Makeover the Moon

 I found this little fellow during a thrifting expedition. He decided to come home with me and spent a few months serving as a paperweight on my desk. I liked his hand carved features, but wasn't sure how best to accentuate them. Then a few weeks ago, inspiration struck and I spent a pleasant morning on my front porch with a cup of coffee, sanding out his rough edges. Next, I added a little iridescent paint and an eye screw. I strung a few glass glitter stars strung on some fishing line and...

now he's shimmering and swinging sweet dreams over our heads each night. I'm crazy about his garbo-esque eyebrows. After all, if the moon can't get away with stage makeup, who can? What have you made new lately?

Escape from the Internet: A Digital Diet for Creativity

Escape Key by Elhorno

Being submerged in the internet for work each day means that managing my screen time has become a central issue in my life. I'm developing tricks for limiting technology use so I can stay present in my life. One is the digital diet outlined here. I like the simple metaphor of food he uses, because we all have to eat, but what, how much and when, all need to be tailored to our own bodies. 

I've personalized my digital diet by staying offline before and after work, (including my smartphone). For me, the five to eight hour window at work to check and reply to emails and get updated on Facebook is more than sufficient. I've also begun using mindfulness practices, list making and task batching to keep focused- a huge challenge since managing social media is my job! The cyclops we know as television is still part of my life, though I like to keep it at less than one hour per day, preferably none. 

However, none of this addresses the issue of finding time to be creative outside of work. Brene Brown says, "Unused creativity is not benign. It metastasizes." This haunts me, and I feel it with increasing urgency being back in a city so devoted to the arts. 

I've been trying to see a live arts performance at least once a month, since the Twin Cities is second only to New York City in theater seats per capita. The quality is impressive, and it's quite affordable if we see something edgy. During each of these performances, I feel that pang Brown spoke of. It's a squeeze of admiration, awe and jealousy for the people up on stage who are living their dream so fearlessly. It's not that I want to be a great actor. It's that I am an artist and I am not practicing my art. 

In the film Pollock, Lee Krasner says, "You are Jackson Pollock and you don't paint!", and it is her deepest recrimination. He's also a womanizer, and an alcoholic, but she can't forgive how he has turned his back on his talent. 

When I had the luxury of more time to pursue my creative work, I often wasted it on household tasks. I love to potter around my house, baking, organizing, crafting and sometimes, blogging about it. But do those things develop me as an artist? They are creative, but are they art? Are they the one, unique song of my soul? 

I don't think so. They are things I do to feel productive, without actually tackling the work. Artistic work is internal, it means peering into your own soul and seeing what bubbles up from that dark, deep, mysterious well. The housework is tangible, I can see the result when I sort my underwear drawer or mop the floor. Art  sometimes has a physical result, a drawing, an essay, but that isn't the reason for it. That is just an after image, a footprint, a shadow. The real thing art does is to fills you up, in an invisible way, with satisfaction at the effort of looking, taking, and making. It also fills you with a yearning for more of that. 

So how can it be that something so good for me can be so hard to do? So hard to make time for? What is stopping me? My jobs aren't stopping me. My housework isn't stopping me. The internet isn't stopping me. It's me stopping me. But why? Where does fear come from when only good things have ever come from practicing art? 

Do you wrestle with finding time to be creative? Do you want to take the time to listen to the song of your heart, but also feel afraid to listen? 

Before & After: Becky Kazana World Headquarters

One of the challenges with living small and working from home is finding a way to concentrate on work tasks when personal tasks (that pile of breakfast dishes, the grocery list, the lure of facebook) surround you. Living in such a small space, we desperately needed an office space to shut out chores and concentrate on growing our business. 

My Dad's massive Victorian house had a tool room in dire need of organization. Though of ample size, precious floor space was squandered; strewn with tools, construction remnants, paint cans, electric supplies and various furniture left by previous tenants.  I felt certain that we could relocate the tool room to a walk in closet by editing and organizing, leaving this space free to become Becky Kazana World Headquarters! Here's what it looked like when we started out:



Yikes! The room was so choked with clutter, I could hardly get photos of the space.

After several hours of work, with the mantra "Like Things Together", I started to create some space. I pulled out anything I could sell on craigslist. All told, I made $175 selling items we found down here, all of which went back into the house. Still scary, but looking a great deal better.

