NOTE: The next Color Your World two week class begins Jan 4, 2016. What makes this class different is the one-on-one daily interaction with an empathetic instructor and with a supportive community of fellow artists. Only $50.00. Click this button to learn more and to register:
If you would like to experience a free class, click here:
Dreaming in the New Year
Cheryl Renee Long MNVJ entry December 27, 2015 Woman In Bubble Bath Dreaming of the New Year She is deeply relaxed, immersed in the turquoise and white bubbles. Her pink curly hair drifts and morphs into a white bird and her dreams slip into an astral journey. She sees and knows her 70th year. It will bring life, color, and abundance.
During the holidays, it’s sometimes hard to even hear yourself think. These are joyous family times for most (though not all, I acknowledge). But eventually visitors leave or you travel home. You become aware in the northern hemisphere of the short days, the long nights, the rain or the snow. In the southern hemisphere, dog days of summer keep temperatures hovering around 100 degrees F.
Cheryl Renee Long–After Thanksgiving 11/28/15, heading home north on I-5
Now is the time to find your own quiet place, go deep into a kind of dreaming trance and let some other spirit speak quietly to you. It’s true that this healing mental and spiritual drifting has an affinity for water. In the Mysterious Night Visiondrawing above, Cheryl has drawn a bubble bath. In my household, it’s the hot tub with a glass roof and the sound of the constant rain. I’ve been in warm climates this time of year, and there we are drawn to waterfalls and the warm sea.
Sandy Brown Jensen. One December 2013, I found myself at the end of the year in a cave on the island of Kauai, a perfect place to lose myself in the timeless flow of the islands.
Give yourself to those private moments, and then find a place to curl up and draw in your Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal. If a white bird seems to flow out of curly pink hair–so be it. TheNight Vision Journalis never about “learning how to draw”; it is first and foremost a place to bring the images and colors behind your eyes to the black paper which is so much like the drawing board of a dream.
Dreams
All night
the dark buds of dreams
open
richly.
In the center
of every petal
is a letter,
and you imagine
if you could only remember
and string them all together
they would spell the answer.
It is a long night,
and not an easy one—-
you have so many branches,
and there are diversions—-
birds that come and go,
the black fox that lies down
to sleep beneath you,
the moon staring
with her bone-white eye.
Finally you have spent
all the energy you can
and you drag from the ground
the muddy skirt of your roots
and leap awake
with two or three syllables
like water in your mouth
and a sense
of loss—-a memory
not yet of a word,
certainly not yet the answer—-
only how it feels
when deep in the tree
all the locks click open,
and the fire surges through the wood,
and the blossoms blossom.
Somewhere far back in my childhood, a visionary teacher asked me to draw around my own hand and color it. I remember feeling delight when I drew my hand and frustration with the blunt and wimpy crayons. Even then I longed for intense color and precise drawing tools.
This morning at 3:20 am, my art naturally gravitated to black paper and gel pen. December 6 is only 17 days from winter solstice and the longest day on planet earth. There is something translucent about winter art. The barrier between waking and sleeping seems sheer. The conscious and the subconscious talk to each other more clearly under the blanket of a dark and rainy night.
Tonight I draw my hand as an elder, many years from the kindergarten art class. I think of it as a secret letter to myself. Who am I now? What have I become since 5 years old? Is this a life well lived so far?
DRAW YOUR HAND EXERCISE
Sometimes the simplest, most childlike art-assignments-to-self can yield the most piercing insights into ourselves. I don’t need to tell you for that for this one, place your hand on your black paper journal and draw its outline. Do you see how that looks like an image on the ancient cave walls? This is a really old art exercise!
This is modern air brush art reproducing the mouth-blown-paint images on the famous cave walls in Europe. Art by Victoria Airbrush Art
Now enter into the drawing trance of childhood, adding words and images to your hand.
DRAW A MAP ON YOUR HAND
Because there is a little cartographer in each of us, an evocative variation of this exercise is to draw a map on your hand, as Gretchen Jones does here:
This is another approach to the hand exercise by Sandy Brown Jensen. This hand appeared to me in a dream where I dreamed the late Tibetan dream yoga master Tarab Tulku placed a very ancient blue agate eye in my palm.
