Art Ink

[If your podcast app isn’t showing the featured art for this episode above visit rebekahnemethy.com/artink1 to check it out.

Castbox and Podcast Addict are both apps I recommend that do show episode specific art.]

Artist: Melissa Dinwiddie

Title of Art: Stitch River Yes

Artist’s Website: melissadinwiddie.com

Instagram: @a_creative_life

Get Melissa's book The Creative Sandbox Way (the 1st 50 pages are free, go download it now, what do you have to lose?)

Art Ink Submission Guidelines: rebekahnemethy.com/artinksubs

[Art Description:]

Melissa Dinwiddie’s mixed media painting, Stitch River Yes is one of three paintings that hang in my studio, and it’s my favorite of the three. It’s made of crackle paste, laid thickly upon a small canvas, painted with teal blue watercolor. One thick, deep, wobbly vertical line, resembling a river, was created by removing various bits of the crackle paste along the jagged edges that the medium creates as it dries. The river is painted darker, and it’s more brown than blue.

The word “yes,” created with an old fashioned typewriter, is cut out and pasted dozens of times, in a strip going down the right edge of the piece, with fewer words at the top of the line, and a thicker cluster of “yes”es towards the bottom. The words wrap around the painted edge of the canvas.

Abstract, cat-whisker-like stitching completes this work. Some of the stitches cross the river, as if holding it together. One tiny, type-written “yes” is pasted atop each stitch.

[Story:]

The wind was blowing through my hair. Birds were singing. The sun was shining, and caressing my skin with a blanket of warmth on that spring day.

I sat on the big rock in my front yard... I’d been planning an inspired day of writing since the day I first set eyes on the natural chair outside my dad’s new house.

At first I just took it all in, the warmth, the rustling songs of nature moving and waking up into spring. I looked out at the neighborhood, and the sky with passing clouds. I was feeling... happy... but I still wasn’t inspired.

I opened my pink binder full of loose leaf. I stared at the blank page.

Why wasn’t I inspired?

I wanted to write but there weren’t any words. There wasn’t anything interesting enough to say.

“Write what you know,” echoed in my head; the common advice I’d heard and read from all the experts everywhere. I didn’t know anything. I was only 13.

What I didn’t realize was that I knew enough... that the experience I was having that day was enough to put my pen down and just start writing.

It wasn’t until I started reading Melissa Dinwiddie’s work, many years later, that I started to realize where I was going wrong.

Number five of the ten guideposts in her book, The Creative Sandbox Way, is to, “Just start anywhere.”

Oh, I could’ve used that advice as a young writer... I shut my pink binder that day 20 years ago without writing a single word. I found it years later, this binder meant for my writing, and it was still totally blank, aside from some yellowing around the edges from all that waiting around.

“Just start anywhere.” I’m so grateful for these three words. In fact, just starting anywhere is how I started writing what you’re hearing right now.

I had Melissa’s painting and the urge to write about how it inspired me. But how? There’s so much! How could I begin to sort through the journey this piece has taken me on?

The river running through Stitch River Yes is like my fear: so deeply etched in my cultural programming, in my human instincts.

Fear: this safety precaution, this emergency brake that stops all except your fight or flight instincts and adrenaline.

Me: I want to start a podcast!

Fear: But what if you’re too busy to release an episode every single week? If you’re not as perfect as a NPR radio show, in quality as well as consistency, well then you’ll just suck, and no one will take you seriously.

Me: I want to tell stories.

Fear: Who cares about your stories? No one will listen. What could you possibly write that will matter?

Me: I want to write stories channeled through the experience of other artist’s work.

Fear: You are not qualified to write about art much less interpret it. You know nothing about art. You’re going to look stupid. People will find out how stupid yo...

I would venture to accuse today’s artist of being both artsy fartsy AND nerdy wordy. Because Kali Parsons has been on my list of artists to feature here since day one of brainstorming Art Ink, well before even a second of audio was recorded. She was one of the few artists I followed who always wrote a tiny story to share along with her fun and whimsical art, and so if you’re an artist who wants to see great examples of how a splash of story can be used to compliment your art...

