February | 2024 | The Direction of Intention

Unbridle Your Enthusiasm [David’s blog on Two Artists Tuesday]

Posted on February 6, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative

In our house, no single question evokes more genuine excitement than, “Do you want to go on errands?” Vertical jumps. Full body wags. Circle zoomies. Finally, a “sit” so we can clip on the small leash that we call his necktie. He gets gussied-up for errands.

Last week Kerri wrote that our bar of contentment is low. It’s true. We don’t need much to feel fulfilled. A walk in the sun. A good cup of coffee. Cooking together. Laughter with friends. Life reduced to the moment.

We recently had a significant-morning-conversation about our egos. We discussed how these past few years have lowered the bar on our self-images. “I’m not all that,” she said, summing it up.

Quinn used to say that, “There are six billion people on this planet and you’re the only one that gives a damn about what you think.” Or how you look. Or what you feel. The other five-billion-nine-hundred-ninety-nine-million…are more concerned with how they look and what they think and feel. You are not the star in their movie. He was a terrific perspective-giver.

It’s a powerful day when you realize that you are not all that. It’s a powerful day when you realize that you are the single steward of your gifts and like any other gift they are meant to be given with no regard to how they are received. Your job is to give your gift. It’s an especially powerful day when you realize that your gift is no better or worse than any other person’s gift. It is just uniquely yours. It is not better-or-worse-than.

When the measurement falls off, when the ego takes a much needed belly punch, then the fun really begins. Flow. Love of what you do and who you are. A giddy return to child-eyes. A low bar of contentment means more and more contentment. Paint to paint. Play to play. Unbridled enthusiasm at the simplest of things. Like full body joy when going on errands.

read Kerri’s blog about ERRANDS

like. support. share. comment. we thank you.

buymeacoffee is a low bar of contentment offered to the artists tilting at the rowdy windmills of ego.

Filed under: Identity, Love, Metaphor, Perspective, Two Artists Tuesday | Tagged: artistry, child like, contentment, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, dogdog, dogga, ego, excitement, fulfillment, gifts, in the moment, infinite games, joy, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, measurement, perspective, perspective giver, play, play to play, presence, self actualization, self image, simplicity, steward, story, studio melange, the melange | 4 Comments »

Chase A Ghost [David’s blog on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on February 5, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative

The question came in through our site from a man who was instrumental in Kerri’s decision to record her compositions. A voice from her past asking a good question.

There are many surface answers to his question. In our case, all would be applicable: to give voice to our thoughts, to build a community, to call attention to our work…This morning, as I ponder his question, I think the purpose of a blog, my blog, might be to chase ghosts.

I began blogging utterly convinced that I had very little of value to say. I’d never considered myself to be a writer. It was a challenge I set for myself. Actually, I had one thing to say and decided I would, every day, attempt to write about it until I ran out of gas. I calculated that the tank would run dry in less than seven days. I was chasing the elusive ghost known as voice. My voice.

The interesting thing about ghost-chasing is that it makes you pay attention to everything. Ghosts can come at you in an instant from any direction and disappear just as quickly. Sometimes you can’t see them at all but feel intensely their icy presence. That was the first thing I learned in my voice-ghost-pursuit: I was paying careful attention, inside and out. It was not intense, not a strain or a struggle. I didn’t have to try. It was natural.

Not surprisingly, paying attention gave me more and more to write about, more to reflect upon. More to offer. “Have you seen this? Do you understand it?”

Chasing ghosts is a great question stimulator. Ghosts are curious and require all manner of suspension of disbelief so they are also terrific curiosity-energizers. Among the first line of questioning is about your self: your perceptions, your beliefs, your ideas of who you are and who you are not. It’s nearly impossible to write about others without exposing your self. Voice chasing leads to an astounding realization: the self/other boundary is permeable. We come to know ourselves relative to how well we know others. We only know our voice because someone out-there is listening and, hopefully, giving voice in return. Contrast principle.

Our basement is unusual in that it has box-after-box of unsold CD’s – the hard evidence of the music industry making a quick pivot to streaming services. The stacks of my unsold paintings take up an entire room. Our filing cabinets are filled with ideas and manuscripts and songs-not-yet-recorded. There are folios of cartoons that didn’t quite make it to syndication, folios of ink gestures, watercolors, and sketches. Another kind of ghost: the work of years past. When we met and married, we began blogging together, originally to try and call attention to the voice-of-work-past-but-not-yet-sold. That ghost, a very sad ghost, quickly left us; the joy of writing together each day overcame the initial intention.

The joy of writing together. We no longer chase the ghost of voice. It was here all along (of course). Now-a-days, we pursue a much simpler spirit: the gift of paying attention, the pure surprise of what shows up when we dive into and write about our daily prompt. “You go first,” I say, since she is wiggling with excitement to read what she just wrote.

read Kerri’s blog about WHAT IS A BLOG?

like. share. support. comment (give voice). we thank you for any and all.

buymeacoffee is lending your voice in support of our voice so we can lend our voice to your voice. It’s a circle.

Filed under: Awakening, Creativity, Merely A Thought Monday, Seeing | Tagged: artistry, awareness, beliefs, blog, bloggers, blogging, community, curiosity, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, ghost, Ghosts, give voice, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, pay attention, paying attention, purpose, questions, story, studio melange, surprise, the melange, voice, writer, writers | 1 Comment »

Don’t Wait! [David’s blog on saturday morning smack-dab]

Posted on February 3, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative

I’ve shared Master Marsh’s insight before: “Customer service…” he said, “…is a firewall against serving the customer.”

