lifestyle – Barbara Stamegna

Artistcoveries

Following the student art show this weekend, I’ve been thinking a lot about art education and how we learn this marvelous thing we call art. My thoughts quickly went back to a recent conversation with a former schoolmate. But before I get to that, let me digress a bit and share a few thoughts about my personal journey toward becoming an artist.

I often lament the fact that I am self-taught. The pastel portrait workshop I attended and the lessons I’ve followed on The Virtual Instructor website are the closest I’ve come to having any actual art instruction. I do think of myself as an art student, but one who is completely home-schooled without benefit of any formal standards. I create my curriculum based both upon my needs and my desires in art. I do a lot of what I love, and then for good measure, I…

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The glaring deep blue of the sky in springtime, the smell of the wet earth just after a pouring rain, the singing of the birds waking you up in the morning, the spreading fragrance of a jasmine flower, the many sounds of moving water and the timeless breaking of the innocent and playful and yet faithful sea waves…

There is a beauty all around and inside of us that, as with clouds, can be sometimes oscured by the suffering caused by the meanness and wickedness of human nature, by the unnatural and stressing lifestyle that humans impose on humans…

“…men has dominated man to his own injury…” (Ecclesiastes 8:9)

But sooner or later, the clouds must go away, and beauty will find its way out…

Art is letting the glimpses of beauty, which come from the inside or lie underneath the true and beautiful things of creation, vibrate inside and then letting it flow freely and without mind through your hand so to translate it into a visible form…