Have you tried drawing your hand and then “entering” it with words and images? What was your experience? Tell us in the Comment field above.
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Yesterday was a day of dark storm clouds broken by sudden sun openings. Although I felt weak from a lingering flu, I picked up my camera for a short walk to see for myself what all the drama was about.
From the bridge over the Willamette River, still golden cottonwoods lit up with sunlight while thick, black clouds roiled behind. The light quickly changed to shadow and then the sun came back again, so my vision seemed to move between the everyday world and that Otherworld always waiting for a turn of the head, the shift in light that would reveal that world where every object is imbued with its own spirit and is waiting to speak to you about whatever is in your heart.
As I was crossing the boardwalk between two ponds, I stopped to frame an image of leaves, water, and reflections when I was startled by the banking flap of enormous wings. Great Blue Heron had flown directly into the focus place of the photo I had framed.
Instantly, I thought of a fragment from Ovid’s Heroides I had read earlier on the morning:
“Chance is always powerful. Let your hook always be cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be fish.”
Each card had a different animal on it, and its qualities translated into human terms in a little accompanying book. When we had a chance encounter with an animal in either the real world or through dream or another chance encounter such as the logo on a truck that arrested our attention, we would say that the animal “flew into my cards today.” We would look up the meaning of the card and through drawing and journaling think about the lesson or insight the animal was bringing. I consider this to be High Play.
Well, Great Blue Heron had certainly flown into my cards–smack into the intense focus of my camera.
I didn’t actually know anything about the symbolic or shamanic meaning of cranes or herons in Western traditions, so I did due diligence when I got home and looked it up.
I learned that herons and cranes were important in Celtic mythology. One reason was because those bird species lived in a misty environment between land and water–the marsh. Just as an hour of quick-changing sun and shadow shifted my seeing between worlds, so does the heron live in that liminal place at the doorway to the Otherworld.
I really love the other reason, too, which I learned from Anna Franklin’s excellent online site, Power Animals, Allies and Totem Animals, “The Celtic god Ogma was said to invented ogham [an ancient British and Irish alphabet] after watching the flight of cranes, the shapes of the birds against the sky giving him the idea for the angular letters.” As a poet and writing instructor, the idea of my writing springing from the shapes of birds against the sky is deeply satisfying.
I have been thinking pretty much non-stop lately about the Mysterious Night Vision Field Journaland the classes my sister and I are creating. The appearance of the Great Blue Heron literally flying into my focus tells me we are on the right track.
Your Mysterious Night Vision Field Journalis your Secret Book, your Book of Dreams where you draw and journal in that numinous space between land and water where the heron lives and feeds. We look at the outer world with our inner eyes, and when the heron flies, we understand the writing their stick legs and archeopteryx shapes make against the sky.
The Science of Shivers
Robert Moss, in a book of his I’m reading right now called Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols, and Synchronicity in Everyday Life, says we must develop the Science of Shivers, “which involves learning to recognize and respect what is going on when something exceptional is in the air and your body responds even before your mind can make sense of it.”
When the heron flapped giant silver wings into my lens, folded up and settled on his log in the pond, I got goosebumps all over. I definitely felt the necessity of responding to this vivid visitation in my Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal; this time as this blog post.
Moss says, “Feeling is your clue to meaning.”
Do you know the poet Mary Oliver? What she doesn’t know about the Science of Shivers doesn’t need to be known. Most of her poems creep up on me and give me the shivers–including those about Great Blue Heron:
Heron Rises From the Dark, Summer Pond
By Mary Oliver
So heavy
is the long-necked, long-bodied heron,
always it is a surprise
when her smoke-colored wings
open
and she turns
from the thick water,
from the black sticks
of the summer pond,
and slowly
rises into the air
and is gone.
Then, not for the first or the last time,
I take the deep breath
of happiness, and I think
how unlikely it is
that death is a hole in the ground,
how improbable
that ascension is not possible,
though everything seems so inert, so nailed
back into itself–
the muskrat and his lumpy lodge,
the turtle,
the fallen gate.
