a different way to state something. Sometimes the different thing doesn’t turn out to be the better thing. Sometimes it does. Whichever way it goes I have the confidence the final solution was a decision, not a default.

Resistance is not Futile!

I’ll close with a painting that was one of my personal favorites of the year – ‘Coffee…black.’ It was the act of resisting nearly every formula I’d ever concocted or relied on in the past that fueled the intent of the painting. That intent being – paint not the objects but the sounds, smells, movement, atmosphere – the passage of the scene through time. The players themselves were only the supporting actors. I had to step away from the painting and out of the studio repeatedly to resist the urge to refine, to finish, to paint the life out of it.

So, never stop looking. Trust the painting. Trust yourself. And trust that tomorrow you can walk into your studio and it won’t be Groundhog Day!

How are you feeling today? Tired? Inspired? Brave? Beaten? As a painter, are the voices in your head your piper or your punisher?

Curiosity is seriously cool…

“Curiosity killed the cat!” So, did curiosity actually kill the cat? Not that I’m aware of.  The saying is floating around like a dust bunny under a couch in pretty much everyone’s sub-conscious having a party with these guys: “Don’t be curious!” “Curiosity will get you in trouble!” “Curiosity will be punished!” “Be curious and you could die…the cat apparently did!!” These are the thugs it runs with.  They’re lurking there and live to make you cave in to creative paralysis. “Don’t try that new idea, technique, subject matter. It might not be accepted. It might not work out. It might not sell. It might not win a ribbon. You might embarrass yourself! You might…FAIL!!!” The voices get more shrill until we’re slump-shouldered, our face in our hands and that spark of an exciting, new, utterly original idea that flitted through our brain has run for the hills.

When we were two feet tall, instead of being congratulated for our amazing creativity we were likely ‘domesticated’ – trained to be compliant. Having figured out how to open the kitchen cabinet doors, use the shelves as a ladder, do a rock climber worthy move to get on the kitchen counter and get a cookie out of the cookie jar from top of the fridge likely got us a swat on the bum rather than the applause it deserved!! Curiosity is BAD still lurks like Gollum under a rock in our brain.

Crumbs are seriously crumby…

Be on the watch that you don’t barter away your curiosity and the chance for adventure and artistic progress for crumbs.  When we move off our artistic vision and worry about what a judge will like, what Aunt Mildred might scowl at, what we see other painters getting pats on the back for, what worked for us last week, what is safe – we may have just slammed on the air brakes of our own progress.

The likes of Courbet, Manet, and Pissaro didn’t move off their vision and race each other back to the land of safety and acceptance when they were rejected from the 1863 Paris Salon.  They kept pushing the envelope answering over and over their own versions of the question, “What would happen if we tried…”

Be the most curious of cats…

The phrase “Curiosity killed the cat.” was originally “Care killed the cat.” Care as in ‘worrying’. So apparently the worried cat didn’t fare so well but the curious cat is quite alive!

Care deeply but don’t worry. Care motivates. Worry paralyzes. Care about your vision. Care about your progress. Care about the joy of creating. Even care about the craziness of the struggle. But, don’t worry. Don’t worry if your sincere efforts for the day missed the mark you were shooting for – you can try again tomorrow. Don’t worry if a judge passes you over. Don’t worry if Aunt Melba scowls at your recent effort. Congratulate that Indiana Jones part of yourself that has the courage to explore.

As painters, curiosity is our rocket fuel! Worry is our kryptonite!

Tomorrow, roll out of bed. Try something new! Handle paint a different way! Paint an amazing passage and then scrape it off just to prove you’re the master of the ship! If you paint with bright colors, try painting the nuance of grays. Pick up some sticks or rocks and lay them next to your brushes. See what kind of interesting marks they might add to your canvas. If something is starting to feel easy go paint something that feels hard.

When we try something new we never fail. We’ve succeeded in finding an answer to the question, “What would happen if I tried…?” We found out what may be useful. What may not. We may stumble on something amazing that isn’t useful in the moment but we can stash in our toolbox for later.

