The art of giving...and another resin piece

'Icy Morning' Mixed Media and Resin 600 x 475 x40mm

I have been pondering the concept of Giving this morning and how it is a fundamental requirement of human beings to give to other human beings if you want to be happy and live a good life. It feels good to give so why do we convince ourselves so much of the time that we need to hoard our gifts (whether these are access to money, services etc) for ourselves and our immediate family rather than recognising that we are all connected and for one to have more than one needs and another to have none, affects us all.

Personally, I have noticed how I have pulled back on giving in the past few months and I shouldn't have. Our business has been affected by the credit crunch with access to funding having been difficult which really sucks when you are half way through building two big houses, go to top up to get the money to complete them and get told that the bank no longer funds construction. While we are coming to the end of this hard period now and have a funding solution that we are in the final stages of, we have had to pull tighter and tighter to get through and our personal spending has pretty much been nil.

While we lived tight in the first few years of starting our property businesses, we had a few years when money was good and we didn't have to really think about it. Our assets were growing and if we saw something we wanted, we could get it (within reason of course). For me, it was buying books as I am quite addicted to books and can easily spend a week in Borders. So we used to be fairly free about giving to various charities as well and I think we must have ended up on a database of people known to give as we get rung up pretty often.

When things started getting tight, I stopped giving. A month or so ago, I saw a man selling pens for Save the Children fund. I have always bought these pens in the past but at $20 per pen I chose not to support that. And I felt like crap! At the end of the day, even though we are going through a temporary hard patch with our business, we are still exceptionally lucky. My husband and I have a very good marriage, our children are amazing incredible creatures and we have assets, even if we don't have a great inflow of cash right now. It is so easy to get hung up on what is wrong with your life that you forget how great it really is. Maybe I should have given that $20, I could have got through without it. I think I got so used to having money in the past, that now when I take out the weekly budget of cash for our personal requirements, I like the security of having it in my purse. But to give, would have bought better returns to me than the security I felt of having it there in case I needed it for our family.

I have been doing a lot of reading recently about the law of attraction etc and while I am still working out my own feelings about those philosophies, I do firmly believe that you get what you give. And if I still give, even when I feel like hoarding for personal security, who knows what good things will come my way. There is no reason why so many people in this world do not have access to clean water, adequate food to eat and shelter in a safe environment. If we who are so lucky to live in countries where we are free to succeed and have a good life, could consider that we are all connected and for a child to die of starvation in Africa hurts all of us, then we could make this world a better place.

I think we get hung up on the concept that there are limitations and that we personally will need to give up what we have in order for others to have enough. But that is not true. There is enough water, food, shelter, money etc for everyone in this world to live a good life. It is how it is managed or hoarded that means currently some have much more than they will ever need and others have none.

Some statistics to back this up, in 2004, the global spending on weapons was $900 billion. If the USA alone froze spending on military and weapons for 18 minutes only, there would be enough money to feed, house, clothe and educate all people who die of starvation for a whole year. And in four years up to 2003, the USA, UK and France earned more income from arms exports to Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America than they provided in aid.

I have hope that our world is moving to a higher level of consciousness. I have great hopes for Obama from a global perspective and if we all just gave just a little bit more, just how great could we make all our lives?

Life Drawing Workshop

Here are a few part-completed drawings from a life drawing workshop I attended yesterday. I was really looking forward to this and I came out feeling frustrated which I talked about on my art school blog if anyone that reads this is interested in hearing about that.

Didn't get a chance to do some more completed drawings but I was pleased at how far I have come in terms of being able to get the proportions pretty much right on the page.

This one was from an interesting exercise where we had to look at the whole body in terms of cylinders and only put the outside lines down once we had completed the figure.

The model was great though and did some excellent poses. I do need to do more life drawing as it is one of the best ways to improve drawing ability, I just wish I hadn't come out of this class feeling so frustrated.

Resin and RED and the search for not needing approval

How is that for a title of a blog post! And I have just realised that I have hit the 4000 views mark just now which is fairly exciting. Obviously a few people like to check in with what I am doing which is nice to know.

I have continued working on these abstracted landscapes with resin and I love them. I finished this one yesterday. Unfortunately it is so hard to take an accurate photo with resin and this particular one just glows in real life. I still haven't come up with a title yet, so still mulling on that, however size wise it is 600 x 450 x 40mm.

I have been thinking about why I am using these materials and why I am suddenly doing this more abstract work and why I am loving the process and the outcome. What I am coming it is that these are about a feeling I have of a sense of place, not the physical representation of it. And because it is a feeling and sense, I first close my eyes and imagine myself where it is and then identify my feelings about it and then translate that into bands of colour. I have so many ideas I want to express this way and I am finding it really exciting.

I also love the tactileness of these. Every time I walk past one on my wall, I stop and touch it, I feel the smoothness of the resin and see the suspended gold underneath. I am still trying to work out what exactly makes me want to touch it - perhaps it is the solidity of the resin and the knowledge I can touch the artwork without damaging it, I'm not sure.

Another interesting outcome from this series of work is that I don't give a damn about whether other people like it or not. In fact my husband who is normally my biggest supporter, doesn't get them and prefers my realistic work. But I am absolutely okay about that because I love them and I will keep on with these for a while yet. And other people who have seen them in real life have had quite different responses to my husband so that's okay too.

