Susie's Art Classes 2 Go Now Available at Art on the Planet

What is it that is so rewarding about expressing our inner creative self? I've always believed that the creative urge was something innate that needed to be exercised, like our physical muscles, almost an essential part of being human.

This is not to say we must all make fine art, write poetry or become concert pianists. It does, however, seem like the world is more vibrant and life is greatly enriched when we create.

For the the past four decades of our marriage I have enjoyed the multitude of ways that Susie has expressed her creativity. What is evident to me is how the creative process always gets her invigorated, while at the same time becomes a blessing for others.

Susie's Art Classes 2 Go were designed to provide materials and instructions so that others can have this experience of guided creation. Her aim was to provide the tools and materials which, when combined with your own creativity, will produce results that you will enjoy sharing with others. And give you ideas for your own future creative projects.

EN: What are Art Classes 2 Go?

Susie Newman: During the pandemic, art classes such as though Community ed. or Art on the Planet "Wine Beginnings" classes are on hold, but people more than ever need a creative outlet! I've worked on coming up with a couple of projects where you can take the packet with all materials and instructions home and create something fun as well as usable. On a nice day a group could still do them together, social distancing in a backyard maybe.

EN: You've been doing creative projects for decades, but this is something different. What prompted you to make these kits?

My daughter turned her goose egg shell into a cactus.

SN: Earlier in the pandemic I did a fun project with a group of friends. Everyone got a goose egg shell, (compliments of my five goose girls) and made something creative using the egg. One of my friends then said it was so fun she wished I would come up with another project. That got me thinking! I had just begun to get involved with teaching community ed classes in Proctor when Covid came along and brought my plans to a screeching halt.

Around this time also an organization in Duluth called Age Well Arrowhead was calling for home made greeting cards to give elderly people to bring cheer and encouragement during this difficult time for many. I sent them some of my cards that I make. Then I noticed that Art on the Planet was offering an art class to go, so I contacted them and they were all for my two project ideas, one of them making greeting cards, and the other art paper that could be used as wrapping paper.

Art paper samples for wrapping paper.

EN: A lot of people, when they think of art think of fine art and paintings for the wall. Can you talk a little about why functional art is so rewarding to make?

Paper for card making. These are part of
the Greeting Cards with Artvelopes set.

SN: I've always especially enjoyed making things that are usable. There's only so much room on the walls for paintings or other framed art. There is something especially fun to me to make products that become part of everyday life and I can share with others. When it gets used up, then I have the pleasure of making more!

EN: Can you describe what each kit will produce?

SN: One of these kits makes 6 greeting cards with "artvelopes." You will cut out and make the envelope out of designed paper using a template provided. The envelope is decorative and becomes part of the art of the card. There are some very cool papers out there, as well as some full photo pages from thrift store books. Each kit includes most of the following themes, Africa, Down Under, Retro 60's, Sea life, Tie dye, and Woodland or Barnyard.

The other kit makes 6 pieces of artsy tie dye style paper. When I sold these at art/craft sales the people who bought them said they didn't want to use it as wrapping paper, they planned to put it on a wall or on a table as decoration. That will be up to the artist who makes them.

I have more ideas for Art Classes to Go including some kid's projects.

EN: Where can we find your Art Classes 2 Go?  

SN: Art on the Planet is located at 1413 Tower Avenue in Superior. You can order the kits on the Art Classes 2 Go page on their website. These two kits are located at the bottom of the page so you'll have to scroll down. You can also click on the Art on the Planet logo in the right hand column here. Art on the Planet represents a wide swath of local artists. If you prefer to order an art kit online, they also do Curbside Delivery.

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CLICK HERE to see a full list of local artists
whose work can be found at Art on the Planet.

Rooster card with Artvelope.

Zentangle Goes Zoom with Esther Piszczek

I'm guessing that if at the beginning of the year you asked Esther Piszczek if she imagined she'd be teaching Zentangle drawing classes online via Zoom, she very likely would have laughed. "What's Zoom?" she may have asked.

As we've all discovered, much has changed these past six months, both globally and locally. The craving to make art remains alive in so many of us. The creative spark or creative urge is something many feel innate, as part of being human. Hence, Leo Tolstoy more than a century ago said, "Without art mankind could not exist." 

As I read this month's Twin Ports Art blog I noticed that Esther Piszczek has continued her Zentangle classes, even with the lockdown. I reached out to learn more about how her classes were going.