You get to choose the voices in your head. Follow the Piper. Delete the Punisher. Be curious. Try new things!  Fling yourself off the side of the pool with abandon and do a flailing belly flop. Might sting a little but you’ll paddle back to the side of the pool, find the beauty in shaking yourself off like a wet dog and… you’ll want to go try it again!

Exercise that cat…

Here’s a personal challenge, which is actually pretty fun. I predict you’re going to surprise yourself.  If you’ve recently painted something that you’ve gotten a bit of praise or an award for – try something that’s the polar opposite and see if you can create a more powerful painting than the one that just got the applause!

I’ll leave you with an image, ‘Havana Grays’, that originated by doing exactly that. An appreciative person stood next to me in front of a painting I’d just finished.  They stared at it, turned to me with delight and with all earnestness said, “It’s sooooooooo detailed!!!!” I mustered my very best thank you ever so much smile while inside I was figuratively beating my head against my paint palette.  Wowing someone with technical ability wasn’t on my goal list for that day. Inviting them to feel something was.  I set out a challenge for myself.  Learn when less can indeed be more. My intent for the next morning’s studio session was to answer the question, “What would happen if…I attempted to create a painting that was stripped of absolutely everything except that which was essential to communicate the mood, and my memory, of that moment in time?”  ‘Havana Grays’ was the painting and it immediately found its ‘person’.

Every morning when we wake up and take up our brushes there is always another question to ask. So, go exercise that curious cat, jump up on the counter and stick your artistic paw in the cookie jar that’s on top of the fridge!

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Chewing gum, a soda bottle, and a paper clip and supposedly we can MacGyver our way out of anything!  I want to share one way you truly CAN MacGyver your way out of those times you feel like no matter which way you turn you are creatively stone-walled and once again the muses seem to have fled.

A lot of us will put music on in the studio along with knocking back a double espresso on those days our brain feels like day-old white bread. Get some mood enhancers going – we feel a bit better, we paint a bit better. So, now you know what this article isn’t about! What it is about is incorporating music into our painting practice in a much more powerful and intentional way.

Good friends and truly inspired – and inspiring – musicians, Dave Curley, Joanna Hyde, and Tadhg Ó Meachair, from the transatlantic trio ‘One for the Foxes’ have agreed to take this leap with me. They’ve offered up the gift of their music, thoughts on creativity and devotion to the arts and life to ‘we who wield brushes’ – their brothers-in-arms in the creative arts. They have provided the music you’ll be using for the exercises you’ll find at the end of the article. A sincere thank you to Dave, Joanna, and Tadhg!

The first exercise will focus on increasing brush vocabulary through painting using your entire body. The second, uprooting ingrained habits and assumptions that are way past their expiration date and have lost their usefulness. My hope is that the music in concert with the exercises will bring you and your paintings one step closer to the heart of all things.

I had occasion recently to work with a talented student who was stuck. The brush was in a death-grip; the approach to the canvas was sincere but unfocused. Paint would be shoveled up, a stroke would be laid down and then rather than allowing a breath, a pause and stepping back from the canvas and assessing the passage they would stroke the passage again and again until any life it might have had was gone. It pretty much bled out on the sidewalk. The student was truly stuck in a loop chanting the same ‘word’ over and over with their brush – but not in a good Zen way. The musical equivalent could be a three-year-old future percussionist banging pan lids together like a bad loop until you want to open the slider and throw them out in the snow just long enough to make them stop. They haven’t yet developed the manual skills, artistry, and understanding of complex rhythms to be the heartbeat of a future band.

I tried everything in my coach’s bag to get them past the wall they’d hit. I had nearly given up when I reached over, turned on my trusty blue-tooth speaker, chose a track and said, ”Now, stop painting the painting and paint the music.” They focused their attention fully on the music. The death grip on the paintbrush loosened. The stance that had been hunched became relaxed. The impetus for the paint strokes began originating from somewhere deep. They began using their entire body. The strokes became fluid and full of life.

