A Passion For Creativity

Responding to a request for comments on their involvement in Mail Art, artists are contributing their thoughts. Read the views of Marina Salmosa, Fabio Sassi, Angela Caporas, and others in Mail Art-Two Cents, now on its own page. Further opinions welcomed!

my postcard for the mail art project TEN

Do you have questions about mail art?  Unless you are involved in the making of it, it can be difficult to get a handle on it. There are no real parameters, except that it uses the postal system. But that’s changing also, I just contributed a small work via email to a project called Violet Spots .

On the Mail Art Page I’ve started a list covering the reasons I participate in this movement. Keep an eye out for additions. Also, if you have your own responses to mail art, let me know, and I’ll post those in another list. 

How does grief affect the creative process?

Our 11 years old dog, Gypsy, died a few weeks ago. It completely threw me off the studio track into the dirt, literally. Rather than painting, I dug holes, moved rocks, and planted native plants. I needed to do something extremely physical, forget myself in the ache of burning muscles.

Now, back on course, I’m reflecting on times when I’ve lost loved people and pets, and how it affected artistic productivity. It varied greatly. For instance, when my Grandmother-in-law died in 1990, I buried myself in a frenzy of artwork, churning out very intuitive pieces, like Endangered, in a short time.

When I read my writer friend Ann’s, loving, funny tribute Goodbye, Henry, it reminded me of my need to write creatively about our dog Capone, after he died several years ago.

However, with Gypsy’s death, I pulled out the shovel, and, starting with her grave, split open the ground and dug.  Kept it up for about a week, digging, extracting rocks and boulders, refilling the spaces with Sugar Bush, Buckeye, and Flowering Apricot.

Hopefully, I wasn’t channeling Gypsy, as one of her favorite toys was a rock, and she loved digging for rocks! Probably not, but I feel better now. 

In looking back over my varied responses to death, it’s apparent that all sorrow needed defined acknowledgement, whether through ritual, words, creative outpouring, or digging holes.

Sorrow is our natural response to a big loss. Not to give it expression and voice in some form can lead to depression, which is debilitating and can kill creativity.

Writing this…I’m being tough, but it’s awful quiet here without her bark, her stirring up of the garbage…

You will now find a total of 4 (four) count them, yes 4! Ok, only four, newsletters in the archive.
But hey, that’s more than there were before I started writing them. 
You may sign up for the newsletter and receive the current one (there are actually 5 in all) here.
To read the archived (yes, only 4) newsletters, go there.
Here and there, that was easy.

and so brilliantly written.