[If your podcast app isn’t showing the featured art for this episode above visit https://rebekahnemethy.com/artink17 to check it out.

Castbox and Podcast Addict are both apps I recommend that do show episode specific art.]

Artist: Kali Parsons

Title of Art: Hope

Artist’s Website: kaliparsons.com

Instagram: @kaliparsonsart

If you connected with this story in any way Michael & Susan would love to hear from you. They can be reached via e-mail at [email protected]

Art Ink Submission Guidelines: rebekahnemethy.com/artinksubs

[Intro:]

Hey there my artsy fartsy, nerdy wordy friends. Sorrynotsorry, you know if you’re here you’re at least half of that description, if not the whole shebang! Own it already.

I would venture to accuse today’s artist of being both artsy fartsy AND nerdy wordy. Because Kali Parsons has been on my list of artists to feature here since day one of brainstorming Art Ink, well before even a second of audio was recorded. She was one of the few artists I followed who always wrote a tiny story to share along with her fun and whimsical art, and so if you’re an artist who wants to see great examples of how a splash of story can be used to compliment your art, I insist you check out her work at kaliparsons.com.

If you’re new to Art Ink, you should know that it’s Kali’s painting that’s gracing the cover of this episode. And it’s that very painting that inspired the beautiful story you’re about to hear. This is usually the part where I describe the featured artwork for listeners who are unable to look at their devices for whatever reason, but today we’re going to be doing things a bit differently. As Kali wrote to me, “Sometimes the art takes off and creates a story all on its own.” And this painting, named “Hope,” isn’t just the spark that instigated this episode, she’s also a character in the following true story.

I present to you The Synchronicity of Hope.

[Story:]

“Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.” -GK Chesterton

Most 18-year-old kids get a tattoo to rebel against their parents, but not Sean. No, Sean’s 1st tattoo was an orange and purple, single-word prayer that his mom would survive what life had dealt her, and his dad not only went with him, but got his own, matching ink, the very same day.

“Hope,” the tattoos said. And that’s what Sean and his father, Michael, did. They hoped that Susan could beat the cancer she’d just been diagnosed with. Hodgkin’s Lymphoma was the 2nd critical diagnosis Susan had taken since becoming a wife and a mother, after a 17-year struggle with primary progressive MS, which is a type of MS that doesn’t remit or relapse. It came on fast and it’s progressively gotten worse over the years. Sean had only been a few months old when that news had come; he doesn’t remember the version of his mother who wasn’t reliant on a wheelchair.

Hope had already been a familiar mantra for their family for several years, had become one after they’d attended their first MS Awareness walk together. Susan’s first neurologist was convinced a cure for MS would be developed in our lifetimes, and that was the hope that she had clung to all those years... so you can imagine the devastation when yet another layer of health challenges began to manifest.

This new diagnosis was the catalyst for Sean and Michael to literally inject a healthy dose of hope into their skin. They chose orange ink to stand for MS Awareness; and the purple ink represented Hodgkin’s.

Shortly afterwards, their mantra started to expand into a wall in their home that was dedicated to hope-filled art and design.

Meanwhile... Michael’s childhood friend, Kali, had been following his updates on Facebook. They hadn’t been in touch through more than social media since their 7th grade band broke up, yet Kali was continuously moved by the strength she witnessed in Michael and Susan’s marriage. When the post that detailed this latest blow to their family’s strug...

Today’s episode was actually inspired by an artist who deleted his Instagram account. Waht-waht. That’s what I get for taking so long to make this show happen. So that means I can’t get in touch with him to use his work on the cover. But exactly a year after I’d drafted that story, at my annual creativity retreat...

[If your podcast app isn’t showing the featured art for this episode above visit https://rebekahnemethy.com/artink14 to check it out.

Castbox and Podcast Addict are both apps I recommend that do show episode specific art.]

Special thanks to Lynelle Eck and Ana Kuprava for supporting Art Ink on Patreon!

Check out Lynelle Eck’s children’s book A Zoo for You.