And especially it is wonderful
that the summers are long
and the ponds so dark and so many,
and therefore it isn’t a miracle
but the common thing,
this decision,
this trailing of the long legs in the water,
this opening up of the heavy body
into a new life: see how the sudden
gray-blue sheets of her wings
strive toward the wind; see how the clasp of nothing
takes her in.
This beautiful watercolor sketch is by one of Cheryl Renee Long‘s art students, Lauri Huston.
Watch carefully then tell me: who flew into YOUR cards today?
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BOOKS I REFERENCED IN THIS ARTICLE
Note: I have personally read all of the books I referenced in this article and can recommend them to you as good companions on your Journey.
“The Doorway Between This World and the Other World” Prismacolor on black art paper by Sandy Brown Jensen
Finding the Way In
Your Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal is not like any other art you’ve done or seen before. Because the soul is always dreaming, awake or asleep, the stream of images is always available to you. Just as the stars are still out in the daytime, Dreamtime is always with you. However, the bright sun of your awake mind dims them to view. You need a reliable entry point, a way in,
In all shamanic traditions, there is a gateway to the spirit world. It could be a crack in a cave wall or a burrow under an old growth tree. Maybe it’s at the bottom of a lake or a back door to your own home you never noticed before. Whatever it is, you can draw it and come back to that drawing over and over as your own unique doorway to your imagination.
Prepare a quiet space to work in your Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal. Make sure you will be undisturbed. Leave your technology in the other room, turned off, so you won’t be distracted. That includes cats, dogs, and kids!
Spread your tools out before you: black paper, gel pens, colored pencils. Light a candle if you want. Now, breathe and center yourself.
Let the image of a doorway, gate, or other portal form in your mind. No judgment or editing! Let it be what it is going to be. Stay with it a while. Do you need a password or special key to get in?
Now, wait for it to open. Be patient, and when it does, go through.
“Finally, your patience is rewarded: the ancient stone door creaks open, the drawbridge is lowered, the boulder magically rolls away from the mouth of the cave. However you visualize your portal to the mythic realm, see it as inviting you to adventure.”
–Jill Jepson Writing as a Sacred Path
Now, quietly pick up your pen and begin to draw. Become as immersed in your drawing as you did when you were a kid.
“The Blue Door” Prismacolor on black art paper by Cheryl Renee Long
This is important work, this building a portal to the world of waking dream.
Report back here with a comment: what was your experience? Describe your portal to your imagination.
“She Who Guides My Stars” Night Vision Journal by Sandy Brown Jensen 11-28-15
SHE WHO GUIDES MY STARS
By Sandy Brown Jensen
I am home with a bad cold today. I am reading Sidewalk Oracle by my favorite dream guide, Robert Moss. I fell asleep for a while. Images floated through my mind, but nothing stuck except when I awoke, the name or word Gaia was with me, the name for Planet Earth.
Still in that liminal state, I did a Mysterious Night Vision scribble drawing of a figure who has emerged in my drawings before. This one I called, “She Who Guides My Stars.” She floats just above the ocean waves, the full moon over her left shoulder. She is centered with a spinning wheel with stars shining between the spokes.
Both hands are on it like a ship’s wheel – also like the Wheel of Fortune in Tarot. Both of her eyes are open, looking ahead, steering the ship of my body and life, spinning out my fate, guided by celestial navigation – the moon, the stars, and the changeable tides.
“Holding It Close” is another Night Vision drawing I did of my Celestial Navigator in 2010.
Although I don’t do as much with the Tarot as I used to, those images are meaningful to me. I have worked on and off a building a Night Vision Tarot deck which I call a Dream Deck. I think this is one to add as a Wheel of Fortune, which refers to the creative cycles of life. The planet of “Wheel of Fortune” is Jupiter, the planet of opportunity, growth, success, and expansion.
The lesson of the Wheel is always that there are ups and downs in life, but in my image, the Wheel s not just running free like an unmanned Ferris wheel; the goddess has both hands on the wheel, using it to steer the ship.
It says that when I have been pushed in a new direction, I have to accept it and adapt. A good example is the cold I have right now, which is making sure I stay put and do nothing I had planned. Instead, I have been given hours to pursue new reading, new lines of thought. I have a few days to turn the compost of my mind to let the fertilizer reach those roots.
