Trying to reprogram negative thought trains

Enjoy Yourself by Teresa Young.

I've noticed myself getting more negative over the last couple of years. Which is a serious issue, because I start to feel like I'm pushing against a wall whenever I try to get something done!
I think this is pretty common for most of us as we get older, but I've got an opinion (when do I not!) that artists are more susceptible to loss of faith in themselves due to our sensitive natures. 
That sounds pretty bad, but I think it's a side effect of what artist's do how they are wired.
Maybe we're like racehorses? So skittish and high strung because we are overly aware of everything!



Path of Intuition by Teresa Young.

In view of that gibber jabber I just went through above, I decided to take a workshop course on how to change my attitude to life! It's called Blast Off! and it's run by Alyson Stanfield, who runs a site called Art Biz Coach. I've never done anything like this before, so it's an experiment that should be interesting to say the least!
Literally, she has us trying to derail our negative thought trains by working against them with our own 'affirmations' or 'intentions'. We have to create these and repeat them to ourselves daily in order to create the habit of thinking in new ways.
It really does make sense, think about how much time we spend thinking negatively, out of fear of things like disappointment, humiliation, pain and so on... A short time over the course of a day to try to counter that just makes so much sense!
Maybe we all need to just stop and take a breath once in a while and pat ourselves on the back, and affirm that we like and appreciate ourselves. It's not a bad idea!

Fear, The Spice of Life!

Exhale by Teresa Young

It seemed like such a good idea at the time.

In theory anyway.  I mean really, it's a natural progression, right?  I started off drawing with crayons, just like everyone else in the industrialized world, and then I moved on to pencils, and pencil crayons, and so on...  I've used charcoal, solid graphite sticks, pens, and so on...

But I didn't count on FEAR.  After years of thinking about it in the back of my mind, I finally got up the gumption to go out and buy it...

I did install it, I really did! And then, fear took over, and I put it back in it's box... You know, because it's so delicate, I don't want to drop it, to step on it by mistake, whatever!

I suppose you might be wondering what I'm talking about by now...

It's a natural progression in our society, it only makes sense... It's a stylus and tablet digital drawing pad. And I don't have clue at this exact moment why I thought I could adapt to something so ALIEN to what I've always done when I draw!

But I have a system that seems to be consistent and sort of works for me. I force myself past my own paralyzing fears by plopping myself right in the middle of them so that I have to do something about them... It's how I learn how to overcome a phobia of water to learn how to swim when I was thirteen... And it wasn't a fear, that was a phobia! I almost drowned at five years old, so the phobia developed out of that, I had fallen into a wading pool and cracked my skull open, and ended up unconscious, face down in the water... I don't remember much, but I do remember the ambulance!



Fear of the Future by Teresa Young

So back to FEAR.  I have learned over the years, that the way to force myself into something I want to do and I am really afraid of doing is to get past that wall of fear somehow... Jump in that river, sell that house and move to where you want to be. Huck it all at thirty and go back to school and do something about it!  Just don't let it defeat you.

The really hard thing about fear is that once you conquer one, there's always, and I mean ALWAYS, another one waiting in the wings!

But life would be so boring without Fear!  If everything was easy, then it wouldn't mean a darn thing when you accomplished anything, no personal buy-in, no jump in your endorphins, no fear....

Ah well, I suppose I take that thingy-bob out of it's box soon and try some of the tutorials and chip away at my fear a bit!

Web Changes Eat Away At Traditional Markets

Change is good, isn't it?
It seems to me that our world in the middle of fundamental changes in how things are bought and sold. I know that seems like the understatement of the century, but I take a bit of time to notice these things.
In past posts I've commented on how the world around us, and the society we live in has been affected by technology. Being a voracious reader, I've even bought books on the subject, trying to get my head around it.

Do we notice it when we live in it?
Can we really comprehend how widespread a change can possibly be, when we're living in the middle of it?
And make no mistake here, we are all in the middle of this, at least in industrialized countries. Otherwise, the global economy wouldn't have had such an immediate and great effect everywhere when it tooks such a major downturn a few years ago!