Listen to my favorite episode of All Beings Considered on Spotify: The Great Sheep Rambo

Artist: the mysterious @daniel.macro on Instagram

Title of Art: Untitled ladybug on a dandelion seed

Link to Original Art: https://www.instagram.com/p/BnotD2sFsI7/

Featured on Curated Instagram Feed: @magic_marvels

Cover Artist: Rebekah Nemethy

Title of Art: Spotted Cucumber Beetle

Artist’s Website: rebekahnemethy.com

Instagram: @rebekahnemethy

Art Ink Submission Guidelines: rebekahnemethy.com/artinksubs

[Intro:]

Hello my fellow artists, art lovers, and storytellers. I am thrilled to welcome you back, and welcome myself back to a new art-inspired adventure today. After the long, drawn out construction of my new voiceover booth, I’m even more thrilled to have more time to get this podcast schedule back on track.

If you listened all the way through the last episode you know that I had a limited time offer on Patreon last month for all new subscribers, and I want to give a big shout out as well as virtual hugs to those of you who signed up to support the show! As promised, all of my upcoming characters are named after, and in tribute to, my generous supporters. Today’s story features characters named after Lynelle Johnson Eck and Ana Kuprava. You ladies rock! Thank you!

If you missed out on the special offer, don’t worry, you can still get quite a few perks for becoming a Patron. And I wanted to let you all know about a new goal I have for the show. Right now Art Ink comes out 1 or 2 times per month, but if you want more we can totally make that happen. Once I reach 500 supporters I’ll be able to dedicate the time needed to crank out a weekly show. So go ahead and show me that’s what you want by pledging your support today at rebekahnemethy.com/patreon or share the show with a friend and help Art Ink find more listeners who can help.

Ok, so today’s episode was actually inspired by an artist who deleted his Instagram account. Waht-waht. That’s what I get for taking so long to make this show happen. So that means I can’t get in touch with him to use his work on the cover. But exactly a year after I’d drafted that story, at my annual creativity retreat, I made a photo that just so happened to work perfectly for the same story and I figured that was a sign not to scrap it.

I’ll describe both photos for you and I’ll give you a link in the shownotes to see the original photo by the mysterious “@daniel.macro” where, at least at the time of this recording, it’s still featured on a curated photography feed on Instagram.

[Art Description:]

The original photo is a close up photo of a fluffy dandelion and a ladybug. The flower’s bare dotted center, which is missing seeds on its top half, fills up the frame’s top left quarter. Wrapped around the edge of that center is an elliptical band of brown seeds still clinging to the flower. The fluffy parts of the bluish white seeds are mostly out of focus throughout the rest of the photo, giving it an overall dreamy feel. But a couple of seeds are sharp, and crawling up the stalk between the fluff and the flower’s center is a red ladybug.

Immediately when I saw this photo I thought of wishes. And I wondered what a ladybug would wish for. As I did some quick research, I discovered that many of the bugs I had previously thought were ladybugs were totally different species. When I dug a bit deeper I found that some of these beetles, like the spotted cucumber beetle, weren’t even carnivorous like their ladybug cousins who are reveled by garde...

I was in a dimly lit cream and pink-tinged studio apartment with Nick and our two cats, George and Callie, when I first watched The Secret. I popped the DVD into Nick’s Xbox with certain expectations... and little did I know that what I was about to learn would completely alter the way I looked at the world forever; that it would fuel a creative fire in me that still burns brightly today...

[If your podcast app isn’t showing the featured art for this episode above visit https://rebekahnemethy.com/artink22 to check it out.

Castbox and Podcast Addict are both apps I recommend that do show episode specific art.]

Artist: Yours Truly

Title of Art: Yahnkas Dawg aka Smokey

The Secret (At the time of recording it was streaming on Netflix or available to rent on Amazon)

Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now

Eckhart Tolle’s YouTube channel

Art Ink Submission Guidelines: rebekahnemethy.com/artinksubs

[Intro:]

I was in a dimly lit cream and pink-tinged studio apartment with Nick and our two cats, George and Callie, when I first watched The Secret. I popped the DVD into Nick’s Xbox with certain expectations... and little did I know that what I was about to learn would completely alter the way I looked at the world forever; that it would fuel a creative fire in me that still burns brightly today.