For years we painting instructors have tried to teach rhythm, melodic line, composition and such with little sketches, slides, diagrams and whatever else we can think up. This was a serious ‘duh’ moment for me. All this artist needed was, not to read about, talk about or look at charts about rhythm, the student needed to experience rhythm in the moment. When they did their body knew exactly what to do with it. Watching them pretty much dance back and forth approaching and retreating from the canvas, laying down strokes inspired by the phrasing in the music actually verged on spooky since minutes ago they were carved in stone.

FINDING THE HEARBEAT

What are some ways we can bring ourselves back to true north when it feels like our painting is going sideways?

We need a heartbeat to live. A song, a tune, a painting, all need a heartbeat to live. The lot of us, painters, composers and songwriters alike, are pretty much guaranteed to now and then have a time when we stand back and realize our creation that day is seriously DOA. Don’t panic – triage. Can it be resuscitated? If not then salvage some valuable learning from it and move on. If there’s still a pulse then:

1. Step back and find the weakness that might be dragging down an otherwise important creation.
2. Ask yourself if the initial intent was unfocused.
3. Is there a weakness in the structure?
4. Did you hang the curtains before the drywall?
5. Is there an inelegant passage in the execution?

Sometimes we are only a very small adjustment away from saving the patient and a fine offering to the muses!

THE PRACTICE AND THE PERFORMANCE

As painters we work on two fronts – the practice and the performance.

1. The practice: Striving for mastery of the technical skills. A painter’s version of practicing scales.
2. The performance: We then choose a time to pull those hard-won arrows out of our quiver to create an image that will carry our message…hopefully squarely into someone’s heart.

Here are some go-tos for your tool kit to help you come at your creative life with more intention and focus.

1. Slow down and resist the temptation to just launch right in. Give yourself permission to spend some time bringing into focus your intention for your painting so it is truly ‘about’ something, not a painting ‘of’ something.
2. Keep your antennae up for those things you respond to.
3. Search for what you feel deeply about. Love will be felt by the viewer if you paint what you love. Joy will be felt by the viewer if you paint what brings you joy. Peace by painting what brings you peace. Power if you paint powerfully.
4. Quiet the voices in your head and sometimes the voices outside of your head.

Musicians lead us on journeys that are image-filled through lyrics and musicianship. As painters, we should strive to take our viewers on journeys that are music-filled, if not literally, at the very least through masterful handling of the painter’s versions of composition, rhythm, and harmony. The common roots of music and the visual arts surface constantly. We compose. We seek harmony. We design with rhythm. We use melodic line. We choose what key we are going to paint in. We place color notes. We find our voice. We create contrast. We use tempo to speed up and slow down the viewer’s path through the painting.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I asked Dave, Joanna and Tadhg of ‘One for the Foxes’ if they would share some thoughts on the creative process from the viewpoint of musicians and songwriters.  I found their insights not only inspiring but remarkably applicable to our process as painters.

“My focus is covering two angles as I embark on my creative process and I try to keep these two fundamental elements (as I see them) at the front of my mind. 

At the outset, most of my process is informed by my own personal experiences and what I take from myself and inject into the music. Establishing the narrative, drawing from past musical interactions and imagining new ones to create something new. As the structural, musical and lyrical elements begin to take form, I try to shift my focus and fine-tune my piece of art with the fresh perspective of a new listener. I have found that parts of my art that I become sentimental and attached to because of the journey of the piece, can actually hinder the overall piece of art and it might be better served if removed. This tension between the personal and the external is important for my process and can offer a lot more clarity to the listener/observer when both sides are taken into consideration.”  Dave Curley – multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter

“In the spirit of art being a sort of continuum (in my mind), I find this element of ‘balance in flow’ really important. Just as Dave is talking about balancing the internal and external for the sake of art, I think that stretches to the idea of being open to whatever creativity is coming through you and/or from inspirational sources around you, and being able to look at it all critically without overwhelming yourself with judgment. 

