Seeing and Being Seen

Productivity ignites again. 
Lots of healing, lots of waiting, lots of stillness.
Leads to this time undergoing big projects, entering into lots of teaching.
More active, more energized.
Paying attention to where my curiosities are taking me. 
I go at my work much easier than I used to.
Less choking.
More inviting.
Following the impulse, writing what my characters are asking to say.
Sharing my interests, listening to what young artists and students want to learn.
Challenging myself, each other.
Approaching big risk, change, new steps.
Outside my comfort zone.
What my body mind has been pining after. 
And so here I go. Another step by step.

Here are some things in old notebooks I'm finding and listening to,
And how I'm thinking about seeing and being seen:

"The seeds you water are the seeds you grow." Buddhist saying

And so what am I watering?

"What we see in an artist's work is what they attend to." Anne Bluethenthal

And so what am I attending to?

What is the lens through which you view the world? What is the lens you're viewed through?

"In the end it all comes down to this: you have a choice (or more accurately a rolling tangle of choices) between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot -- and thereby guaranteeing it will not make you happy. It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty. And curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice." David Bayles/Ted Orland

And so what am I choosing?

"I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices." Audre Lorde

How do we care for the other?
How do I care for the other in me?
So I can care for the other in you?

By investing in this kind of art making?

Art that is of the people, by the people, for the people.

And always asking...

Who is onstage -- who is in power?
How do we see work? How is work being seen?
How do we define ourselves so we have some kind of control over the lens we're being viewed through?

​And remembering when I did this, a great practice: 

Step back from my work over time and look at it.
The last ten works, are there linkages? Consistencies?

It might be time for me to revisit this again now.

And you? What are you working on?
What are you asking?
​What are you following?
What are your eyes following? All your senses?