EN: How long after the lockdown occurred before you discovered you could teach Zentangle online? 

Esther Piszczek: It took me one month to start teaching on Zoom. I taught my first official class on Wednesday, April 15, after a quick prep class with two Zentangle (R) teacher friends.

The lockdown occurred mid-March. I knew almost right away that other teachers were teaching online Zentangle (R) classes, but I'd never imagined I would be able to teach online with any success as I value the in person interaction a live class provides. When the quarantine happened in mid-March, I'd taught one of four Advanced Zentangle classes in person at Ordean East Middle School through Duluth Community Education. We decided to put the class on hold, hoping we'd be able to meet again in person to finish the class. So that class didn't spur me to begin teaching online, but my Zentangle (R) & Wine class was scheduled for April 15 and I didn't want to cancel it because that group of students has been drawing with me monthly for years. When I finally decided to teach online, I met with a teacher friend of mine in Madison, WI, who helped me get started on Zoom and set up a Paypal account to accept donations. Next, I created a website so I would have a place to advertise my classes and showcase my students' work. I'm so glad I decided to teach online. It has challenged me and delighted me in many ways.

EN: When you teach at the gallery you take 3 hours. Are your Zoom classes shorter or the same?

EP: My gallery classes and my Zoom classes are 2.5 hours long. Sometimes they run long, especially at the gallery where everyone has been drawing together for years, but the Zoom classes generally end on time or sometimes early.

EN: What were the biggest challenges?

EP: My biggest challenge initially was converting my drawing pad and easel set up where I stand to teach to a Zoom set up that limits my set up to the area where my webcam is located. I held an initial class with two Zentangle teacher friends in mid April using a standing set up before holding my first class on April 15. For the April 15 class, I was still standing to teach and the camera height required me to place my easel on a platform, which also required me to stretch to draw on the drawing pad. I was exhausted and experiencing physical pain by the end of the 2.5 hour class and knew I needed to tweak the set up. Next I set up a table in front of my computer / web cam and put a table easel on it that held a much smaller drawing pad than the one I use on my standing easel. That worked much better. My next challenge was lighting. I was using a shop light to light one side of my easel that a friend allowed me to borrow, but it wasn't a standing light. I propped it up with a hand held weight and leaned it against my drawing easel, but if I bumped my easel while drawing, the light would tip over and I had to scramble to catch it more than once. So I did some research on standing lamps and purchased a standing Ott Lite that never tips over and also lights my space.

Another challenge is creating the class mosaics you see on my website. When I hold a class in person, I arrange all of the student tiles into a class mosaic on a black piece of poster board and take a picture. I then email that picture to the class. My students love receiving the class mosaics where they can see all the class tiles together and study/learn from other students' drawing/shading choices. Now, students take their own tile pictures and send them to me so I can create a class mosaic. For my largest class so far, I had 11 individual photos to edit and place to create the class mosaic, plus a picture of my demo tile. When those pictures are well taken, the editing process is easy, but when the camera is misaligned or an edge of the tile is cut off, it becomes more difficult to edit the photo and have it look good. Fortunately, I have really great photo editing software that can fix quite a bit.

EN: Has it gotten easier?

EP: Yes! Now that my set up is figured out and I have a pretty consistent group of students, I'm spending less time sending out introductory emails talking about what supplies students will need for the class (all things you can find at home), and my set up is really quick now. And I am so grateful that I never have to worry about knocking over my light during class. I've also spent time educating my students about what makes a tile photograph easiest to edit, since then, the quality of the photographs has improved and now I spend less time editing each photo to create the class mosaic.

EN: Have you had students from other parts of the country or overseas participating? 

EP: Yes. I have a longtime friend, we met in India when I was a Rotary Exchange Student there in 1987, who found my classes on Facebook. She'd been looking for a new art class to explore and I was delighted when she emailed me from Oregon to sign up for the class. She's been taking classes, sometimes twice weekly, since May 27. Another longtime student lives in Ontonogan, MI, and invited her artist niece Lauren from Baton Rouge, LA to come to class. They both draw with me on Monday nights for my advanced class. Lauren invited her 13 year old stepdaughter to join my Zentangle Foundations class on Wednesday nights and they have been drawing with me weekly, as well. Another long time student is a nun from the St. Scholastica Monastery who got quarantined in Chicago and she joins us from there. I've also had classes with friends in ME and NH. I haven't had any international students yet, but friends of mine want to have a class with my friend's mother who lives in Romania, so I could have an international student sometime soon.