I think one of the most fundamental reasons for art is joy – getting to feel and share joy -, and that is a sort of mantra I try to come back to in order to keep myself balanced when I’m feeling bogged down by uncertainty or criticism, most often my own. I know it sounds trite, but I do think that happiness is the core behind this all, and that is ultimately what allows the creativity to come out into the world. Some of my favorite moments are when I’m listening to a piece of music and it fills me up so much that I get goose bumps. I’m experiencing the piece in such a pure way without consciously analyzing it. With the open and subjective process that is art, it’s sometimes hard to know from the artist’s perspective when to let a project or piece be “complete”, or at least sit for a while and decide whether or not to come back to it. I try to keep ahold of an awareness of this flow between the various states of creating something and experiencing all different feelings about it, so that I can continue to try new things, hopefully learn and improve, allow for the more difficult moments, create space when necessary, and more than anything, keeping loving the whole experience of it. That, in turn, allows for whatever I’ve created/shaped/molded to be shared, and perhaps become something new again for the next person.” Joanna Hyde – vocals, fiddle, songwriter

“As for my creative process, particularly in terms of composition, I find it to be an ever-evolving process. Perhaps coming from the Irish tradition, where ‘a composition’ is usually limited to 16 bars of music and incorporates repeated motifs within that, one can encounter a burning urge to break the rules and strive to make something ‘bigger’. This can be very rewarding. However, when all the rules are broken, suddenly the beauty of the original ‘simple’ form can also emerge. Then, rather than feel confined by strictures, one can find immense joy in appreciating subtleties often lost in a larger picture. 

Ultimately, neither of these approaches is ‘wrong’, and, to echo Dave’s and Joanna’s words, letting go is the big challenge. You will always improve, evolve, and/or change as an artist. Tomorrow you might balk at the idea of something you love today. But today is just as valid as tomorrow. As the legendary Irish musician Dónal Lunny once told me in the midst of an album recording, ‘That’s why we call it ‘a record’. It’s a record of where you and your art is right now.’ “ Tadhg Ó Meachair – piano, piano-accordion, composer

MUSIC TO INSPIRE PAINTING AND PAINTINGS INSPIRED BY MUSIC

I’m going to share two paintings in an ongoing series that will be exploring music. The musicians are the subjects of the paintings but the message is the music. They are paintings ‘of’ musicians but ‘about’ music. The first is about music that was and will be. The second is about music in the present moment.

The Harpist

The painting is of a harpist but it is about the space between the notes where music exists.  Her hands in her lap mirror the rests in a composition. It looks back to when the music was and forward to when the music will be again.

Buena Vista Social Club

This is, on the surface, a painting of musicians on a stage. Again, the painting is about the music. For this painting, I literally used the spaces between the musicians to paint the music. Every stroke, color note, paint passage was executed to be a visual translation of the music filling the club. Even the powerful bass line lives in the dark vertical post on the left. The tangle of wires speaks about the complexities of the notes – of how the voices of instruments intermingle.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Okay, now we’ll turn our thoughts toward how to put all of these ideas into practice. Let’s dump some sound and some pigment into an imaginary particle accelerator and make the two collide. When any two things collide in this universe something is created. Water + rock = a canyon. Car + tree = a trip to the body shop. If you DO create something new because of a fender bender after you’re over inventing new profanities, stop and look at how the light might be hitting the new wrinkles in the sheet metal. Look at the sweeping patterns the grass stuck in the quarter panel is making. There’s beauty even in something that a minute ago totally sucked the life out of your day. Pass no judgment on what appears on your canvas during the exercises. Just let the worlds collide and feel the joy of the process.

My hope is that the music in concert with the following exercises will bring you and your paintings one step closer to the heart of all things!

EXERCISE 1: Increasing brush vocabulary through painting using your entire body.

Use two 12×16 or larger inexpensive canvas panels or paper. You don’t want to worry or feel precious about the surface you do exercises on.

