Grateful

Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend. A quick Skype phone call home on the big day to listen to the familiar cheer of my family setting out to eat and then walk, or nap off, my favorite meal of the year.

The cliche pops up before I can stop it: There are no words to describe....  how it feels to long for home.

Is there something you long for that seems to be out of reach sometimes?

This has been a year of learning curves, so I am grateful for you. Grateful for needs met, for the power of and energy of common causes like #girleffect. Grateful for the chance to explore and ask questions, define and redefine, for conversations and simple pleasures.

Love,
Rose

Essential words & Quiet drawings

Paintings take up wall and storage space. Image files, as I discovered this week haunting my backup files, take up vast amounts of virtual space. Years of making paintings, illustrations, and drawings, and I have thousands of images stored.  Originals. Duplicates. Different scales and formats.

I'm aware of the outpouring of images I have to share vs. the amount of words that will fill the 'Writer' pages of my revamped website. For art, there are slide shows options and collections of visual projects. I write every day, but such a small percentage of it surfaces. Writing files and folders multiply as I add lines and paragraphs here and there like I would shade a drawing. All those words to reveal just the most essential few. 

Is there something you quietly pursue knowing it will take shape later?

A fantastic conversation with Maggie Sutrov in Maui will be making it's way to my Art is Dialogue podcast soon. Sometimes a conversation is the best way to bring those sketched out, typed out ideas to life. Enjoy her lovely quiet drawings in Markings, her live, hand-illustrated story.

Markings: Of drawing, horses, and art from our earliest times.

by Maggie T. Sutrov

In Stereo: Dialogue2010 Live

Post Update:

Dialogue2010: The inaugural Art is Dialogue conversation between 9 cultural innovators on art, culture, and hybrid identity on February 28, 2010 facilitated by me and hosted by expat+HAREM is now live!

Inspired by my post on "Mapping the Imagination" at expat+HAREM, our conversation created a living definition of hybrid identity and how one's worldview literally shifts as a result of location.

Listen to the podcast here.
Read the complete transcript here.

Join in with your own comments and thoughts using Twitter hashtag #dialogue2010 or on expat+HAREM. 

Last night I jumped three times over a fire smoldering on the sidewalk, buried a hastily scrawled wish into the ground by a single pink rose in the garden, and squeezed myself into the blue plastic seat of a swing set to celebrate the Turkish festival of Hıdrellez on May 5. Tara reminded me of it in her post on wishes, and after my husband told me the neighbor ladies were inviting me to participate in this annual ritual, I couldn't resist leaving the house at midnight to honor the meeting of Hızır and Ilyas on earth along with two late-middle aged neighbors and two reluctant teen girls. Were there traditions like this in America, they asked me? The air was chilly and it was thrilling to think four women under the moon had the power to invoke their dreams to make them real.

This week I launched my first podcast and Love, Rose is now available for download in a reader or iTunes! Stay tuned for unabashedly explorative podcasts on the intersection of art and domesticity, excerpts of short fiction, and conversations held as part of Art is Dialogue, including Dialogue2010 hosted by expat+HAREM in late February. I hope you'll listen along!

Verbal footprints

Home prints / photo by Rose Deniz

Sezin described us as 'intimate strangers,' Anastasia a 'carillon,' each person's comments creating a verbal percussion. The nine women who gathered on Sunday to participate in Dialogue2010 astounded me with their clarity of vision, their engagement with creativity, their willingness to bend and flex through identity and language challenges, and their alignment with their core. A year or two ago, I created my vision statement, or what Gwen Bell would describe as a 'personal manifesto,' and these three words have shaped the work I've done since: manifest creative potential. In starting Art is Dialogue and moderating this discussion, I felt that come to life. I felt synchronicty with people I've yet to meet in real life, bonded through a willingness to live a meaningful life at the crossroads. 

How do you manifest your creative potential?

The blog responses to the dialogue have left me speechless. I invite you to dip into the syncopated words of the women who made it happen. As more posts and feedback become available, I'll post updates.

Being grounded is overrated -- Furthering the Worldwide Cultural Conversation

What determines your present orbit, and how does it change your self-view?

