art and soul

i am headed off to the portland, oregon art and soul retreat tonight. soooo excited! a week of doing nothing but creating art  - i can barely believe it.

i have packed all the supplies i need for classes, plus i am bringing a bunch of other things to do in my free time. what is the checked luggage weight limit again? i think i might go over a teensy bit!

i do have to admit that i am bit nervous for the classes though. if you have been reading my blog for a while, then you know that i am not a painter, not even a little bit. i can tell you practically anything you need to know about pretty much any art/craft out there. technique, product, i am a wealth of info. but paint? no way! it has never been a medium that i was interested in. i think the root of this is because i like the small crazy details of creating art. i like things to be controlled, precise, and to line up and with painting, that kind of goes out the window.

i will always remember an art professor i had in college who tried to shake this obsessive perfection out of us. we must have spent 3 weeks on a 24x36 drawing. major time invested in getting everything right, getting the piece to look exactly like we wanted it to. at the end of those weeks, we all had masterpieces in our hands. however, what came next was enough to send many of us over the edge. the professor told us to cut our drawings up into tiny 2x2 inch pieces and then we were tasked to make a collage out of those pieces. i swear that class has scarred me to this day!

in recent years, i have come to realize that freely expressive, over the top, explosive art is just not in the cards for me. and that is ok. so why am i taking 2 painting classes you ask?  well one class was not intended, but was a last minute switch when the instructor of my original class canceled (reserving the awful rant that i could go into) and the other one, i found really interesting. and it really is ok to step out of your comfort zone once in a while.

so i am going in with an open mind and hopefully i will come out with some new skills and knowledge under my belt. oh, and some pretty canvases as well.

i have some posts scheduled for the next few days, but if you want to here about my adventures in portland, i will be updating twitter regularly!