Painting the hours of the day...

I am continuing my exploration of daily hours, by observing the light on objects and places that I inhabit.I find patterns in the images themselves and then again in my repeated actions and routines. I document the hours, based on the times of the day remembered with prayers in monasteries, to find meaning and express gratefulness for the richness of my life. 

The more I observe the moment that I am currently in, the richer and multi- layered my painting sketches become.

I see things I never took the time to notice before. Does this occur in your life and if so, how do you create the space to see more?

Because of this attention to the sacredness of each moment, I love to visit the site Gratefulness.

lauds

Live life as if creating a work of art!

You can look at life as if you are an artist working at creating...at making visible your ideas!I find that humdrum and repetitive tasks such as morning ablutions, folding the laundry , setting the table, making and eating breakfast, reading the paper and driving to work, provide a pattern and structure on which to build dreams for the day.  In the midst of the structure I can find time to  balance the elements of my day, notice and choose color and tone and find the lines that connect events and places. Although I feel that my life as a  "work" of art in process, it was further articulated and richly defined in "the everyday work of art" by Eric Booth.

I will be exploring the idea that the work of creating art is not limited to paint, canvas and clay about once a week on this blog, simply because I find  such a freedom and inspiration to think of my own life this way! I will also s feasibility of each person to develop a way of thinking to create art from the stuff of his life.

I then begin to notice when other people are treating there lives with the creativity and discipline usually associated with the creative process. I see the creative "work" of art in small acts such as setting a table or huge, highly visible efforts such as Barack Obama's journey by train to Washington!

So I wonder, where do you find that you exercise your creativity  in your daily life?

Art & the global economy

I had the opportunity of going to MoMA yesterday evening. I was actually there for a lecture on economics! Hmmm... It was an opportunity to reflect upon "America and the New Global Economy" with the guest speaker Lawrence H. Summers. He navigated through the complex financial challenges we currently face. As former United States Secretary of the Treasury and current Harvard professor, he certainly has spent a lot of his life reflecting and predicting economic fluxes and solutions. He sees a window of opportunity ahead in which we will be able to reshape public policy to maintain flexibility and fiscal strength as we practice inclusive prosperity and create systems of government to manage our global economy.Concurrently, it was inspiring to take the opportunity to visit "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibit! This link provides a great opportunity to explore the plethora of exhibits. The flexible thinking that was mentioned in the economic lecture was reflected in the visual explorations that we were immersed in as soon as we walked through the intuitive doors! There is so much to search through, but it is amazing how intuitive our designing is becoming. One of my favorites is sketch furniture. A chair and table are sketched in 3D and then created by computer data and lasers.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zP1em1dg5k&eurl=http://www.frontdesign.se/sketchfurniture/]

Another way of expanding thinking is found in TextArc using visualization and mapping to visually analyze patterns and concepts in texts. try Visuwords yourself! For a simpler version that I have used for a while, try Visual Thesaurus.

These are just two amazing embodiments of the human imagination for your investigation at MoMA.

I find this exhibit to be a stimulating companion to the economic and political lecture summarized above. They both describe the need for the elastic thinking necessary for us to flourish together on a global level.