Remember when buying was different?
Think about this in a more personal, closer to home way. 


Apathy Breeds Entropy, Acrylic
on canvas, by Teresa Young

When we walked through a mall in the eighties, we saw bookstores, music stores, clothing stores, specialty stores of every description possible lined up in the aisles. To go shopping, most of us went to a mall (be it strip or indoor!) and endlessly looked at merchandise, then decided on what we wanted and bought it. Simple as pie.
We could touch it, try it on, try it out, whatever. It seemed like the only way to do things at the time.
The new, shadowy world of buying stuff online was considered risky, and not many people did it. Just Internet geeks who understood how all those unwieldy search engines worked. Nobody else seemed to find it very convenient, and it was a novelty.

There were other things we bought as well, called services. And everyone used a middleman, such as travel agents (in the case of holidays and business trips!) and realtors (in the case of property transactions). We rented objects such as movies and cars from businesses designed to provide services to us. This was a large sector of local economies the world over.

A small thing happened
But I noticed something scary in the nineties.
It started slow, but eventually, everyone noticed it.
Suddenly, it seemed like every music store I'd ever frequented was having a closing out sale. Over a three or four year period, almost all of them went out of business.


Dance, sketch by
Teresa Young.

I couldn't stand it anymore, and I asked the manager of one of my favourites just as he was closing his doors. Apparently, selling music CD's online killed the stores in the malls.  And only one or two international francises figured out what was coming, and moved part of their business to websites, assuring their survival in the coming storm...
Most of us didn't think much of this, at the time. It seemed pretty innocuous.
Just a glitch!
Little did we know, it was actually a sign of things to come for other industries...
The smartest entrepreneurs jumped on the Internet bandwagon and put their goods and services there before you could say 'Chapters', or 'HMV'.

Store after store goes online
It seemed to start with music stores, then bookstores, then most specialty stores. In order to survive, stores needed to get online to reach a wider market base. It made sense, little stores that cover a tiny niche market had low survivability prior to the Internet. They just couldn't reach enough consumers to cover their cost of doing business.

Want something? Google it!
We started to see Internet sites that catered to business sectors that were never widely seen previously. And Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, they all helped the consumer find these little stores.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was born, and people began selling that as a service as well.


Bookface, Acrylic on wood, by
Teresa Young.

Dictionaries and encyclopedias were now found in just about every garage sale. Who needed them? All we had to do was go to the Net and answer our questions quickly and easily.
Mind you, this created a whole new mentality, if we couldn't get what we wanted, be it information or stuff, we lost interest very, very quickly.
Marketing became an even bigger business than before as it modernized with the growth of the Internet.

A Brave New World! (with apologies to writer Aldous Huxley)
We all became quite used to stores being put out of business by online sites, and suddenly it became the way to do business everywhere. This actually wasn't a bad thing, as market reach expanded, the necessity to locate your business in a city declined. Now, many online stores are located in out of the way places, business is decentralizing, leading to the decline of cities as business centres. (Suck it up cities, it's about time, you did the same thing to country based industries and stores years ago!)
It was as if someone gigantic entity had through a huge spiderweb over the Earth, and it connected everything whereever it settled. The global economy became a daily reality.

Then Something Changed
But change isn't a static force, it just keeps burgeoning forward, like some sort of major organic life form gobbling up it's food source.


Surreal Locomotion by Teresa Young

We can never be sure where it started, it was so insiduous, but the first noticeable market casualty was the travel industry.
All of a sudden, Expedia© and Travelocity© were everywhere. Why bother calling a busy travel agent when you can book online? And the deals, no high overhead, remarkable flexibility, travel agents couldn't compete with the scale and convenience.
The travel industry was revolutionized by the advent of online software sites that allowed you to check the data on travel bookings, air flights, hotels, everything to plan your trips with ease. This destroyed the demand for travel agents, and only a small minority of existing travel agents survived the revolution.
This new type of industry focus is now happening in the Real Estate industry, boards that used to control the data of listings within that industry have been forced to downsize as Zillow© and Top Producer© consumer sites eat away at their market share. Large companies are forced to compete with small, online companies that adapt to the changing market more quickly thanks to Internet tools and flexibility of thinking. As it happened in the travel industry, consumers are starting to by-pass real estate agents, the middleman is starting to disappear.
It's starting to hit many industries in turn, art galleries, retails stores of any description, services that require some sort of coordination, these are all becoming transformed into something new and different via the Internet.

