Day 4 continued

Saturday morning of my ArtFest adventure brough a workshop with Anahata Katkin. I was happy to have a few people from my previous workshops in my class and I finally got to really connect with Elizabeth.

In the morning, we went down to the beach to create nature altars (as I described in my previous post). Here is a picture of mine.

After we finished we walked to each person's altar. Each of us shared what we wanted to about creating the altar, what it represented, and so on. It was beautiful. There is so much more I could share about this morning...but for right now, the sacredness of the experience needs to stay there on the beach as I continue to soak it all in and realize all that I have learned.

After lunch, we met up again to create a mixed-media piece inspired by our altar. Anahata had us each take a polaroid picture of our altar on the beach so we would have something to work from.

This was a very inspiring class, but I was out of my comfort zone for the entire time. Until, really, the last few minutes of class. I am getting used to this idea of building layers in a piece. I am so mystified that I am actually creating something and I fall in love with the "background." I forget that I am creating texture for the piece and not the actual finished piece. (This problem has followed me home. I love the techniques I learned at ArtFest, but I am still not able to move forward from the background sometimes.) We used inks, water-soluble oil pastels, gesso as a paint layer, charcoal, and other things that I had never used in this way. I felt frozen for a good part of the class. That feeling of wanting to jump out of my own skin. I described my internal self talk in last week's SPT post. By the end of class though, I found my words. I wrote about what was going on in my mind. And then I realized I could use the lines that the dripped black ink had created on my page as lines for more words. Suddenly I was moving quickly, letting go, finding my way. Of course, time was up then...

I am still not done with this, but here is how it looks right now.

The words across the page:
The beauty of the fear is that anything you do will be the right thing. To do nothing is to stay in the frozen moment. To do something, to move, is to live.

Saturday night brought show and tell and the end of ArtFest. I was able to spend more time with Kelly, talk with a few other new friends, and have one more conversation with Kristi Steiner.

I take a breath. My heart has grown. How blessed I am to have had this experience. I am forever changed.