Athena Dreams Design

Monday Moments - Submitting Your Art

Moment #1

Firstly, a big and heart-felt thank you to all of you who have been spreading the word about the Squam Art Show - A Vision of Squam {please follow some of the above links to read about why you really, really, really should submit your work}.

For any of you who attended Squam in September 2008 and feel a yen to participate in this show:

• you can download a prospectus, here, 
• read a little more about the show here, 
• visit the gallery where the show will be hanging here, 
• and you can register for Squam Art Workshops 2009 here. 
• The deadline to submit your work is 30 April 
• Please feel free to e-mail me with questions and etc 

And for those of you who are going to be attending in 2009: so glad you are going to treat yourself to this wonderful event, AND you will be eligible to submit work to the show in 2010.

Moment #2

The lovely and talented Jess Gonacha is asking for submissions to her blog Pecannoot. This is an amazing site that is devoted to showing work from artists of all kinds, of all genres, from places all around the world, and the theme for the site is abundance, in all its varied and beautiful forms. Share your art with an audience who is there to celebrate the abundance of life, of art, and of humanity. I visit every morning, instead of listening to the doom and gloom on the news, it's a much better way to start the day with some positive thoughts and images about abundance.

Why We Share our Art*

For the past week I have been busily - sometimes merrily and sometimes choppily - working on painting commissions, and it got me to thinking about why we share our art*. 

Why do we spend days and weeks in a studio with our brushes and our paints and then hang the finished pieces on a beautifully blank white wall for others to see; why do we put our words to pages that will live briefly on shelves in a bookstore, waiting to be taken to a new home, or be read aloud to a room full of people; why do we get up on stage and sing/play a song or 10 that we have written, to a room full of people, some friends and some strangers; why do we spend hours behind a lens and then publish/show the photographs we have taken? I could come up with a bunch more illustrations, but I think we all get the idea here...

Why are we compelled to create and then share our art?  A simple question, but I would imagine there are a multitude of reasons. These are some of the reasons that I came up with today:

• To share something of ourselves - our ideas, our dreams, our vision, our deepest thoughts, our humanity
• To communicate 
• To connect 
• To make our world a little broader, a little wider, a little deeper
• To tell each other who we are 
• To share a moment in time   

So, for me, creating art* is like a conversation. A conversation with an awesomely charming and wonderful friend. A conversation about life, and the world, our places in the world, the dreams we have for our lives, the dreams we dreamed last week, a fragment of poetry remembered, some laughter, stories about childhood, and on and on and on - one of those conversations that goes on all night, punctuated with moments of silence, gazing at the night sky, and then back to the conversation. 

What are the conversations you see in your own artwork? I would truly like to know. . . 

*The word Art is used here in a general way to describe anything that one creates in any medium of choice.