Mobile Technology Drives Change Away from Established Websites
Things are moving forward faster and faster, and none of us know where it's going next, as consumers rapidly adapt to tablets and phones as their interface of choice.
Since people are on the go constantly, they interact with websites all the time, and there's a whole new industry dedicated to optimizing for mobile devices, creating apps for download, and getting rid of the extra chaff on a site so the mobile users are attracted to a site and keep coming back.
For instance, on my artist website, two thirds of the traffic through the site is on mobile devices. And this is probably not confined to art websites, but to websites in general.
Speaking of art websites, with the swell of mobile surfing, artsites that get the most hits are the ones that have moved away from flash animations and static pages that don't adjust well to differing mobile screen sizes.
Maybe we all need to rethink our blogs and websites to adapt to a changing world.

New Art For 2012

Also published on www.teresa-young.net:

Confidence In Motion-Feb.2012-
by Teresa Young

Clown College shown at
ARTOUR-O in Florence.

I've been doing a fair bit of drawing and painting this year, getting my feet wet with interacting with other artists online.

I've really found that it can inspire you to create more art to look at what other creative people are up to online!

Something To Do With Creepy Staring Eyes,
Feb.2012-by Teresa Young

Earlier this year, I created a lovely acrylic painting an art contest run by Subaru Canada that finished with an exhibition at the Toronto Auto Show. While I didn't win, it was fun to get my artwork out there and have people see it in a non-typical setting! Confidence In Motion was my entry into the contest;-) I finally finished my glass painting of an eye, had a bit of trouble finding a title for the work, and in fact, I became attached to the working title I had put on it, so I decided to keep it!

Sunrise of Symbology, Mar.2012
-by Teresa Young.

Entubation, Mar.2012
-by Teresa Young.

I was also part of a group exhibit at Artists Haven Gallery in Fort I Lauderdale FL during the month of February.
I exhibited a couple of paintings in a group exhibition in Florence at the beginning of March, Vivid Arts: A Retrospective, as part of the ARTOUR-O Florence 2012 Temporary Museum of Contemporary Art Auditorium al Duomo Via de' Cerretani, Italy.
Lately though, I've been spending time on DeviantArt, getting to know other artists. My site there has grown, and does contain a fair amount of work I don't have on my regular site. As the loading times and storage there seems to be a bit better for usability.

Exhale, March 2012
-by Teresa Young.

A Particular Venom-March 2012,
 by Teresa Young

Well, I think I'm getting overlong here on this post, or I'm really out of practice, so I think I will just add in the rest of my current 2012 art pieces for people to take a look at;-)

Cut To The Quick, March 2012-by Teresa Young.



Dreams of Lothlorien, March 2012-by Teresa Young.

But What Does It Mean?

Untitled Glass Art by Teresa Young

I've often been asked that question by people viewing my artwork, and it's a reasonable question which doesn't really have a reasonable answer...  Art is such a subjective thing, it really depends on the point of view of the person looking at the artwork, and it's even more subjective when you are dealing with abstracted or surrealistic images!
This conundrum is probably responsible for the unsatisfying answers people get from artists, and me in particular when they ask that question.  I can tell you what it means to me at that moment in time, but I can't tell you what it means to you.  The artwork could be hitting you on an emotional, visceral level, which could mean you either hate it, or really like it, and I wouldn't necessarily be able to figure out why it appeals to you. (Or doesn't for that matter!)


Fauvist Fantasy by Teresa Young.

