Inspirational Tips: Be the Music, Be the Art!

MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT: If you have not had a chance to visit Blockhead Radio's Artisan Challenge this week, please do so. My card, "The Impossibly Possible Hippo" is in the Paper Crafts category and I'd LOVE it if you would vote for me. AND we have several other Thursday Sweet Treat participants/cheering members in as well - please look for mkc photography, Huckleberry Arts, GlassElements and Dorset Hill Beads! If you have a piece in, please let us know. Congrats to TheClayMuse on a big win last week!!

Help support the many, amazing artists in this challenge and Blockhead Radio. That station and it's entire crew do SO much to help other artists like YOU. Please take a moment to vote, enter a work of your own and support a wonderful, amazing radio station! http://www.blockheadradiolive.com/

Now let's talk INSPIRATION!!

Rose Lariat Necklace

http://salvagedexpression.etsy.com/

Salvaged Expression has a special place in my heart. I am not just a fan of her tremendously beautiful, fresh, exciting artwork or the way she challenges herself within her work, I am a fan of her as a person as well. Salvaged always extends a hand and a kind word, listens and gives sound advice, and selflessly gives whatever she has to help others, including her endless supply of wit and humor.

After last week's Artist PlayDate, she wrote and shared this story with me. I was so inspired by it and her key points to remember that I asked her permission to pass this inspiration along to you!

"It's a Friday after work and I'm driving into Pittsburgh to see my SO," Salvaged begins. "Due to too much enthusiasm and a miscalculation, I am stuck in some of the worst rush hour/tunnel traffic I have yet seen.

There are things going on in my life as evidenced by the fact that I'm driving my mother's car. (yikes) A car with no CD player! (Really, really yikes!) Thanks to slow moving traffic I have time to fish out my headset and make this drive more enjoyable. Before I know it, I'm road dancing. The kind you can only do when you're in, "Stop and stop some more traffic". Fingers in the air like a disco queen, swinging my head around, rocking down to the steering column and back. Utterly unpretentious or self conscious, it was freeing...it was embarrassing! Seriously, I occasionally think of myself as a rocker and this was "Praise You" by Fatboy Slim. Ouch!

So I'm grooving like Saturday morning on a long weekend when I look over and see a guy grooving along with me. (My inner rocker goes to hide behind some amps.) This is a man who clearly does not listen to "Praise You!" We dance a bit more and traffic moves and I never see him again. But in the meantime, we had shared that silly, little moment (and a blue dolphin air freshener actually...) and the thought always brightens my day.

So this story has 2 points. Ok 3.

1. Music is good!

2. This whole thing was started by a song. Your work will touch people you will never know in ways you will never see and the world will be much richer for it.

3. Either of us could have sat there like rush hour automatons... and had zero fun. Living your life as yourself, going out into the world and being you without shame doesn't just make you an artist/writer/amazing chick. It makes you the art.

Now that's not without pressure but it does give you permission to be wrong. It also gives you permission to be powerful. So I may have totally missed the mark (too late to stress over the brush strokes now) or hit something home but if nothing else you know what to do next time you're stuck in traffic. ...I reserve bubble blowing for the advanced classes. (Seriously!)"