Once my dad (on the left) saw the room cleared out, he started to get excited about really making it special. I had planned to move in "as is", perhaps with a coat of paint or two but he called his construction expert Tom (on the right), and got things rolling. The first concern was containing the asbestos paint on the ceiling, which they sealed up by powder coating with paint. The ugly pipes snaking overhead disappeared when the ceiling was painted black, which hid the pipes without sacrificing height. Then an electrician installed several florescent lights and additional outlets on each wall. It was incredible to see the transformation of brilliant light- the room suddenly seemed like a legitimate work space, no longer part of a dingy old basement. But it also shined brightly on the cracked and crumbling concrete walls and floor!

 A bucket of leveler helped even out the dips and crevices in the floor and gave us a smooth surface on which to install a beautiful wood floor. Eric spent quite a lot of time on his knees with a bucket of glue and a jug of foul smelling mineral spirits to get it installed.

My dad had a stack of pine lumber cut from our backyard (my friends may recall the infamous Log Rolling story...) and he decided that would create a nice texture for the walls, also solving the problem of putting drywall in a damp basement where it is likely to warp and crumble. It created a nice warmth for the space and the whole room smells like pine- clean, rich and warm.

All that was left now was to furnish it. We spent a lot of time combing craigslist and made more than one Ikea trip for a row of tables that would create a long L shaped work space.

Here, at last, is the finished product. We are so proud of it. The artwork is all by talented Etsy artists; the Man Riding Lobster poster from Nate Duval, the Ironing Ostrich and Piano Playing Pachyderm are from Wild Life Prints. The matching fawn colored leather chairs were craigslist scores, hardly used from Ikea. The tables were new from Ikea. The custom monogrammed wastebasket is from Two Sisters Designs. Our lightbox is now a permanent feature in our studio, making snapping beautiful photos much easier and we have ample storage for our inventory and all my crafting supplies in the cupboards mounted on the walls. 

Our packing station is actually a cabinet door mounted at waist height so you can stand while you assemble boxes. Eric's greatest innovation has been finding a way to print first class postage at home so that our parcels can go out with the mailman on the same day, without us ever leaving the house. He also mounted a towel rack above to store tissue paper neatly.

I'm so delighted with how this project turned out- it was far better than what I had initially imagined, thanks to my Dad, my husband and the talented Tom. I know great things will happen in this little room.

Our goal is to make this our full-time income stream, with the capacity to support a family someday soon. We'd love to run a business from home, giving us the flexibility to be with our family every day. I'd like to focus on my writing, finding new outlets in free lance writing and adding new facets to the blog and website. Eric is planning to expand our sales outlets to include Amazon and Ebay, in addition to Etsy.

These are big dreams for such a humble little room, but when I look back at the dusty junk yard it was, I have no doubt that it is possible to imagine and create beauty in unlikely places. The first step is making room.

Movie Review: Hugo

Martin Scorsese's latest doesn't involve Leonardo DiCaprio in period garb. Thank goodness. Instead, it's set in 1920's Paris and tells the story of a little boy named Hugo. Orphaned after his watchmaker father dies in a fire, Hugo is taken to a train station by an alcoholic Uncle and told that if he maintains the stations' clocks, he can live in the shabby, forgotten apartments above. So Hugo enters into a hidden world behind the surface of the station- peering out of walls as he scurries from clock to clock, oiling and winding them. He comes to know familiar faces as he goes about his daily work, but never speaks to any of them, preferring to live in secret with the gears and cogs of machines.

After his work is through, he tinkers with a beautiful silver automoton that he and his father had been restoring from the havoc of rust and time. This humanoid machine is meant to write when all it's pieces are running properly, but it is exceptionally complicated. Now that Hugo's father is gone, his only guide is his father's beautifully drawn notebook. The trouble is finding parts for his little machine- every piece is tiny and carefully made. There is a little toy shop in the station, and Hugo takes to stealing parts from the odd windup toy.

But one day, the toy shop owner catches him in the act and takes the notebook and Hugo is pulled out of his secret mechanical world and into the human one at last.

The story plays with the metaphor of what it means to be human in a world of machines. This is a central problem of modern life, and many artists and writers seem to return to the turn of the century to help them think about it. (Steampunk anyone?) Back then, most of those machines were made by human hands and it took human ingenuity to help them continue to run. Now, so much of our world is run by machines with parts made by machines and controlled by even more machines that we have become unconscious of them. I suspect this very complexity is the reason so many people are interested in going back to the land, or supporting hand made cottage industry.

Mr. Scorcese's answer to this question seems to be that creativity is the thing that helps us to be human in a world of technology and mechanization. It helps us to make sense of a world that isn't always ordered and precise like a piece of clockwork. Imagination is what makes us special and it is what will save us from becoming machines ourselves. It helps us to love and dream and what could be more human than that?

I can't recommend this movie heartily enough. It was beautiful and deeply moving. I can't wait to see it again.