I've had eighty year old grandmother's love my artwork, so much for traditional likes and dislikes. And I can never predict who will. It seems to have a pretty broad appeal though, so I take that as a good sign.
Now that I've expressed my opinion on art and how subjective it is, and how anything I say probably doesn't apply to you, the viewer anyway, I'm going to go ahead and tell you with some of my pieces what they mean to me...  Which is really just a snapshot in time anyway, depending on my mood, the meaning could change for me as I see something different in an existing painting.  Art is just like that, it's somewhat dynamic, which I think is part of it's appeal!


Sunken Treasure by Teresa Young

Take Fauvist Fantasy above, I was experimenting with glass paints and the creative urge took me in a very red, red, and blue direction. I was feeling very happy and enjoyed the beauty of the world around me that day, and I think that carnival feeling came out in the artwork. It's merely an emotional celebration of painting in itself, and how it makes me happy to do it.
Sunken Treasure on the other hand, goes back to when I used to scuba dive in my late teens and how I really loved the feeling when I was under the water below thirty or forty feet. When I took my scuba ticket there was this little octopus less than a foot across that swam near me, I played with it under that water until is squirt ink and swam away! 
The ocean has always seemed magical and like another world, sort of a treasure trove of beauty that most of us never get to see. I felt honoured to have been able to experience that beauty, and it really came out in this painting!


Emergence by Teresa Young

This is sort of fun, I'm going to do another!
Emergence is pretty obvious, if you had happened to know where my life was in 1998 when I painted it. 

I was in the process of divorcing and the feelings of learning to be independent and forging my own identity again were really at the forefront of my psyche. I like the way the woman is pushing up through a semi-formless muck to emerge into the light!

I was living on the west coast of Canada at the time, and that's why you can see a mountain range in the background. The really interesting thing about paintings is that they are often like the written word. They can have layers of meaning, like metaphor in stories, that I am often not aware of.


Figure Frog by Teresa Young

What I mean by that is the parallel in Emergence about is that on the surface it has a clear meaning, 'divorcing woman finding her identity', but it has a second meaning for me as an artist as well. I was in the process of developing my style, moving away from realism and into abstraction, using surrealism as a sort of intermediate step.

Sunken Treasure was also a 'crossover' piece for me in that it started out as a realistic piece that flowed into abstraction over time.



Cat's Emotions by Teresa Young

Figure Frog came about in the same timeframe, I think I sort of felt like I was leap-frogging ahead into the future. It's pretty nice to realize how bright everything can look to you when you are starting on a new path!  I think that why some of my pieces from the late nineties make me nostalgic.
Later on, my art started to change, as everything alive does, it evolves over time, which is why I can say I never paint that same thing twice!  I used to be a realistic painter, and did portraits in my youth, but I don't think I could settle down to realism again. It's like being nailed into a rigid box for me, I couldn't do it!


Carnival by Teresa Young

Cat's Emotions, another crossover piece, is actually a surreal watercolour painting with ink drawn into it. You have to get close to realize it's not realistic. I was expressing how much I loved cats and identified with them as a source of love and connection. Cats are pretty independent as well, so I think I admire that in them as well.


Escape by Teresa Young

Carnival is one of my favourite acrylic paintings. It feels like a roller coast ride of greens and blues to me. I see waves of light and joyous feeling, which is probably why the title of the piece...


The Wheels Art Turning

Escape, on the other hand, even though it doesn't seem like it, is an expression of frustration in the life I was living in the mid 2000's. 2003 or 4?  I was stuck in a corporate job with lots of responsibility and no voice. I was pretty close to starting a downward trend that ended up with me leaving the job I held for over a decade to start over in a new location. Like a lot of people in the IT industry, I was dissatisfied with the pressure and anxiety I experience.


Queen of Thorns

I felt like I really, really wanted to escape. The painting expressed that desire for me. And probably, it also expressed hope for a more serene existence somewhere out 'there'! That meaning applies to a lot of the artwork I did between 2002 and 2009, actually.  The Wheels Art Turning was about the feeling of being trapped and powerless in my job. I actually felt like no one was listening to me, and it sure came out in that painting!


