Take a look at your hands. Stretch your fingers wide. Ball them into a fist. Rotate your wrists. Wiggle your fingers as fast as you can. Just look at them go – like horses chomping at the bit eager to get out of the stable / up off your lap.
A hand-made gate at nightfall on the farm.
What it takes to be handy seems to be starting and trying and then accessing, researching, and improving. Kind of like making art, right?
This week think of a project where you can employ your hands. Look around. Pick anything that will result in a more inspiring or beautiful environment – a project that will help your creative process. It doesn’t have to require any money. It will require spirit and determination. Start by creating the DESIRE for the change.
You can’t just dream of the change or complain of not having what you want, the assignment is to put that team of fingers to work for you. YOUR CREATIVE LIFE IS IN YOUR HANDS. You can bend parts of your life into the shape that you want if you work at it bit by bit. Maybe your project will be painting a wall that you have never liked. Maybe it will be moving the furniture for better flow and use. If you make a mistake, you can change it again.
This post was inspired by the friends that we visited on our drive to North Carolina. Let me introduce you to them, so that you can see how “done by hand” has shaped their lives in soul nourishing ways:
Marion Stephenson putting the final tweaks on a portrait in one of her five studio rooms.
Marion showing a commission. Note the portrait of Lt. Hannah Feuerstein on the wall above.
When Marion and Gerry Stephenson moved into a huge “handyman special” in downtown York, PA, I was aghast. But my idea of a nightmare was their idea of potential.
Each time I stop by, more transformations have occurred. Their home is a joy to experience, and everyone always wants to return. Taking one wall, floor, roof, etc. at a time and working on a small budget, they now have a home where all details are rich with beauty and personal meaning. Em’s studio has been a model for mine in many ways.
Throughout the studio textures result from saving old layers and creating new ones.
Please stop by Marion’s website to see her paintings. One of her pottery vases in shown in a photo on the lesson on drawing roses.
- One of Marion’s teaching studio rooms where the utilitarian mingles with the hand-made and the original features of the old house.
In the mountains near Elkins, West Virginia the Proudfoot farm glows and grows. So much is done by hand over so many acres, and still there is time for jug bands, stained glass, watercolor painting….
Evening on the Proudfoot farm in West Virginia. Photos: Lillian Kennedy
A visual feast of textures is the natural result of their healthy and artistic farm life. Here is a storage room above the root cellar.
David and Cindy Proudfoot having a coffee during a morning check of the gardens.
Settled in at Cedar Point, NC, we are eating their organic veggies, looking at their bouquet, drinking their hard cider, and spreading their honey.