On the other side of the deep intimacy of the creative process, one is hurled into the lights and camera lenses of marketing and sharing one's work. This is the hardest part of the process for many of us so-called "creative types". Marketing and selling a book is very different from selling fine art. For one thing, paintings hang on the wall and exhibit themselves while you are off doing other things. Books sit on shelves, pile onto tables, rest in hard to reach cyber pages. They are much harder to be seen.
In the case of self-published books, there are no marketing departments to do the "social work" of getting the book seen and heard and read. I've learned to be patient with myself in accomplishing all the required support a book needs. It's going to be a slow process. I wasn't a marketing major. I didn't grow up with a computer screen in front of me since I was five. Social media is not second nature to me, in fact, trying to be consistent in social media taught me that I am shy, and that I would rather do creative things than connecting things. Show offs are really great at social media, people who like to be seen, people who like to be looked at. Let's face it, some people will do anything to be looked at. I was taught that such a characteristic made a person vain, perverse, and maybe even vulgar. Be that as it may, the Kardashians have proved that vanity can be a money-maker. I don't fit into that social media climbing genus or specie. (If you are a reader of this blog you know I'm often too shy to write too often.)
I am, however, very sociable, and that is a great help when presenting to classes or bookstore audiences. The interactions have been heart warming.
I love hearing from people who are reading or have read Tango Lessons. (I don't get many notes from readers of Freeing the Creative Spirit anymore.) And this is the real kernel in this post, the difference between being a painter and being a writer in getting feedback. We may be different types of animals, but both writer and artist egos love to be fed.
At the moment I have 6 reviews in Amazon, all 5 stars. Well, let's face it, most of them are friends. But they count! And every now and then I get an email from a friend or family member to say they are having a great time reading Tango Lessons. It is a wonderful feeling. I want to know exactly where they are in the story and what reactions they have to certain characters, and where do they think the story is going. But I cannot ask, I just content myself with a kind of self-satisfied realization that tells me I have given the world something that didn't exist before.
In the ACCI Gallery interview I said that the moment I saw a projection of Monet's painting of Rouen Cathedral in the Mist, I suddenly understood that painting/Art was magic. The artist, the writer, is a conjurer. We create something out of nothing and then we give it to the world as a gift.That is our form of magic. I'm sure you have experienced some magical excitement in response to some work of art, or perhaps a work of animation or music. All our art forms are magical means of transporting us beyond the hard, cold, ungiving surfaces of life.
So I'd like to encourage you to feed the artists. If you see a piece of fine art that you admire but can't afford, leave a note for the artist with the gallery person. (Someone once left me a note tucked into the stretcher bars on the back of a painting! That was great!) Write a fan letter, or email. You have no idea how much it means. Our art has a life of its own. It meets people we never meet, so we love to know that someone out there cares about that work we do all alone while the rest of the world is playing golf, going to a street fair, taking a nap, playing basketball, listening to jazz or all the other great things people do who choose not to write.
I started to write this blog in order to pass along my new Amazon Author's Page. The page has a bio, some photos, a link back to this blog. I think one can email the author that way, too. It's all new to me. Here is the link: amazon.com/author/adrianaadiaz
Thanks for reading. Maybe I'll hear from you some time.
Thursday, November 30, 2017
Monday, November 13, 2017
Yours Truly in the Spotlight for ACCI Gallery -November, 2017
A C C I Artist Spotlight
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 ADRIANA DIAZ
Adriana
Diaz is a true creatrix: a prolific mixed media painter, novelist,
creative life coach, dancer, and teacher. Her creative magic is in
bringing elements of the physical sensuous
world
into her paintings, to awaken viewers to the world around them,
expanding their presence and sense awareness of the physical world. With
this heightened sense of physical presence, Adriana believes we can
become more appreciative and literally in touch with the sensual and
spiritually alive nature of the inanimate world.
Adriana describes herself as a "crayons first" kid,
moving on to major in art, and ultimately becoming a creative life
coach, which she practices alongside her painting and writing. She
fondly recalls seeing the image of Monet's "Rouen Cathedral in the
Mist" at age 18 as the moment she realized that art could be magic.
Being of Spanish heritage, Adriana claims a kind of connection to the
Spanish painters: Velazquez, Goya, Picasso, and the Catalán artist Tāpies,
as their work combines the plastic and aesthetic elements of fine art
with their personal political presence, something she strives to achieve
in her own work.
Adriana finds a kinship between the process of painting and
the act of writing. "The physical act of writing often shows up in my
paintings as marks and 'found languages,' developed spontaneously
without forethought. This connects me to the cultural anthropological
phenomenon of languages held within the body of the earth. As if our
ancestors put them there for safekeeping, intending them to be
discovered by their children's children. The marking also connects me
to the scribe who in ancient times was the one who recorded or
transferred stories through pictures, then marks that became language."