Undercurrents

 Queen of Thorns, I painted after I put in my resignation and just a few days before I left. I sort of felt like I was letting a few people down, leaving the job and it's responsibilities behind. But I also felt that it was something I needed to do for my personal growth and well being. So I was being a queen, and pretty prickly about the decision!


Pushing For The Sky

Undercurrents was about moving on and the undercurrents and emotional overtones that are never expressed out loud. We sort of swim through these currents and never truly acknowledge what is really going on out there in the 'real' world.  I was trying to show the undercurrents of our everyday world with this rather large painting.
Pushing For The Sky is from this year, very recent, and it's about growth, life and moving forward.  Reaching for the sky, not trying to be too trite here!
I think I'm back in a 'trying to find my footing' or identity cycle again. I'm not sure we ever really find out who we are, because like the artwork we produce, we are constantly changing. And sometimes, we go through similar cycles in our life as we learn out life's lessons...

Timing Is Everything

 

I was down at the beach the other day trying to catch a photo of the surf and I was finding it frustrating to hit just the right moment to catch the wave...

I know surfers have coined a phrase for this, but when you think about it, much of our life is about 'catching the wave'.  If we aren't paying attention when opportunity knocks, we might not even hear it!

I think that this really serves as an accurate analogy for life in general.  It's often all about the timing...  When we stop and smell the roses or talk to someone who might lead us down a path that we are meant to follow, we are in the right place at the right time... 

Nowadays, we are often rushing around trying to get through our tasks that are so very, very important, and we don't pay much attention to what's around us.  Who knows how many times you've rushed by that individual that might impart some nugget of wisdom necessary for your life's evolution?

When I was working in the IT industry out west, I was often too busy to do anything other than my job!  Whatever energy I had left over at the end of the workday was used to grab the small necessities of life and not much else...  After years of this day to day cycle my horizons literally shrank for me, because I just wasn't enjoying being alive!  I was just rushing to get things done and not seeing the world around me. 

This had an effect on me in many ways, many of which I wasn't even aware of...  As an artist, I didn't stop painting and drawing because I found that I had to hang onto that particular anchor to maintain my balance and sanity... But I'm very sure that my artwork suffered in unseen ways even though I was still doing it regularly.

If you are hanging onto where you are at and you not growing and experimenting, it's just treading water...

I found that the way I was living was turning into a very grey existence for me, without colour or vibrancy.  For an artist, that's like a sort of living death!

I wonder how many of us sink into the abyss of mundanity without realizing that we are throttling our inner selves in the process?  I don't believe anyone seeks that kind of existence, it just sort of sneaks up on us quietly...

The stress that occurs over time with that sort of existence is rampant these days...  I was talking to different people prior to leaving the west and found out that in technology jobs such as IT, people are stressing out and finding it harder and harder to cope...  In fact, it's so bad that workers will be 'used up' by large corporations and then downsized when they are no longer effective.  That sounds pretty cold, but it's the way the world often works these days...  I have a friend whose husband spent many decades with a large company and was downsized less than a year before he was due to retire...  It was toxic and demoralizing for this man as he felt that he had been used and rejected, which on some level he was.

The ability to extricate yourself and move into a better environment is something not everyone can do.  We trap ourselves with mortgages and lifestyles that require we stay firmly planted where we are with no deviations...

And really, what kind of existence is that when you get right down to it?  You know what you are doing, day in, day out, and there are no real variations on the theme...  It's no wonder I got bored in my own way.  As an artist, I need to have a feeling that life is a mystery, that there might be something around the corner that is new, that I don't expect...  Within the mosiac of our society, Artists aren't really painted as seeking a stereotypical existence...  And it's probably for good reasons.  I'm a round peg that didn't fit into a square hole!

I really don't know what I'm going to be doing tomorrow and for a lot of people, that would be a very scary thing.  For me, it's freeing... 

Nowadays, I feel inspired to paint and experiment with my art in ways that I hadn't felt before, and it's the uncertainty and freedom that I'm experiencing here that is feeding that creative flow.