This smack-dab is hot off the reality press; it just happened. When she hung up the phone, she immediately reached for the computer. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“You’ll see.” she smirked.

It tickles me that Kerri so readily translates and transforms her real-world experiences into our cartoon land personas. If nothing else, if no one on earth ever reads our weekly comic strip, of this I am certain: smack-dab is good for our mental health.

“As the customer, isn’t the business supposed to be valuing our time above their time?” I asked, knowing I was about to get that special stink-eye saved for my too-idealistic-no-duh-commentary. She didn’t disappoint!

“Where’s the complaint department?” I asked in mock rage.

She smiled, “Your wait time will be three hours and fifteen minutes.”

read Kerri’s blogpost about WAIT TIMES

Bonus cartoon from the Flawed Archive:

share it. like it. support it. comment on it. we thank you for any or all of it.

buymeacoffee is a tip jar dedicated to keeping cartoon characters real.

Filed under: smack-dab | Tagged: aarp, artistry, cartoon, cartoon characters, complaint department, customer service, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, Idealism, idealistic, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, middle age cartoon, middle age romance, second chances, story, studio melange, the melange, time, two artists, value, wait times | 1 Comment »

Stand In A Word [David’s blog on KS Friday]

Posted on February 2, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative

Poets and philosophers have been trying to define beauty for eons. What is beautiful? It’s an impossible task since beauty is not a “thing.” It’s an experience, meaning that it is a relationship – so it is not possible to squeeze it into a fixed word definition. Like all rivers and relationships, beauty is fluid. The best we can do it recognize and appreciate being part of the relationship. We can approach it through language but will never capture it.

The English language is hard. It turns everything into a noun, a thing. I just wrote “being part of the relationship.” Even if I’d written, “being a participant in the relationship,” I’d still be stuck in the noun-trap. Participant (a thing) in another thing called “relationship”. It’s no wonder we have such difficulty wrapping our small-noun-minds around huge-global-relationships like climate change. Through language we can easily compartmentalize the most intimate of interrelationships; as a dedicated thing, climate, has nothing to do with me, also a thing. Two things rather than one relationship. Where’s a verb when you need it?

It’s always there. Our language prejudices us against our interconnectivity.

If Kerri and I have a cathedral, a place of worship, it is nature. Our trails. We go there to get quiet. To clear our busy minds. We go there when we have questions too big to merely solve. We go there when we are overwhelmed and need to ground ourselves. We go there to fill up on inspiration. We go there for the same reason we each go to our studios – to enter a conscious relationship with something bigger than our little selves. To experience that which cannot be defined. We go there to release the noun-mind, the problem-solver, and enter the relationship with beauty. To stand in another word that, like beauty, is a flowing river, impossible to contain: possibility.

Kerri’s albums are available on iTunes and streaming on Pandora and iHeart Radio

read Kerri’s blogpost about CATHEDRALS

share. like. comment. support. all are meaningful words, like “thank you”.

buymeacoffee is an action, a verb, that has positive impact on the pronoun in the phrase.

Filed under: KS Friday, Language, Metaphor, Possibility | Tagged: artistry, beauty, cathedral, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, grounding, inspiration, interconnected, interconnection, interconnectivity, interrelated, interrelationship, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, language, nature, noun, possibility, relationship, sanctuary, story, studio melange, the melange, verb | 3 Comments »

See The Third [David’s blog on DR Thursday]

Posted on February 1, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative

Rules of composition are really a study of human perception. It’s not the work of art that’s being examined, it’s the human being. Why do we consistently – universally – respond positively to visual compositions that follow the rule of thirds? Divide a composition into thirds, either vertically or horizontally, and then place focal areas of the “scene” at the meeting points of the lines. A professor in art and design school teaches the rule as a basic tenet, not because it was a concept that was invented but because someone, somewhere in time, noticed that people generally like their paintings, photographs, murals, quilts, architecture… when the focal point lands on one of the thirds. It was a discovery about the nature of people. Human nature.

Even the most abstract painters adhere to the rule of thirds. There is structure beneath seeming chaos.

There is something about humans and the number 3. The structure of a joke has three parts – the set-up, the detail, and the punchline. Most religions sport a trinity: father, son, and holy ghost. Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Dome is a festival of three. Pay attention and the rule of thirds pops up in everything from brain science to marketing messages. Triangulate and even the most lost hiker will be found.

When I first met Kerri I was disconcerted. Her compositional eye is infinitely better than mine. How could this musician come into my studio, snap a photo of my work-in-progress, and show me that her cropped version of my composition was infinitely better? What the heck? Her crops were never radical; simple adjustments merely. After I recognized how natural yet specific her eye sees the thirds – while I am clumsy in my seeing – in a fit of re-composing, I almost took a saw and scissors to my paintings. It was so obvious. Now, I ask her early and often to come into the studio and tell me what she sees (Imagine my horror when she stands silently for several moments and finally utters, “Well…”).

On the trail she stops often to “take a picture.” I play a game with myself. I look at where she aims her camera and then I predict where the focal point will land. Which third will claim the prize? I am almost never right but always delighted by what she shows me. “Lookit!” she says, smiling. A perfect third. Naturally.