EN: The gallery space was compressed and had a feeling of intimacy that was special. If you were in a larger room, could you return to socially distanced Zentangle classes in person? 

EP: Yes, however, my students have expressed concern about meeting in public and have also said how much they enjoy the Zoom format. My community ed class that was put on hold in mid-March met for the second class of the four class series on Monday, June 29. I asked them whether they would like to meet in person at the school for the remaining two classes, as I was told by the coordinator that that is now possible, but they all said they are more comfortable meeting online.

Another benefit to Zoom is the number of students I am able to teach at one time. You mentioned the intimate feeling of the space at Master Framing Gallery where I have taught Zentangle & Wine classes monthly since 2014. That space holds 7 at capacity and it is a bit of a squeeze. My first official Zoom class was a Zentangle & (bring your own) Wine class on April 15 and there were 9 students in the class. I wouldn't have been able to fit 9 students in the Gallery at any time. My classes say they are limited to eight, but that reflects the number of screens. I regularly have a mother / daughter duo who draw together on their front porch in Lakeside. When they are on one screen, it means I can add a ninth student to the class. The largest class so far has been eleven with six of those students on only three screens.

NOTEWORTHY
The Duluth Art Institute is now Open.

Related Links
Esther Piszczek's Patterned Peace
Local Art Seen: First Lesson in Zentangle with Esther Piszczek
A Slideshow of Zentangle Drawings at EternalPossibility.com

Throwback Thursday: Innovation Institute Gives Hope and Meaning To Wheelchair Bound

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN MAY 2009

For several decades I've been watching Harrold Andresen’s career unfold. It's been easy to do since he’s my brother-in-law, having married my wife’s sister. In 1980, the four of us went to Mexico to work at an orphanage, a significant experience in all of our lives. Susie and I returned in late fall 1981, Harrold and Nancy came back to the States in 1982.

Harrold ran a shop as an auto mechanic before going to Mexico. And while South-o’-the-Border he was dedicated to mechanical tasks not only for the orphanage, but also for the vehicles of many missionaries who brought their cars and pickups to him. (The kids loved him for fixing the pedal cars that had been donated, as seen in this picture above.)

When the Andresens left Mexico Harrold set up shop in the Rio Grande Valley, where he continued to work on cars, but also continued to service missionaries’ vehicles. Eventually the family moved to Duncanville, a suburb of Dallas, where he established his business, Mechanical Excellence. In addition to taking care of cars, Harrold was continuously inventing. He invented tools, he invented what he called the Cozy Heater, a product they sold to customers in nearly every state. He conceived a vehicle which combined the best engine with the best body, and built a number of them for customers. He also ran a rental car business and pursued other miscellaneous endeavors. But underneath it all was a desire to help handicapped people, especially the wheel-chair bound.

About five years ago, Andresen began taking steps toward building what has come to be known as Innovation Institute. “The mission of the school is to get products into the hands of the disabled that they couldn’t get anywhere else or they couldn’t afford. Also, to give them some skills so they can earn some money for the first time in their lives.” Andresen has also learned a lot about wheelchair sports, but we'll save that for another blog note.

Mechanical Excellence, Andresen’s auto shop, at one time had 20 bays for working on cars. Three-fourths is now set apart for the school. The school combines Harrold’s incredibly creative mechanical aptitude with his passion to help the handicapped, especially men more drawn to activities like welding and maintenance than arts and crafts.

In March we had a chance to tour the facility, and "impressive" is an understatement. There's a welding section, locksmithing, a library, classrooms and all kinds of work areas for other designated purposes. One section is devoted to modifying ride around lawn mowers for the wheelchair bound. To describe Harrold's vision in all this would take several blog entries and this is but an introduction. Let's just say that if you look up the phrase "Thinking Outside The Box" it will probably lead you to images of Innovation Institute.

Here's an example of the kind of thinking that went into modifying the auto shop to be a school.

"So here's one logistic: how do you get grinders that are approved by OSHA people, usable from a wheelchair, yet somewhat portable because when we have a big project we gotta move things?" Andresen laid out the issues. "And this is their fifth attempt! The advantage we had in remodeling the facility is we had two guys in power chairs, and two guys in manual chairs minimum, but often there were way more than that. They would come in on Saturday and Sunday and most evenings for the four years that we remodeled this place."