As a major arcana card, the Wheel of Fortune appears at a pivotal time in my life where new options become possible. Through all the changes, I feel the center of stability within me; my Celestial Navigator is at the helm.
“Silly Woman with Red Boxing Gloves” By Cheryl Renee Long. Gel Pen on Black Paper
The Silly Woman With Red Boxing Gloves
By Cheryl Renee Long
She slowly cycles her way in and out of my dreams, each visit announcing a new chapter in my life. She silently enters the black screen of my night vision from stage right, confidently steering her wobbly, decrepit blue bicycle. She pauses in the spotlight and looks directly into my eyes. Time for change. She lifts her red boxing glove, signifying a fight may be in my near future. She implies that I should do no harm and draw no blood either physically or emotionally.
The Silly Woman shifts her gaze and she wheels the wobbling bike stage left. I wonder, is she silly? She looks silly. Or is she wise?
“Jitterbug Dancer” Gel pen on black sketch book paper by Cheryl Renee Long
JITTERBUG DANCER
By Cheryl Renee Long
Before I could talk, even before I could walk, my young mother would scoop me up and dance with me in her arms. By 3 years old, I was her tiny dance partner. I knew all the big band sounds, the crooners and the words to the popular songs of the 1930s and 1940’s. I didn’t learn to dance – it was full immersion from birth.
The Jitterbug Dancer sketch came from a Mysterious Night Vision gel pen scribble. I did it with my eyes closed. The fun and the creativity came when I “saw” something in the scribble. I used Gelly Roll gel pens and Prismacolor colored pencils.
Our mom is now about to turn 90. She still loves Glen Miller and she still dances in place. She is my Jitterbug Dancer.
NOTE: Cheryl Renee Long’s “Color Your World” Colored Pencil Sketching class begins Jan. 4, 2016 and is only $50. Click here to view the sales page and/or to enroll:https://app.ruzuku.com/courses/11010/about
NEW CLASS ANNOUNCED
In late February 2016, Cheryl Renee Long and the hard working behind-the-scenes crew at Toucan Create! will introduce a brand new online class on how to loosen up your creativity and really explore your artistic imagination drawing with gel pen or colored pencils on black paper. This is your Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal!
GETTING READY FOR THE CLASS
Here are some tips about some supplies you might like to get you started.
TALKING ABOUT PAPER
First things first! Check out the Toucan Artists Bookstore or your local art supply store and buy yourself a black sketchbook. Size is up to you, but personally I like something small that says “field journal” to me. The one I just started is by Artagain and is 9″ x 6″. It’s pretty spendy at $29.70. If I had my way, it would be about 5 1/2″ x 5 1/5″.
If you like working on a little larger format, the Pacon Basic Black Sketch Book, 8.5″x11″ is a good choice and only costs $4.99. I have been known to buy a sketchbook this large then take it down to my local copy center, cut the pages in halves or quarters and have the resulting custom-sized sketchbook spiral bound with my own cover on it.
After a break of a year or so, I (Sandy) came back to my Mysterious Night Vision Journal with this image called “Return to the Night Garden.” A “night garden” is another way to think about your imagination or soul. In this image, I am showcasing Sakura pens.
TALKING ABOUT GEL PENS AND COLORED PENCILS
When it comes to gel pens that glow in the darkness that is your Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal, one pen rules them all: the one, the only, the fabulous Sakura of Gelly Roll fame. Their huge line of pens glitter, glow, and pouf. Here are a couple of charts to help you better evaluate which pens do what:
This chart by Rachel Johnson shows what you can expects from the various lines of Sakura pens on black paper.
Of the pens that look great on black paper, Moonlight at $6.99 for a pack of 10 is the best. I know Souffle looks good, but it is a weird, three-dimensional ink that takes a couple minutes to dry, and then if you flip another page down on top it, the poufiness crushes down into a peculiar mess. Proceed at your own risk!
This chart, also by Rachel Johnson, shows the effects of the same pens on white paper.