Work standing up so you can move freely. Make sure you have a clear path so you can step back from your easel at least 6 or 8 feet if possible. You need to always be moving forward and back. Forward to lay down a passage. Back to see the big picture. For this exercise, you’re to not care a whit what ends up on the canvas. Focus entirely on the music and use it to inspire new ways to approach your canvas. Allow the marks you make on the canvas to just ‘be’ with no judgment. Relax and use your entire body. Let the stroke originate in the earth, move up through your spine, shoulders, arm, through your brush and finally to the canvas. Click on the audio clips to access the music for your exercises.

I’ve chosen two of Dave Curley’s pieces from ‘A Brand New Day’ for this exercise.

A. The first piece you’ll work to is a beautifully rendered piece that leads you on a gentle and at the same time emotional journey awash in visuals.  ‘The Pleasure Will be Mine’ – written by Alan Reid, arrangement by Dave Curley and Mick Broderick. 

I want you to be aware of the grace in the music and let that translate into how you move your body and hold your brush. You should hold a brush with both delicacy and perfect control. It should nearly fall out of your hand. You’ll move from shoveling up paint and spreading it on the canvas like stuccoing a wall to a vocabulary of true brush calligraphy that can speak volumes with a stroke.

B. For the second half of this exercise, you’ll work to one of Dave’s original pieces, ‘Off to War’, which is both powerful and poignant at the same time. e NOTES: ‘Off to War’ is a true story from Ireland in 1916, based off a mother’s diary which she kept for her son who was fighting in the Irish regiment of the English army in the 1st world war. Old story, new art.  – Dave Curley, Mick Broderick

Use a new canvas or paper. The intent, the rhythms, the message are entirely different. As you focus on the music and begin responding, you’ll discover you’ll be using your body in an entirely different way as you approach the canvas. There is a more powerful undertone in this song with compelling rhythms. There are moments that are lilting and inspiring and conversely poignant and heartbreaking. Pull out your Big Book of Brush Vocabulary for this one! You’ll need lots of different words.

EXERCISE 2: Uprooting ingrained habits and assumptions that are past their expiration date and have lost their usefulness!

Again, use two 12×16 or larger inexpensive canvas panels or paper.

For this exercise, we will again focus on the music but the intent is to interpret what we’re hearing and translate it into passages of color on the canvas. We have a huge vocabulary in a single brush. We can go from a wisp of a hairline to a powerful and bold stroke with just a twist of the brush in our hand.  After you load your brush you then have three tools for making your mark – speed, pressure, and direction in infinite combinations. Try them individually and then combined. Step back between passages and assess how successfully you’ve communicated the intent of the music.

I’ve chosen two wonderful pieces from ‘One For the Foxes’ for this exercise.

A. The first tune you’ll work to in this second exercise is a beautifully crafted piece, ‘Virginia’, that is sure to draw you in and inspire you to use your brush in new ways as it takes you along on its journey.

Notes: Virginia is a town in County Cavan in Ireland, and is one we particularly enjoyed putting together with its more distinctive arc/journey from slow and airy to faster and punchier. – Tadhg Ó Meachair

Let your mark making follow the arc of the story in this one letting your brush follow the beautiful drawn out passages in all of their tenderness. Then interpret the anticipation as the tempo slows then builds and the piece becomes more complex.  This is a great exercise for breaking the habit of repetitive brush strokes. You will have the pure music of radically different passages on one canvas. That’s when the painting becomes a dance.

B. The final piece you’ll be working to in this series of exercises fully invites you to the dance of life – ‘One for the Foxes’!

Notes: “One for the Foxes…is a mix of two tunes – one Irish tune composed by Junior Crehan, and then the tune that myself and Joanna composed in honor of some foxes who lived in my back garden in Dublin!” – Tadhg Ó Meachair

This last exercise is about shaking off dusty habits that have been holding us back, stealing our voice and keeping us from true expression and connection. 

So, put the last canvas on the easel, turn up ‘One for the Foxes’ and feel what it’s like to channel joy!

Enjoy your journey of discovery! – Lyn

Credits:

Many thanks to Joanna Hyde, Tadhg Ó Meachair and Dave Curley of ‘One for the Foxes’.