Conversational Crossroads -- Love, Rose

Mapping my hybrid life on a personal, passion level involves drawings, notations, and novel writing.

What is a Turquoise Poppy? -- Tara Lutman Agacayak

Turquoise Poppy is about allowing your circumstances to guide your path while staying true to your inner compass.
Fear of Flying -- Sezin.org

My fear of flying signals my time to stay put, my time to understand how it feels to have wings while remaining grounded.
Path finder -- Love, Rose
What language do you use to describe your trajectory?
Ring my bell -- Furthering the Worldwide Cultural Conversation
What comes first, the hybrid self or the hybrid life? Are our most resonant peers made or born?
Talking Point -- Skaian Gates
I found myself asking through the day were we sharing our hybrid lives because of our creativity or because of our experience of being expats.
A Thousand Ways -- Tales from Turkey
I've connected with 9 women with crazy, joyful, challenging hybrid lives so like my own. Lives that seem to hinge on one particular characteristic we all share - creativity.
Intimate Strangers -- Sezin.org
Dialogue 2010 was a meeting of kindreds, as women, as hybrids, as artists, as dreamers, believers.
Mapping My Worldview -- Skaian Gates
Two snapshots placed side-by-side to show how my worldview has changed.
What an Expat Leaves Behind - Judith van Praag
The expat hybrid lifestyle forms an audible cloud

Podcast availability will be made public this spring. In the meantime, join the discussion on Twitter using #dialogue2010, visit this Squidoo lens for up to the minute information, and join the Dialogue2010 Facebook page for future event information.

Conversational crossroads

Mapping my hybrid life on a personal, passion level involves drawings, notations, and novel writing. The stuff I do daily. When it connects with others, like in conversation with the 10 cultural innovators I'll be talking to on Feb 28 as part of Dialogue2010 at expat+HAREM, it becomes multi-dimensional, an elixir of dynamic change and inspiration. In talking about abandoning the map to live more fully, dialogue becomes art.

Anastasia Ashman, expat+HAREM producer, identifies a crucial element of what happens when identity is fluid, when location, desire, and being in the present are invited to shape a meaningful life: "a wider orbit around the inner me" is allowed to emerge. That is what I hope will be explored in Dialogue2010: unearthing the things we need to let go of in order to move forward, blurring our boundaries, and developing our own idiosyncratic centers of balance.

As the first inception of Art is Dialogue, I invite you to join in the twitter chat #dialogue2010, or add a comment, and listen to the podcast when it's made live this spring.

Silk Road Stories

Friendships made in just a few short hours. Life stories shared, professional commonalities discovered, mothering suggestions offered, all while eating some of the best Turkish food I've had in Turkey. The women I met from the Bursa International Women's Association were French, Italian, German, Russian, American, and more. How were we able to relate to each other with different cultural viewpoints? Different occupations, different ages? I went to speak about creativity and left marveling at the ability for community to form abroad. Enlightened conversation. Multi-national viewpoints.

Bursa, known for being the last stop on the silk road, has a vibrant international women's community. I met a Turkish woman who runs her own coffee shop after first studying finance in Turkey, designing textiles in New York, and returning to start afresh with coffee and pastries she decorates herself. I met an American opening the first quilting shop in Turkey that will be selling fabric online (yea for me!). I met a German graphic designer who breezed through my drawing exercises. I met homemakers juggling multiple kids and learning new languages. I met a woman with her 2-month old baby who apologized for her English while elegantly articulating that the only thing she wants to do is be a mother right now.

Riding a bus to Bursa that left at 7:30 a.m., I sat next to a university student wearing hand-knit leg warmers and gloves who offered me her saltine crackers. 11 hours later, we coincidentally rode the same bus back to Izmit, laughing when we boarded the small service bus that took us home to nearby neighborhoods. She studied economics. Had taken her final exam that day. She was a photographer. We made a date for coffee.

I believe that the things most difficult to overcome, public speaking being way out of my comfort zone, are emboldened by passion. By the support of a community that honors unique, individual voices that examine larger cultural patterns. I am passionate about art and life being merged, even if it is messy. I am grateful for breaking out of routines. And the kismet relationships that can form just by hopping a bus.