But the odd thing is, I would work in computers again, no problem... I went and took an engineering degree because I like to use my brain to problem solve and think.  It also provides a good balance to my artwork, because they use different parts of the brain.  But I would think long and hard before I signed on with a large corporation with a hierarchy in place that dehumanized people...  It's easy enough to recognize when you are on the outside of it!

But we are the sum of our experiences, and I believe that as artists, it is important to have a wider world view to give depth to your art.  And timing is everything... My artwork did not have the depth twenty years ago that it has today, I believe the maturity and viewpoint I've developed through my experiences has reflected itself into my artwork.  And that is enriching in itself.

Images - photos and artwork by Teresa Young:
1. Peggys Cove Wave - April 2010,  2. Convergence - Feb.2010,  3. Unnamed Abstract - Mar.2010,  4. Fleeting Eternity - Jul.2001,  5. The Crowbar - Nov.2001,  6. Mahone Bay - Jan.2010,  7. Golden Dreams - Apr.2001.

Beauty In The Face Of Age

 

Having started my art career with portraiture, I'm constantly fascinated by the faces of the people around me...

And seeing faces age and change as people grow older is quite interesting in itself...

It's almost like our lives get written to our features like a computer writing something to a disk...

The old saying goes that the eyes are the windows into the soul, but ironically enough, the eyes themselves are the one thing in our features that stays constant as we age... 

As any portraitist can tell you, the eyes are always drawn the same size and the face grows around it. Which is why our eyes start out looking pretty large in proportion to our face and then smaller when we are in our late childhood and finally, our adult sized eyes are small in comparison to the facial structure around it.

 

But it's the rest of the face that's really interesting...

The eyes might have 'it'... but the rest of the face tells a story! 

 

If you frown a lot, you will develop deep lines going from your nose down to the corners of your lips, and they will look different than the wrinkles that you get if you laugh a lot.  (I know they shouldn't as they are in almost the same spot as laugh lines, but there it is.  They look different as an end result!)

Frowners also have wrinkles in the centre of their face just between their eyebrows, which makes them look stern and tightened up like a bowstring ready to shoot...

People that laugh a lot tend to wrinkle differently, more like they are still laughing somehow.  Their faces can be just as wrinkled as the frowners, but the lines have a softness that is hard to quantify.

But if someone is perpetually sad, they seem to still get the frown style of wrinkles, but it's a softer look, like sadness itself... 

There's almost poetry or a different style of beauty in how wrinkles form...

They are actually something that can be quite beautiful, if you are aware of beauty in the form of lines and patterns.

 Not to mention the fact that wrinkles are much like accents around a subject!

 They can sharpen and highlight features, and can truly bring to the forefront beauty that can't be seen in a smooth face.

Over the years, I've drawn hundreds of faces.  The ones I remember aren't young, but older, more defined...  And the more defined the face, the more challenging it is to capture.

But it's not just me, throughout the centuries artists have always been fascinated by the beauty of the older face. There are good reasons for this, an older face is unique. The lines are different in every person, much like a fingerprint, no two people are alike. Because we all have different lives and experiences, our faces age differently.

Sadly, as I look around at our media and culture I see beauty represented as being typified by only the young face...  And I find this pretty strange because of the demographic of our population!

A large proportion of our population now is older as the baby boomers head towards retirement.

That means we have a unique opportunity to celebrate the beauty of aging by changing our cultural definitions of beauty.  Maybe we all need to be artists in some small way so that we can see it.

Just think 'Beauty in the Face of Age'!


Photos and images by Teresa Young:
1.  Playing Dominoes with Fred Ervine,  2. CloseUp-Portrait Of Diehl Children-Nov. 2009,  3. Grief For A Small Boy - Nov. 1997,  4. Eileens Eyes-Nov. 2009,  5. Daryls Frown - Nov. 2009,  6. Eileens Smile-Nov. 2009, 7. Barb McLean-Dec.2009,  8. Unnamed Abstract-Dec.2009,  9. Unnamed Surreal - May 1998.