Tuesday, April 26, 2011

You Are An Artist


Michael Gormley Editorial Director of American Artist writes:
You Are An Artist
How do you know if you are an artist? Most children give their imaginations free reign, drawing and painting their wildest dreams with selfless abandon. Unlike most grown-ups, who put aside their art materials to pursue more “serious” activities, artists keep at it, committed to preserving a childlike wonder with the world and a deep desire to express that wonder. That’s how you know you are an artist—you need to create as much as you need to breathe. The world calls this art, but really you’re just doing what comes naturally.
*******************

Yolanda Martin
(editing attribution BetteLou Tobin)

What is Michael Gormley saying?

Isn’t there more to being an artist than the uncontrollable impulse to create? As we mature we learn to think that unless we can create what is judged to be good art by others then we stop creating, or else we must work and learn to improve our art so that we can continue creating art, but still seeking approval from others as validation that we are artists so as to continue to enjoy doing what gives us so much pleasure.

Too often, the professional artists building their reputations in the art community emerge, separate, and distance themselves from other nonprofessional artists, those who with childlike wonder simply enjoy creating art and expressing themselves emotively, with originality and sensitivity resonating with the subject being communicated. The artists, whose priorities and motives are to make a living from their art, create art with underlying emphases that their work must be sold, should never feel more important or better than the artists creating art solely for the pleasure, health, and happiness they get in the art making process.

Art is, for the majority of artists in the world, an enjoyable, quality ’me’ time, leisure pursuit, not a laborious, competitive business enterprise fraught with details of marketing and commercial economics trying to obtain revenue from the art created.

You are an artist simply because as a human being you were born with a need to discover, to experience, and to communicate your perceptions and life interactions, sharing those with others, affirming your realities and your existence through your own original creations. You are an individual worthy of enhanced positive self concept obtained through your personally chosen artistic endeavors. You should judge your art by your own standards, and not those of others who would discourage you perhaps only to better themselves by suppressing your individuality and personal worth.

The world is advanced by those who create, not by those who conform. You are an artist who can create what no other artist can create because you, and you alone, have a right to be you, the right to express your unique individuality. You are not a rubber stamp of another’s thought constructs about you. No one should be allowed to oppress and suppress your abilities and potential.

Build on your strengths, improve your weaknesses, and create love and positive energies around you because you are an Artist!

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Phoenix Artists Guild Spring Exhibit Art Show 2011

Jaxine Cummins is a wonderfully superior photographer and successful artist, and her husband, Chuck Cummins, currently is the webmaster for the Phoenix Artist's Guild Web Site http://phoenixartistsguild.com and also the Arizona Art Alliance Membership Chairperson . 
 
You have seen my video and photographs of the recent PAG Artist's Reception http://ymmartin.com/2011-04-08-PAG-Spring-Exibit-Art-Show-and-Sale/ , now see what a professional photographer has done with the same subject theme. It takes a lot of time taking and finishing the photographs to present an event at this level of quality of workmanship, and it would be nice if every show received similar preservation of the event and work of the artists. http://www.phoenixartistsguild.com/last_show_photos.htm .
 
Good, better, and best,
Continue on till
Your good is better
Your better is blessed.
 
Life is not a test,
To do and to learn,
To share and to give,
That is better's best!
 
Yolanda Martin ©

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

I Believe ...

I believe that God, the creator, does not involve himself in our petty affairs. He is the source and intelligence of the universe and all that is in it, and by giving man choice, man is accountable for consequences for all choices made, both individually and collectively within the environment, with its ever changing variables sprinkled with constants (fate) as we know it or define it.

Prayer works because there is a collective human consciousness and higher spiritual realm, supra reality/environment, the individual spiritually influences the definition of that higher spiritual realm of alternative futures (consisting of individual destinies and unalterable fates). The individual determines their destiny via body, mind, spirit (soul), self actualized living, while coping in life with specific fate as determined by realities over which he has no choice or control (the given constants and parameters of his life). Think now of the Serenity Prayer and the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi.

IMO, Catholic confession works because it psychologically cleanses the person of guilt and re-focuses the self to living a life free of sin. It would not work for a person who has no ethics or morals, no guilt, and is remorseless, i.e. the hardened criminal or others, unless they experienced a spiritual awakening or rebirth and opened their hearts to agape love and awareness capable of feeling and knowing the difference between right and wrong.

The person confessing his sins is proactively, positively projecting a path for progress in his life, learning from his past, with or without the assist of clerical redirection. Christian ethics promotes values clarification and helps in making wiser choices in the future that attenuate sinning in one’s life. Christianity is a consequence of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. All religions known to man are consequences yielding consequences by their very existence. It is the challenge of religions and of governments to unify the family of man to achieve peace. prosperity, progress, and happiness. Whether one confesses or not, one must cope with their conscience privately, knowing where they could have made a more effective choice in the past, and how to improve their choices in the future. If they do not do that, then they are simply a mindless, uncaring, machine without a soul.


It is man’s duty to serve God, not for God to serve man either individually or collectively. God is above all that. That which we would like him to do for us, but which we should and can do ourselves, he will not and should not do for us. “One Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” says nothing about God solving our problems for us, but simply reminds us of our subordinate status to God, the Almighty.


However you may conceive or do not conceive the God concept in your mind is irrelevant. What is relevant is that you realize that we, the people, are necessarily subservient to a cohesive intelligent greater entity collective universal consciousness, the unified organization known to us as America, (of the people, for the people and by the people) is under, not over, or even equal to the synergetic whole we give strength to preserving, our Nation.



Saturday, April 2, 2011

The Church and Its Usefulness in History

I do not agree (see below) that the churches are the least productive industry.  I believe that by being morale boosters and uplifting the human spirit enabling it to work and live in harmony with one another, enabling increased productivity and better performance, that the church is possibly the most productive industry known to man and one that is supported voluntarily by its constituents unlike the government which taxes it citizens to death and beyond.

It is the church, not the government, that compassionately and ethically cares about newborns, the dying and the dead, and all in between birth and death.  The church more than any other organization known to man in all of his history has promoted and preserved art and artists, and not just in any one mode of expression of art, but all art in the world.

Sex was God's gift to man, Love was God's gift to woman. (you may quote me).



Sent: Saturday, April 02, 2011 8:17 AM
Subject: Re: Art and the Church, My Photography and Video of St. Francis Xavier during Lent
Catholic churches have typically been beautiful, even ornately beautiful. The feeling was, and I think still is, that this is where a common (poor) parishioner may come and be surrounded, even overwhelmed, by beauty. It is certainly nicer looking than his often squalid home, and he forgets that he is paying for all this finery by his tithes.

Then the people who inhabit this beautiful building gather together to tell him that his common thoughts and very human actions are bad, sinful.  If he has any hope of a heaven, which they promote as everlasting life in paradise, he must pray, confess his sins (of which they convince him he has many,) do penance, and tithe, tithe, tithe to support the church in the manner it would like to become accustomed.

Quoting Robert A. Heinlein The Notebook of Lazarus Long:

The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd  fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.

He follows this note with:

The second most preposterous notion is that copulation is inherently sinful.