Blog Giveaway: "Coaching the Artist Within"

I've stocked up on duplicates of some of my favorite books.  Today's celebratory blog give-away is a copy of Coaching the Artist Within by America's foremost Creativity Coach, Eric Maisel.

Says Maisel, "Have you ever wished you had a professional coach who could encourage your creative pursuits, help structure your efforts, and cheer you on?  ... Designed to help any person become more creative.  Coaching the Artist Within will teach you to be your own coach, and the results will transform your relationship with the creative process".

I am a big fan of Maisel's books, and I think this particular book is very suitable for both new artists and experienced artists.

The first person to leave a comment on my blog today will win this book.

For the next blog give-away we'll try a different method for choosing a winner (I will draw from everyone that leaves a post that day).

Also, today at 6:30 pm EST I will be interviewed in my studio by Liana Voia on Blog Talk Radio.  You can listen to the interview live or tune in afterward at this link:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/multiplearts/2013/01/09/elaine-quehl--textile-and-quilt-artist

Creating in the Middle of Things, Part 2

I spent last week teaching workshops at the Greenwood Quiltery in Guelph, Ontario. During this time I stayed with my sister in Waterloo. She goes to bed early and I am a night owl. This time I was prepared to actually create some of my own work on a teaching trip. The fabric was dyed, the pattern designed, and all I had to do was start creating. I am happy to say that I was successful at completing a complete quilt top during this trip! OK, some values need to be tweaked a little, but here is my striped dahlia.

In my December 8, 2010 blog post titled Why I Wish it were Summer I shared a photo I had taken of a striped dahlia and the shibori fabrics I had dyed on a pole to create the flower. This project seemed a little easier to create on the road than Red Stool (post below). That one is just too hard to take on the road.
I taught 4 different workshops last week. Below Sharon shows off the piece she created in my Liberated Radial Piecing class. By the end of the class she had almost completed this very cheerful radial design.

Upon my return to Ottawa, I was invited to meet Helen Heaney, President of the Austrian Quilt Guild, at the home of friend and student Anneliese Villeneuve. Anneliese is just about the closest thing to an angel on earth you will find. She devotes much of her time to volunteering with Victorias Quilts, a charity that delivers hand-made quilts to cancer patients. Anneliese has been a wonderful supporter of my art quilt career for many years. Helen has been President of the Austrian Quilt Guild (which Anneliese is a member of) for eight years, and has seen the membership grow from 250 to 700 during her time there. I shared some of my quilts with her and she had fun shopping out of my store of hand-dyed fabrics. Here we are, left to right, Helen, me and Anneliese.

Upon arriving home I was also able to pick up the more than 100 meters of fabric my friend Denise ironed for me while I was away. Several teaching bookings have been firmed up during this time so I have contracts to prepare and those dreaded taxes to finish! It will be a week of paperwork and more teaching locally.

Creating in the Middle of Things

I have a little hiatus from teaching during this two-week period, so I've been in the studio a bit. This is what I'm working on. First photo is the inspiration photo, which is a composite of three different photos I took, and the second photo shows my humble start of this piece, called "Red Stool". I've also got a few smaller projects going that involve working with some sheer hand-dyed organzas (fun!).

That's all I managed last week. I could make the excuse that I am dyeing up a storm for my Ottawa Valley Quilt show booth, that I'm doing my bookeeping for 2010 in preparation for my taxes, that I'm revising and updating my teaching brochure (I only use Publisher once or twice a year and each time I have to re-teach myself), or that I've been preparing teaching contracts, prepping for next week's teaching trip, doing laundry, and worst of all, trying to exercise more and eat better! BUT, the reality hits me today!! Some of you know I've been enrolled in Eric Maisel's Introductory Creativity Coaching training. Ever since discovering his books a couple of years ago, I know that the struggles I go through with the artistic process are normal. We all procrastinate because we want to avoid the work that doesn't work, because we are too attached to outcome, and because we believe the script that we don't have time. So this past week the topic of our class was "Creating in the Middle of Things". We had to come up with an idea to help a client do just that. Apparently I missed the mark, as Eric responded that what we really need to do is help our clients accept that we will ALWAYS be creating in the middle of things, and we have to learn to create despite being there. Modern life, with all its distractions,is always going on around us! "The middle of things" is also the mental states we find ourselves in as we react to life. There will never be a perfect time to create ... NOW is that perfect time. Red Stool is going to be a major piece for me, so how will I make myself sit down and work? By doing a bit at a time, just like my last piece. Better to do 15 minutes a day than a day once a month because it cultivates the regular habit of showing up for your work! There was a quote by one of the other coaches in training, that went something like this "Once you make the choice to cut off the pipeline of complaint, you free giga watts of energy". How true that feels. The answer is to stop resisting the work, and plug away at it little by little. Maybe I can do that with diet and exercise too?
Speaking of Eric Maisel, the latest issue of the SAQA Journal (Spring 2011) contains my article about the "Coaching the Artist Within" class I took with Eric last June. Maybe it will tempt you to read some of his books. I think you will love them.