30/30 Challenge - Day 4

15 x 15, Be The Bird  www.linhbdang.com

Creative Practice Week 2 - Six Word Memoir

Autobiography:  Give Love That Makes People Beautiful

Present Moment:  Sipping Rooibos Tea. I am happy.

Vision:  A world overflowing with joyful tears.

Spirituality:  All of You. More than enough.

Using only six words to describe your life’s motto wasn’t easy, but I did notice that I lost track of time thinking about using the right words. I have been stressed about all the things I have to accomplish on my To-Do List that people around me could feel that negative energy. After the first task, I saw that my shoulders were no longer up close to my ears and I sat up straight.

Word is powerful! I can see myself using this Six Word Memoir with the patients in the hospital. It’s a great opening to get them to start thinking about what to paint or create. They might be able to forget their worries for a while or maybe take it deeper and focus on their purpose in life. Purpose makes you fight to survive for the people you love.

I took a photo of my list to show the process of my thoughts. My six word autobiography is my life’s mission. I did not want it written in plan font, so I tried to write it in what calligraphers call, Black Letter. It’s not perfect; but then again, neither am I.

30/30 Challenge - Day 3

15X15  Three - Linh B Dang  www.linhbdang.com

30/30 Challenge - Day 2

15x15 - Be The Love (Ghost) - Artist: Linh B Dang  www.linhbdang.com

30/30 Challenge - Day 1

I haven’t been blogging for a long time. Cool fact I just learned the other day, Blog is for Web Log and then it got shorten to Blog. I recently took on a painting challenge for the month of September where anyone can join the challenge. It begins on September 1, 2014. It is a no rules challenge.  You can do whatever you want. The point is to get you creating everyday.

Artist, Leslie Saeta, is hosting this challenge. She had this challenge last year. To join, click on this website:"30 Paintings In 30 Days".  

There are approximately 650 people from around the world signed up for this challenge.  I am excited to take this challenge because I usually can’t find time to do art everyday, so I am determined to accomplish this. Please visit daily and leave comments if you like my work. It will encourage me to keep producing.

Thanks for visiting!

15x15 - Be The Love - Artist: Linh B Dang  www.linhbdang.com

Creative Practice

At the beginning of this year, my creative practice has changed from oil painting to printmaking and book art. I am a former painter who found God. My previous work were dark where I would paint ghosts or the fantasy of an abused child who wish she could cut off her abuser’s hands and penis. 

Now, after much healing through my faith, through forgiveness and through art, I learned that art reflects what is inside the artist. Art helps us to heal by sharing our thoughts and letting it “out”.

When we keep all the pain, un-forgiveness and/or shame inside, we inject the poison into our veins. It then slowly seeps through our body. This darkness then turns into cancer or some other disease.

Today, when a bad childhood memory creeps up, I would visualize myself binding that incident, wrapping it up and tossing it into a fire. I would then say good words over myself; such as, mercy, grace, beauty, love, joy, and peace.

I use this same practice in creating art. I would first meditate on something good and fun. My work is more of encouraging, fun or cheerful themes. It might not be powerful visually, but I believe it brings joy to a person’s heart.

Today, the theme is “Over the Hill”.  I recently turned 45 years old and thought what “Over the Hill” meant. It would be fun to create a small book using letterpress, so I went to the Center for the Book in San Francisco and rented the press machine. (Below are photos of my creative practice.)

1.     Laying out the concept.   

2.     Running it through the press machine. 

3.     Because everything has to be done backwards, I made a mistake.

I printed “bab” instead of  “bad”.

4.     This is what I love about mistakes; I tried to come up with a creative way to fix it without have to spend another 6 hours recreating the layout.  I turned “bab” into “bad.attitude.b@!ch!” I thought it was funny. Unexpected. CUT OUT THE B.A.B!

5.     Final product of a small folded book made out of one page with only a slit in the middle.

I have discovered recently that my creative practice doesn’t have to be perfect. I can always take my mistakes and make the final product better -but with an unexpected surprise.

The Desire to Write

My hope, my fear in writing is to find love. Not a romantic kind of love, but more of an acceptance kind of love. Yes, I do not feel like I belong anywhere, to anyone - not even to my current family, and definitely not to my own mother. I fear that if I write about my life, my childhood, my mother would disown me for the second time.  I fear that people would think I was too damaged to be worthy of love. I fear my world would be lonely; lonelier than when my mother called me a disgrace because I didn’t understand about sex. But there is still that desire to write, to share the world of me, to show that I am not invisible and that I do have something worth writing, worth telling, worth reading.

BUT. THAT. IS. JUST. A. DREAM.

Dreams don’t come true for me. Though I pray and wish and hope that they do, they don’t.  How cool would it be if they did? How wonderful would it be to be happy for a moment, to be happy to the point of fear – the fear of losing that feeling of ecstatic joy, the fear of waking up and knowing that it was just a dream.