Why that is important for me, is that in the past I have been quite concerned with receiving the approval of others in order to feel validated in myself. About 6 years ago I was going through a Human Synergistics course prior to going through the training to become accredited to use and deliver these materials myself. During this, you do a survey on yourself and then get 5 other people to complete it on you too. You end up with 2 circumplexes and can compare the difference in how you see yourself and how others see you, as well as understanding whether your behaviours fall in the construction areas or not. These tools are fabulous and backed up with huge amount of research from Harvard and all the big names. Anyhow, my results showed that other people saw me as quite high in requiring approval whereas I didn't see that in myself. This really upset me and I got home, burst into tears in front of my husband saying that I was so upset about this result and how I didn't think it was true.

My very honest husband said "Look what you're saying, you are so upset about what other people think about you, perhaps there is something there". That was a bit of an ah-ha moment and I realised that I obviously was very concerned about how I was viewed by others and their approval of me that it upset me so much when I received feedback that I viewed as negative. And a very important step in the development cycle is to accept and recognise where you are at so that you can then move forward and develop more constructive behaviours.

So I do think I have moved on with this since then, especially in my professional career life, but with my art and perhaps because I am still relatively new at this, I still have required validation from other people liking what I do in order to determine if it is "good". But not with these, I love them and I don't need others approval and I will keep going with them.

Completed portrait of Carter using carbon pencils

Here is the completed drawing of Carter to go with Tayla. The photo is terrible as the lighting is so dull today and the scan was even worse. So hopefully you get the idea anyway. I tried to follow advice about making the background white but as I use Photoshop Elements I think it is slightly different in that area with the levels so I played around a bit but couldn't work it out. I would like to get the full Photoshop at same stage as I would love to learn it properly.

And here are both drawings framed. I will be packaging these up very well and couriering them this afternoon so that they arrive at Mum's house tomorrow on her birthday.

I only did Carter's one this morning as I had a horrendous headache last night and couldn't do much let alone draw. I have cut out sugary foods and drinks (again) as since Christmas my sweet tooth addiction had been getting worse and worse. So for the last two days I have had a bad headache which starts in the afternoon and I am sure it is due to my blood sugar levels having to adjust to less sugar. I am hesitant to take panadol for it as I think my body just needs to sort itself out itself so my DH gave me a good head massage last night and I have been sculling back water. I have been addicted to Just Juice Bubbles for a few months which for people outside of NZ is 50% fruit juice and 50% lemonade and exceptionally yummy especially in the heat of summer. So that is gone and no longer in the house.

Pay it Forward - Giveaway

I was reading Chavah Kinloch's blog this morning and came across this Pay it Forward giveaway. As I was the lucky 2nd person to comment, I will be looking forward to receiving my gift from her. I am lucky enough to own two small paintings that Chavah did and I love them dearly and they hang in our bedroom so I am very excited about what I might get as she is a very creative individual.

So here are the rules!

1. Be one of the first THREE bloggers to leave a comment on this post, which then entitles you to a handmade item from me (yeah for handmade!).

2. If you are one of the first three to make a comment, you are a winner! And you then agree to post this challenge on your own blog, meaning that you will pay it forward, creating a handmade gift -anything!- for the first THREE bloggers who leave a comment on YOUR post about this giveaway!

3. The gift that you send to your 3 friends can be from any price range and you have 365 days to make/ship your item. This means you should be willing to maintain your blog at least until you receive your gift and have shipped your gifts. And, remember it’s the spirit and the thought that count!

4. When you receive your gift, blog about it! If you are not one of the first three to comment on this post, you can still play along. Go ahead and start your own Pay It Forward chain, and encourage your blogging friends to do the same! It's all about paying it forward.

I can say now that I will endeavour to send these out way before the 365 days and it will be art, either a drawing or a painting. I am quite happy to do a drawing of someone that you love so if you are one of the three winners, feel free to email me a photo if that is what you want and I can draw it. Otherwise I will have to come up with something myself.

Portrait - carbon pencil and charcoal pencil

I am just having a quick break from working to post this which is done on A4 Arches HP paper and is framed and now sitting waiting for me to draw the matching one of my son so they can be couriered down to Christchurch for my Mum's birthday this Thursday. She is not consistent with logging onto the internet so I am hoping that trend will continue this week and that she won't see my blog as she doesn't know I am doing these for her.

Still haven't finished Connor and need too as there is not much left to do. I am definitely a starter and as I have drawn all the difficult interesting stuff I am not that inspired to do the finishing off and I have to be very focused to get that done.

And we are still watching LOST and are so into it. Just started season 3 last night. Our local video store has all the DVD's to rent so it is great. I don't think I could handle watching it on TV as it would move too slow for me week by week but when you watch it on DVD it is like a long long movie and I like all the unexplained stuff. I enjoy sci-fi anyway so trying to figure out what it all means is lots of fun. And I am refusing to look on the internet to find out what happens and it means I can sit and draw while watching so it's all good!

I am still here

Just a quickie to say that I still alive, just not doing much art over the past week as business has taken over and I have been working hard. I haven't touched Connor's portrait for over a week and there isn't much left to do so I need to get onto it. Will post again once I have finished this as well as a large resin piece that just needs one more coat of resin. Back soon.....