However, gel pens are not the only choice for your Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal; colored pencils work great, too. Cheryl Renn Long recommends Prismacolor:
“Country Farm Yard” is a sketch by Toucan Create! art instructor Cheryl Renee Long that shows off the versatility of Prismacolor. She used a pen to touch in her first outlines, as you can see by looking closely, then she used Prismacolor pencils to lay down color on color in places and to blend in other places.A great way to get started with your Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal is to select a pen, close your eyes, and scribble. Then open your eyes and have finishing your scribble as a kind of coloring book page. What do the various shapes suggest to you? Which colors are calling your name? When you are done, give it the first title that pops into your head and write it down. Add the date and you’ve begun a great journey into “The Sky Inside”! (Image is from Sandy Brown Jensen’s MNVFJ.)
When I was a little girl, I was doll crazy. I dressed my dolls obsessively, and I was lucky enough to have an Aunt Mel who loved to make doll clothes for my girls.
I sat them around the picnic table and taught them; and I became a teacher.
I invited them to tea parties and cooked for them in my doll kitchen; and I became an avid home cook and dinner party hostess.
I read to them and became a reader.
I drew with them and became an artist.
What I am now, I learned by acting on The Doll Stage.
The Way of the Doll quote is from Rainer Maria Rilke, the great German poet who thought quite a bit about dolls. The art is made using the Bazaart app for iPad.
“Am I not right to feel as if I
must stay seated, as if I must wait
before The Doll Stage, or, rather,
gaze at it so intensely that at
last an Angel
has to come and make the stuffed skins startle into life?
Angel and Doll: A real play, finally.”
–Rainer Maria Rilke
My most beloved doll was a Betsy McCall doll. I took her on our family vacation to Glacier National Park. One morning, I got her all dressed for the day’s adventure over the Going to the Sun Highway and arranged her in a little tableau under a huge old oak tree.
Lost Betsy. I made this image just this week. At age 65, there is some inner compulsion to return again and again to the scene of the crime; the crime of abandoning a loved one to the wilderness. I began with two of my photographs, collaged it in the Bazaart for iPad app, then used the “Purts” setting in the Virtual Painter app for the painterly quality.
In the kerfluffle of departure, I forgot her until we were high on the pass, and then the parents said it was too late to go back for her. I was heartbroken. My mother, now age 89, has so many times told me one of the few regrets of her well-lived life was that they didn’t go back for Betsy.
In my memory, Betsy is still there, waiting for me. I have returned to Montana three times over the span of the ensuing five decades, and each time I have gone to that tree to look for her. At age 65, there is some inner compulsion to return again and again to the scene of the crime; the crime of abandoning a loved one to the wilderness.
The Angel of Lost Children. Bazaart collage and “Purts” setting in Virtual Painter.
Why does a doll, an inanimate object, hold such a place of psychic charge, of emotional power on The Doll Stage of my soul? She was my first loss; she went ahead of me and created the Room of Inconsolable Grief that is now always there just off stage. Betsy lives there in the good company of my father and a black dog named Fianna.
Dolls occupy a liminal space between the rational and the irrational, between form and its shadow, between daylight and dream. The psychodramas of childhood doll play became the dark well of Mystery that I draw on daily in my art, in all the details of a passionate life lived for and in art.
“The Time Travelers Appear Before Me On the Forest Floor.” I made this image this morning in response to the Daily Create challenge to think inside the box for once instead of outside the box. Again, the theme of the lost dolls in the forest spontaneously surfaces. I am on the left, contemplating their appearance once again. Yellow Bird, why do you come?
I return to the theme of dolls again and again in my Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal (soon to be an online class. Stay tuned by subscribing to toucancreate.com, the website for our online art classes.). I find them deeply satisfying. The dolls speak to me of my many interior worlds; they act out on The Doll Stage that is the theatrical doorway to the old growth forest of my mind.
It turns out that I am the “Angel who startles the stuffed skins into life. Angel and Doll: A real play, finally.”
“Angel and Doll: A real play, finally.” Bazaart app for iPad.
Are you a doll lover, too? Some people hate dolls and find them creepy–I will write about that next time. Is there something in your life that acts as dolls do for me, as intermediary objects between daylight and the place where you do art, that waking dream?
Please share your thoughts in the comment field below, or the one at the very top of the page–between the two “The Lost Doll” titles where it says “Leave a Comment.”–I’d love to hear from you!
