Art Sparks and Artomatic!

Ever join an online dating service or just call an Uber 'cause it's the cool thing to do? Yeah, me either. And you want to know why? Well, cause I'm scared that whoever answers the ad or pulls up to the curb will snatch me up and proceed to make a nice coat out of my velvety smooth skin! Oh, and the fact that I'm married might make that online ad a little awkward, but I digress...So you can imagine the angst I had signing up for a Meetup group for artists, but I was desperate to find a tribe in this new place I now call home. Well, I can happily report that after some vetting (the likes of which I haven't seen since my job with the VA, and much appreciated due to the above mentioned paranoias) my new tribe is called Art Sparks! And girrrrrl, they are a talented and fun bunch! And you know how tribe pressure can make you do things you may not normally do...alone...well, these sisters talked me into doing Artomatic. Now, let me explain that. Artomatic is a huge, nonjuried show. You pay for your wall space and you hang up your art. Easy enough, right? Except it wasn't. See, the show was in thirty days and I had NO work ready. NONE. And besides that, I'm primarily a jewelry artist and my work generally doesn't go very well in those types of shows. So what did I do?  I summoned my muse back from her six month sabbatical, handed her Steven Pressfield's, The War of Art, and told her to get to work. And work she did! I drank lots of coffee and I think she smoked meth (I would say crack, but we're both from the South, and you know how we like to cook..) And in the end we turned out a whole wall of wonderful, edgy, thought provoking, colorful, controlled chaos...totally Circus Meets Boardroom! But I wasn't the only one to do that! Several of my tribe members participated too, and they all created fabulous spaces! It is truly amazing what you can achieve when you have a supporting tribe and a muse that's high on glitter dust and resin fumes!

Until Next Time....Seek Your Tribe!