Adriana
rejoined ACCI Gallery in 2015 after an extended hiatus, and has since
been an active member and volunteer on the Events committee. She
finds the dialog, sensibilities, and work of other artists to be
wonderful catalysts for her thinking and imaging. Making intellectual
and artistic activities available in the East Bay, meeting other
artists and being part of the joint creative presence at ACCI Gallery
are part of what keeps her creative spirit engaged.
Find both of Adriana's books on Amazon:
Freeing the Creative Spirit, Drawing on the Power of Art to Tap the Magic and Wisdom Within
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Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Tango Lessons
Well, I am branching
out, attempting to fulfill my creative potential, just as I encourage others to
do. We are capable of far more than we think. Most readers know that I wrote a non-fiction book titled Freeing the Creative Spirit in the
1990’s, and now I have taken another leap into the world of the written word, I
have written a novel titled Tango Lessons.
Tango Lessons does not teach the reader
how to dance tango, but it does offer some deeper insights into tango as more
than a dance. I tapped into the spiritual and political things I have
learned and experienced as an apprentice to the dance. I bring together things
from the real world of tango with a fictitious tale about a woman who goes to
Argentina to learn about the tango, but more importantly she travels to that
foreign land in search of a lost relative, an elder who it appears may not have
died in the Spanish Civil War (as the family had presumed).
The journey
comes at a time when she has lost the life she's known. Her twenty-five year
marriage has ended in divorce. Her only child has gone off to college. And the
house she had known as home has burnt to the ground. Raquel Carval is over
fifty, full of anxiety and self-doubt. But she hopes to accomplish one
important thing, to find the elder brother of her dying godmother before she takes her last breath.
The challenges she takes on were unimaginable. She didn't realize that thousands of people in Argentina are looking for loved ones who disappeared more than twenty years ago. She didn't realize that she embodied the courage and beauty of a woman capable of creating a new life, or of accepting a dangerous, even life-threatening mission for the sake of justice and truth.
We had a terrific launch party for Tango Lessons. Yes, of course, we danced a little tango, and we ate empanadas and drank red wine. It was a very heart-warming evening for me, to feel supported by friends who I'd not seen in years. Most of them had no idea I'd been working on a book about tango for over ten years.
If any readers of this blog are working on a writing project, I want to support you for your courage and determination. Writing is a solitary undertaking. And a book, whether it is fiction or non-fiction requires research, planning, time lines, thinking and rethinking. Then there can be months, even years of editing. And in this market, months or years can be spent shopping it to agents or publishers. I finally decided that self-publication was not a sign of failure, but an act of independence.
When I finally held a copy of Tango Lessons in my hands, the success smelled even sweeter than the first time I held Freeing the Creative Spirit, which was published by a big publishing house. I knew that without any other forces behind me, I had stayed with the project for the long haul. I had never given up. I made every hurdle push me to make the story better, the writing more direct. Because it is a story with a good deal of Spanish dialog, the spell check program quit early on, so I had to reread and reread for spelling errors that are easy to lose track of. The book designer's program then took out the italics that were editorially required for the Spanish, so I had to read with a pair of literary tweezers to reset the italics. This blog is the only place you will learn about all that, unless you come to a reading. It's important to include those details of the creative process here because that's what this blog is about.
You can see that beyond the years that I put into studying tango, Tango Lessons still had a lot to teach me. And every time I get another email, phone call, or Amazon page review I am rewarded a hundred times over. Readers tell me they can't put it down. They say they stayed awake into the small hours of the night because they had to finish it. Turns out, I wrote a page turner! Critical appreciation is important, of course, but there is also a great feeling to know that the reader is caught up in the story, that the heroine's life matters to them. Literature has the power to instill hope and inspire courage. If I have done some of that, I know the ten years were worthwhile. Hope you will read it and enjoy it.
Saturday, July 8, 2017
After The Quietude
I’ve been away from blogging for a long time. I think
of it as a sabbatical away from the blog. I was not uninspired. I was quiet,
and in that quietude, a number of deaths befell my family. I think of my family as a tribe, the
tribe that offset the state of being an only child. I had many aunts and
uncles, many cousins. And best of all, I had my grandparents. They were my
greatest treasure, and I haven’t yet learned all the things they taught me
though they’ve been gone from me for many years.
About the quietude:
I was filled with too many questions to write about things I thought I
understood. Why didn’t I ever realize that the more family you have, the more
people you are going to lose? That’s what happened in the last year and a half.
The landscape of my family has sadly changed. Here in this blog, I try to bring
creativity into alignment with life’s daily challenges. But I was simply filled
with questions. I guess the biggest question I confronted was what does
creativity contribute to loss? That is to say, can creativity actually help us
survive loss?
I once believed
that art making would help me survive anything. I believed that art was such an
important path that if one turned everything into the service of art, the pains
of life would have an ultimate purpose. Today I see that there are two paths to
that purpose: First there is the power of the process: the act of creating relieves
the emotional pressure building up physically and spiritually. In that regard
the content or quality of the content has very little meaning. If it works to
help the individual survive, then its purpose is served. But if I think about
Van Gogh painting to ease his loss, I recognize that the second path of art
mediating pain is of value to anyone who experiences one’s work and is also
touched or influenced by it. In that case, someone else’s loss is valuable to
all of us, though we certainly do not wish harm or pain to anyone.