Reinventing the artist

Much like others go on pilgrimages to sacred places, art has been for me an act of searching. It has been a vehicle to describe the sensation of being a receiver of information and vision. It has given me an identity as part of a tribe of curious people asking questions visually. It has been a philosophy for processing stimulation, unraveling identity, and understanding the past.

What I didn’t expect as an artist is that I would leave the art world. 

And reenter by asking questions about what art really is.

Conversation is just part of Art is Dialogue. It is also an inkling that the rules for artists have changed while old models are still being employed. It is an invitation to consider the artist as being part of larger spheres of science, psychology, domesticity, entrepreneurship, travel and language.

Art is Dialogue gives credence to Jean Houston’s visionary idea that everyone has the potential to be a “social artist” as much as Mark Rothko’s exploration of art being divine and a location for spirituality.

Has art ever changed you? If so, was it the art itself, the space in which it was shown, or perhaps the place you were at in your life at that moment?

The Art of Cultivating a Creative Life

20 women sit around long tables pushed together in a corner of a café in Istanbul on a Saturday morning. The clink of coffee cups, the murmur of orders being placed. I pace around a little bit, preparing myself physically and mentally to talk about creativity to this group of professional women that I have been a part of since 2007.

The painter Robert Motherwell reportedly always started his day with figure drawing, though in his finished work, literal figures are scarce. He did it because it got him up and moving, pushing kinetic energy around until the good stuff could come out. He knew the power of drawing.

I have planned a drawing exercise for this reason, and I move around the room, saying hello to all the women who have come: a mother with her 6 month old baby and her 4-year old daughter, a salon owner, lawyers, entrepreneurs, writers, bakers and teachers.

The title of my talk is The Art of Cultivating a Creative Life. I hand out sheets of paper and pencils, and we do one of Betty Edward’s exercises from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I do this to dispel the “I can’t draw” so “I’m not creative” myth. I also choose this exercise because it relates to perception. How we think we see a chair, a hand, a house, but what we really see is a symbol. By slowing down our brains, we trick it into overriding its impulse to see the symbol of a hand and not its network of lines, hangnails, smooth nail beds, and curve of the thumb. Some women grasp a shift in their awareness immediately, others later as I talk about the application of a seemingly simple exercise to the borderlands of work and home, to professionalism, to adapting to life as an expat in Turkey.

I talk about navigating new territory abroad. About being faced with making decisions in the gray areas of bi-cultural life. I talk about reinvention. The spark. Creativity as a way of being and not just the action of sitting down to make something or write something. I talk about the magic of dialogue, concluding by putting out the extraordinarily uncomplicated idea that all moments in life are art. And then I pose this question:

Can you identify where you feel moments of spark in your own life?

Now, where are yours?

Art is Dialogue

Unveiling a spark, a five-year-in-the-making idea that started out as the tiniest flicker. Out of art + nesting. Out of blurry boundaries. Now an invitation for you to explore along with me:

Art is Dialogue, a series of dynamic conversations hosted online on curated topics where art is in the exchange of ideas.

Through the alchemy of discourse, Art is Dialogue facilitates new perspectives and useable knowledge for multifaceted lives.

The questions change. The locations change. The premise does not:

The separate identities of artist, curator, and critic are merging. Artists are now scientists, teachers, philosophers, parents, authors, and engineers. Curating is done by artist-led initiatives, sparked by gathering of individuals meeting for conversation online, over dinner, or coffee. Critics are artists of word and vision. Art is conversation, the grouping of images, objects, people, and location around meaningful topics. Art is in the words we speak, ignited by the chemistry of language.

Contemporary living and art making requires multiplicities, engagement with life in dynamic ways, crafting identities that resonate across geography. Freed from the wall, art craves non-specific locales, driven by new vocabulary and a glossary of terms that represents the intricacies of life today. Being present is critical.

The definition of an artist has changed. The studio is you.

Interested in joining in on a conversation? Care to host a talk? Follow Art is Dialogue on Twitter for updates (freshly hatched as of today, Jan/12/10, so expect more soon!).
More information forthcoming on the inaugural collaboration with expat+HAREM this year while Istanbul is the 2010 European Capital of Culture.