ONE FOR THE FOXES

Dave Curley, Tadhg Ó Meachair & Joanna Hyde form an exciting and dynamic transatlantic trio that presents a rousing blend of Irish and American folk music, having already won over audiences on both sides of the ocean. The group is made up of Dublin’s Tadhg Ó Meachair (Goitse), Galway’s Dave Curley (SLIDE) and Denver, Colorado’s Joanna Hyde (The Hydes), and features a mix of Irish and American folk music and song – both traditional and newly-composed – presented in an energetic and engaging manner. Their performances strike a tasteful balance between the stories found in ballads across both sides of the Atlantic and the respective instrumental music traditions of these places. Award-winning instrumentalists each in their own right, Dave, Tadhg & Joanna take a unique twist on the diverse strengths of their individual backgrounds, weaving between traditional melodies, their own compositions, and songs from the broader folk canon. The results are highly personalized and thrilling in their daring and forthright grasp of the material. Through a shared deep-rooted passion for Irish traditional music, this trio highlights the vital role of Irish traditional music as an origin of many American folk musics and explores how those styles can interact with one another in a manner both eclectic and grounded.

Dave Curley

A multi-instrumentalist from County Galway, Dave Curley has worked with multiple Grammy-winning acts, as well as being a member of the Irish supergroup, SLIDE. Not only an outstanding musician, singer, and songwriter, Dave is also known as a champion Irish step dancer.

Tadhg Ó Meachair

An All-Ireland champion pianist, Tadhg has toured the world with his multi-award-winning band GOITSE. His musicianship, recognized by legendary musician Dónal Lunny in his ‘Lorg Lunny’ television series, has led him to collaborate with acts ranging from Seán Ó Sé to The Stunning.

Joanne Hyde

Award-winning fiddler and vocalist Joanna Hyde, a Colorado native, is steeped in musical styles on both sides of the Atlantic. A recipient of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation’s Graduate Arts Award, Joanna has an MA in Irish Traditional Music Performance from the prestigious Irish World Academy in Limerick, and tours throughout North America and Europe with various projects

oneforthefoxes@gmail.com

‘One for the Foxes’

 www.oneforthefoxes.com

 ‘A Brand New Day’

