Creative Every Day

A Long Rambling Post about Interviews, Play, Money and Being Carded

January 27th, 2009

Today, the lovely Sarah J. Bray of S.Joy Studios has interviewed me for her fabulous new blog, MaTweeps, where she features cool people (tweeps) who use Twitter! I jumped into the Twitter fray fairly recently and I have to say, I'm really enjoying it. You can see my MaTweeps interview with Sarah here and if you use Twitter, feel free to follow me where I go by @leah_art.

In her interview, Sarah called me an artist and creativity consultant, which totally tickled me. Now there's a label I can have some fun with!

It just so happens that this is a week full of interviews! On Friday my 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women interview with Jamie will be up and Sunday at 11 am EST I'll be on blogtalk radio with the ever so sweet, Connie of Dirty Footprints!

Here's what I've been up to creatively:

This is the latest stage of my work-in-progress painting, which I'm calling "Listening" at the moment. More layers of paint, some waves at the bottom. It's coming along, slowly. I've been playing with a self-leveling gel which is fun, but a bit hard to capture in a photograph. I'm not sure where the next step is in this piece, so I'm going to continue to play with it and see what comes.

I've also been playing with my ideas of money. (So much to play with!! Seriously, I think I could spend the whole year with play as my focus!) I'm currently taking a class with the amazing Havi Brooks. I was on a call a couple days ago where the focus was on shifting your perception of money. It was suggested that we think of how we define money, the good and bad ways, and then try to find an idea or image that combines the two.

I wrote out some of my feelings about money: how it's something I want to hold on to, how it can be used for wonderful things, how it's scary, how it represents growth, how it's an energetic exchange. But an image wasn't coming to mind. Actually, the only image that came to mind was that of a sort of "money monster," but that wasn't quite right. So, I decided to sit down, write out some of the words, and then just start to draw to see what might come up. First I drew the scarier image on the left hand page. It ended up being a sort of "money monster tree" with tentacles that attached all octopus-like in my hair. And it was over me like a heavy, huge burden.

Then as I imagined how my more positive associations with money might tie into this tree image, I drew a different sort of tree, one that is light, resilient, growing, and energetically positive. It's fun to play with beliefs and perceptions through art and I highly recommend it to anyone feeling called to do so!

And since I'm rambling on and on, here's a funny story to close out this post. This morning, I heard a knock at the door. There was a delivery man with a package for the hubster that needed to be signed for. I told him the delivery was for my husband and I could sign for it. I put my hand out to sign, but he didn't move. He was giving me the strangest look, like he didn't believe me. I thought maybe he was thinking I wasn't married to my husband, like maybe I was a sneaky roommate trying to sign for his stuff, so I went in to get an id (and realized that I couldn't find my license anywhere. Doh!) I grabbed a bank card that had my married name on it, showed it to him, and then he finally hit me with his real concern,

"Are you over 21? Because you don't look it."

Oh! So, I laughed and told him that I was definitely over 21 (I'm 32) and then he let me sign for the package. Of course, I love being mistaken for 21 at this point. The only time I hated it was as a teenager when everyone thought my younger siblings were older than me. The most humiliating experience was when my parents took me out to celebrate the fact that I was going off to college that week and everyone (including my younger brother) was given an adult menu and they asked if I wanted a kid's menu. Ouch. Heh. I can laugh about it now! And I found my license this evening too. Phew! So all is well. Next time I get carded, I'll be prepared.