Andresen is standing over a low bench. "We had this on cement blocks. We had grinders on I-beams, we had grinders on telescopic stands, and we came up with this. The same kind of heavy pallet thing that made the welding areas, this has 500 pounds of weight. So it's not bolted to the floor, which it has to be if it's movable, but this isn't moveable. And the height's right... And here's the other problem: cutting. You cut metal, you blow hot sparks. You blow hot sparks on your legs with no nerves, you burn your skin and don't know it until the guys smell the burning skin and say, 'Hey, Joe you're burning your legs.' So we had to figure out a way to catch the sparks. One day I was watching [my daughter] Amy feed her horses and I thought, hey a feeding trough is tapered in a way that you could get under this with your wheelchair."

And so it is, attention to detail... solving one issue at a time.

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NINE YEARS LATER
Harrold has many strengths, including an endless curiosity and a stubborn commitment to do whatever it takes to fulfill the vision, to see it through. If you feel moved to contribute to the work, Innovation Institute is a non-profit.  To see what they are doing today, what they have accomplished and where they want to go, visit: https://innovationisus.org/

What Makes Life Worth Living? Magnolia Salon Prepares to Explore Hygge, Mindfulness, Creativity and Flow

Two weeks ago the Oldenburg House, in conjunction with Magnolia Cafe, kicked off a concept they've dubbed the Magnolia Salon, stimulated in part by the salon-style meeting places featured in late 20s Paris and re-created in films like Midnight In Paris. Here are few notes I've gathered on the topic that is swirling around for exploration tonight on hygge, mindfulness, creativity and flow.

Emily said to me recently that she and Glenn 'have had endless conversations about what we call 'the slipstream' and creating the optimal environment for flow and creativity." These are conversations that many others might wish to become part of.

She went on to say that they have been  pondering the role of limits, struggles and discontent in sparking creativity. "We often have had great things happen because we believe in 'loving our constraints'," she explained. It's another way of saying "necessity is the mother of invention.

Emily then cited a TED Talk by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of the book Flow, who asks, "What makes a life worth living?" Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of "flow."

This led to some thoughts about the Danish concept of hygge, the Swedish focus on lagom, Scottish belief in còsagach, the Japanese focus of wabi-sabi and ikigai, the Dutch phrase gezelligheid and the German term gemutlicheit. If that string of words is a bit too much, the notion of mindfulness, of coziness, and maybe satisfaction are all part of it. (I'm guessing.)

What I do know is that these are idea starters that our Salon group will strive to investigate more deeply, especially as it relates to creativity, appreciation for beauty, and the mutual enrichment of exploring the possibilities that come from dialogue. 

Here's the opening of a blog post titled The Hygge Connection. It's from a blog called "Not Quite Superhuman." I love that name.

THE HYGGE CONNECTION

According to author Marie Tourell Soderberg (2016), at one time Denmark claimed much of northern Europe, even parts of Britain, as part of their territories. However, after losing the last bit which consisted of Norway in 1814, Denmark was left with nothing more than a small, flat landscape of a country. Therefore, they promoted a strong sense of community among people with shared interests. The characteristics of hygge are the epitome of the Scandinavian welfare state and Danish identity. Demark ranks as number two on the current World Happiness Report (2017) and was previously rated as number one in the world. Many researchers have pointed to hygge being the reason for this high rating (Soderberg, 2016).

Hygge (pronounced Hoo-ga) is a term that somewhat defies translation into English. In a sense, it is a feeling of family and friends, conversation, openness, and warmth (Soderberg, 2016).

The author goes on to write about Hygge & Mindfulness, Hygge Themes and Hygge and Mindset, perhaps more than you ever wanted to learn about this word, though I suspect you'll find it more of a catalyst to do further thinking on this topic. It may even prod you to think about moving to Denmark sone day.

You can read the rest of this excellent essay here at Not Quite Superhuman.

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At this point I hope to have accomplished my purpose, which is to make you want to join us tonight for a stimulating discussion and the mutual exploration of themes we often think about only privately. If you already have other plans, then plan to join us next week or any future Thursday that you have open. We'd like to get to know you. Oldenburg House is located at 604 Chestnut Avenue in Carlton, about 15 minutes South of the Proctor exit. (I promise to time this for you at some point soon.)

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Magnolia Salon was initially organized by Oldenburg House, Oldenburg Arts and Cultural Community (OACC), and Magnolia Café. The first season of The Salon will be held on Thursday evenings from 6-9 p.m. in the Carlton Room at Oldenburg House through May 31, 2018.