http://davecurleymusic.com

© Lyn Boyer – No Fear Oil Painting™

www.lynboyer.com

We’re inspired. Paint flies. Ideas run rampant and our only fear is one might escape before we get it on the canvas.  And then…nothing. Black nothingness. A post-apocalyptic wasteland. We’re left alone staring into our brain and see a gaping hole of rubble where yesterday flocks of ideas beckoned. The paintbrush feels like it weighs a hundred pounds and every stroke feels painful and kludgy. Panic starts to set in. Elvis…has left the building.
Stage 1 – Standing in front of a white canvas – paralyzed.
Stage 2 – Raw panic.
Stage 3 – You’re in a ball on the couch stuffing chips in your mouth reaching for the remote to binge watch Netflix.
What is it that inhabits our brain on one day pouring out ideas, energy and inspiration and then just up and leaves the next day? Connection to Spirit? A muse? Does it leave us or do we leave it? Will it ever come back? I stopped in to see an artist/gallery owner one day whose work I admired. She always seemed like an endless fount of inspiration. Year after year, fabulous work would consistently appear on the walls.  I sat down across from her. She looked up at me, said nothing for a few moments and then said slowly, “I’ve…got…nothing. It’s gone. There is absolutely NOTHING there.” There was a tinge of panic. It was a confession and plea. A confession of the secret we all carry that we aren’t the magical beings some people think we are. We aren’t the eternal fount of creativity with never a blip. It was a confession of the fear that the well was dry, that the ideas would never return. Just then, a mini-epiphany exploded in my brain, and though it didn’t diminish my empathy for her, it also made me feel suddenly not so alone.  This happens to all creative people. Perhaps more often for some than others. It may not be comfortable but it’s also not the end.
So, what you can do about it? How do you find your way back to productivity and inspiration? First, chill-ax. Take a breath. Stop begging your muse to come back. Your muse is just not that into you at the moment.  Quit acting like a jilted lover. Put a chip clip on the bag of chips, get off the couch, pick up a brush and just do the work. Be willing to do the work even when you feel….NOTHING! Feelings come. Feelings go. In true Elvis form feelings, “Ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog.” Okay, that sounds dreary but when you understand the nature of inspiration, the nature of your muse, you’ll be able to trim your sails, navigate the seas and actually begin to enjoy the vagaries of the wind and waves.
Think of your muse as a lighthouse. When it completes its circuit and its beam falls on you the world lights up. We then expect it to come to a grinding halt and forever shed its light on us. When it moves on in its never-ending arc, leaving us once again in the dark, we throw a tantrum. We greedily want it to stop doing its job.  We forget it left us with a gift before it continued on its circuit. A new idea. Something to be curious about.
Let the light move on, get comfortable with the twilight. Know that as the light swings once again through its arc, it’s searching the horizon, it’s gathering new ideas to deliver to you when it next visits.  Our psyche, our creativity, our passion needs rest periods. It’s only fear that the beam will never complete its sweep and fall on us again that sends us to the couch with a bag of chips.  When you learn over time that yes, Elvis has left the building, BUT he is scheduled to return, we can relax and use the time for a number of things. Reconnecting with nature. Doing some introspection as to why, exactly, you paint. Practicing some core skills. Doing a focused study – the painter’s version of a musician doing their scales. In other words, spend/use the time productively so that when the beam sweeps around and falls on you again you’ll be prepared!  Half of the secret of life is being prepared so you won’t miss the moments when they present themselves.  When you’re alert and fit you can race that train to somewhere awesome and grab onto the handrail as it’s leaving the station on a new journey. If you’re asleep on the couch you’re going to miss the train.
So how about some pretty pain-free techniques for breaking out of a serious funk:
1. This is counter-intuitive, but try making yourself NOT go in your studio. Limit your painting time to something ridiculously doable like 30 minutes. If even that sounds painful make it 15. Set a timer and stop painting even if the fog is beginning to lift and things are going swimmingly. The magic moment will come when you desperately want to work past when the timer goes off. Stop anyway. Stay hungry my friend. Pretty soon you’ll begin passionately hating the timer. Passion is back…even if it’s in the form of glaring at a timer. You’ll fling the timer aside and paint on into the night. The funk will have been banished like a roach by the light.
2. Set a specific intention. Choose a reason to walk into the studio. ‘I will learn about…’ ‘I’m curious about…’ ‘What would happen if…’ ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to try…’
3. Use your tantrum as energy. Put up a dart board in the studio. Throw darts. Then throw paint…at a canvas. Be physical. Stand up to paint. Paint with energy. Don’t slouch in a chair. Jump up and strike the power pose. (Feet wide and strong, chest up, arms thrust above your head in exclamation and face pointing defiantly upwards.)
4. Figure out what it is that’s intimidating you. Hit it head on. Wrestle it to the ground. Stop staying safe.
5. Demand nothing of yourself except to go through the motions. Mix a little paint. Sit on the floor and put your art books in alphabetical order for no particular reason. Lie on the floor, stare at the studio upside down and imagine what life would be like walking around on the ceiling. Congratulate yourself on whatever small thing you managed.
I’ll leave you with an image: “Havana Nights.” It turned out to be one of my favorite paintings of the year. It was waiting for me on the other side of some impenetrable wall. There was a literal war going on inside me. I had no idea what to paint. My internal tantrum was palpable. Finally, by sheer will, stubbornness or exhaustion from my own mental battle I made myself walk into the studio, pick up a brush and make one mark. Then another. Then another. Then there was no stopping. Paintings want to be painted and we sometimes just need to allow them to manifest themselves by the simple act of picking up a brush no matter how we’re feeling.
No one is exempt from periods of struggle. Don’t worry. Pick up your brush. The magic always comes back. The lighthouse doesn’t stop shining. And remember…sometimes our best work waits for us on the other side of the greatest resistance.