Creativity is
valuable to us when it allows us to let go of overwhelming emotions or images
that may torture or haunt us. I am very pleased when someone connects with one
of my paintings, even more pleased if they buy it in order to continue
communing with it. In the sale of something I created to alleviate pain, the
sale allows me a deeper level of letting go by removing the manifested image
and object from my view. I may not forget the event or the loss, but a part of
the energy it provoked in me is released and eventually sent away.
Amazingly, that
which pain manifests may bring comfort to someone else. This is true for
literary arts as well as visual arts. It is perhaps even a greater part of
musical composition and performance, as well as film and theater. Maybe that is a definition of art, something
done with such skilled truthfulness as to pass along a shared dimension of the
human experience, albeit beautiful or brutal.
Thanks for
reading.
The image at the top is a small journal painting titled "Dolor de Corazon".
Tuesday, September 6, 2016
The Past is Officially Over
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| "The Universal Game", A. Díaz, (detail) |
The value
of this project was not actually clear to me, when I started. I know I was
tired of seeing the room as it was, and it was pulling down my energy. Actually, there was a structural aspect that
contributed to the situation: the room has a fireplace that has no damper. Air
swooshed in and out freely in spite of a makeshift dam of my own design. It was
always freezing in there, so I kept the door closed, keeping the space as my
personal North Pole annex. But a heater insert installed in the fireplace, changed
the whole bioregion, making it a habitable part of the house.
I had no
idea when I began that the hours of labor and the process of clearing and
purging was actually an internal
project. I had a helper for the first day, so it seemed like a house project.
But immediately a death in her family took her from the work, and unexpectedly,
I was left with an enormous job on my hands. All the books had been taken off
the shelves, over 300 of them. They were in boxes and big shopping bags all
over the floor along with boxes of files I’d taken from the filing cabinets.
The desk that so many years ago had belonged to my father, was an island with more
boxes and piles of notebooks on top of it, about four feet long and two feet
wide.
There were mornings when all I
could manage was to stare at the accumulation of it all. I wondered where I would find the energy for
it. At night, trying to get to sleep, I felt a terrible sense of anxiety
caused, it seemed, by the disorganization of my books. The whole idea of this
project seemed to have been foolhardy. How was I going to do it all by myself? It
wasn’t something I could hire out because I had to personally go through every
file to determine what to keep and what too throw away. Over thirty years of
teaching, and much of it before computers (I know that makes me seem very old,
but it was a significant factor) had accumulated lesson plans, lecture
outlines, evaluation forms, handouts, and letters and cards from students and
readers of Freeing the Creative Spirit.
It wasn’t going to be a matter of throwing out bunches of meaningless paper, it
was going to be a process of letting go, in some cases, one by one. Only as I
got into it, did I realize how deeply personal and internal the process would
be.
Keeping a
journal for most of my life has given me a sense of bringing life along with
me. I can go back into the pages of my life at any time to resurrect or remind
myself of my reality. The North Pole Annex had become a squirrel’s nest of
keepers I thought of as resources for the future. I had newspaper and magazine
cuttings on significant subjects like women’s studies and art history.
Newspaper clippings about Latinos who had achieved significant success, and women’s
firsts around the globe. Over and over I said, “I can get this stuff and more
on the Internet”, and I threw it away.
The hardest
things to part with were the cards and letters from students and readers. Even
if it was a card from someone I’d never met, it was a reminder that I had
impacted someone’s life. It was evidence, hard evidence, that I had made a
contribution to the world. Eventually I had to ask myself, why did I need this
hard evidence? Why didn’t I trust the work that I had done? Why didn’t I trust
my memories?
As the room
took on the smell of fresh paint and the boxes and files disappeared, sleep
came more easily. Pound after pound of paper went out. Some went through the
shredder, some went out in reams. The desk went to an appreciative cousin. The
space became calm and the ambient air was welcoming. Then, one day, after
releasing the things I’d put off until the end, I heard myself say, “Well, the
past is officially over.” I felt lighter. Even though I have the record of my
journals, I have let go of everything I’d been clinging to for the sake of
proving that I’ve had a significant life. I’ve had “a career”. That may seem
strange to people who were groomed or groomed themselves to have a career from
the time of their youth, but for me, it took all those files and letters to
prove that I had indeed gone beyond what was expected of me. Even though I have
done many different types of jobs to support or subsidize my work, I’ve never
settled for that nice little rut of a job envisioned by my parents.
Obviously,
I came to this realization the hard way. But I share it in case there is
someone reading my blog who has a closet or a room, or a space in the back of
your mind where you are questioning your accomplishments. Trust me, a good
clean out and a fresh coat of paint can do wonders.
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