If you’re unfamiliar, The Secret is a documentary; a compilation of interviews of some rich and famous types who share stories about how they, essentially, wished their lives into existence with visualization and vision boards.

At the time I was only just out of college, in a couple of tons of debt and I’d decided I wanted to pursue a career that had little to do with the degree I’d graduated with. I’d recently gotten a part-time job working as a photo assistant at a magazine that shot primarily product photography, but I knew that I wanted to transition into working for myself and in that moment I wanted to focus my work on animals.

And so I committed to a brief visualization exercise, which I stacked alongside my daily meditation practice. For a minute or two I imagined what it would be like to wake up as a ‘real’ full time pet photographer: I visualized packing my gear into the trunk of my silver Mazda3, which may or may not have already had a photo of my cousin’s pink-bowed yorkie, Abbey, smiling across the rear windshield, along with my website and phone number. I saw myself drive to a beautiful park with grassy hills and a cluster of trees. Then as I got out of my car I greeted a puppy, a rottie puppy, I’d decided as the image sharpened in my mind’s eye.

After my visualization exercise, I got up, essentially stepping back into reality, and made coffee. And then I went on with my day.

It was within a day or two, scrolling through facebook, that I came across the most adorable black & brown puppy – someone had just adopted him and I jumped at the chance to photograph him. I had zero doubt in my mind that the Universe had arranged this for me. He wasn’t 100 percent rottweiler, but his coloring and face sure made him look like the dog I’d envisioned in my little daydream. And this was a sure sign that, for the first time in my life, I’d consciously created something or at least I’d consciously drawn to me, that which already existed... but like the existential chicken-egg conundrum... who really cares what came first? The magick lies in the fact that it happened.

Now full disclosure, I never was able to support myself fully with animal portraiture alone, but I got plenty of opportunities to photograph dogs, cats, and birds and I did later on become a full time photographer shooting the most boring photos imaginable... so although it never happened exactly the way I’d visualized it happening, some semblance of professional photographer and animal photographer did manifest itself in my life. Again, I have no doubts... but there were also some other things going on that I didn’t recognize back then, and I’ve learned that that these 3 things are essential keys to the manifestation process that The Secret forgot to mention. Let’s dig in shall we?

[Art Description:]

Oh and that cute little doggie on the cover of this episode? That’s a rescue pup named Smokey and, yes, h...

Today we’re going to start with the art, because what’s interesting is that I made the photo that appears on this episode’s cover before I really knew how ubiquitous frequency is in our reality. Everything is made of energy and therefore, everything has a frequency... literally everything... but before I hop into that bunny pit...

[If your podcast app isn’t showing the featured art for this episode above visit https://rebekahnemethy.com/artink25 to check it out.

Castbox and Podcast Addict are both apps I recommend that do show episode specific art.]

Artist: Yours Truly

Title of Art: Rolling Rs with Wine

The Sacred Geometry Movie by Spirit Science (The bit that inspired this essay can be found between 01:16:05 to 01:20:20 – 4 minutes well worth it!)

The double slit experiment – If you have Hulu, the best explanation I’ve seen is in season 3, episode 9 (titled Magic without Lies) of Cosmos: Possible Worlds with Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

In case that’s not available anymore, here’s another explanation with Joe Scott on YouTube: Down the Rabbit Hole of the Double Slit Experiment

Art Ink Submission Guidelines: rebekahnemethy.com/artinksubs

[Intro:]/[Art Description:]

Today we’re going to start with the art, because what’s interesting is that I made the photo that appears on this episode’s cover before I really knew how ubiquitous frequency is in our reality. Everything is made of energy and therefore, everything has a frequency... literally everything... but before I hop into that bunny pit, I want to describe the cover photo, for those of you who are operating heavy machinery and can’t see it right now, and give you a behind the scenes look at how I made it.

On a black background, a jagged, diamond-shaped waveform made of thin, teal green lines stands out in sharp focus on the left side of the image. And in case you don’t know what a waveform is, because I didn’t before I started editing audio, it’s that squiggly line often used to represent music and voiceover brands – think of what a heart rate monitor looks like. On the right side is a similarly shaped waveform, except this one looks smudged and blurry – and around this teal blur is a circular swoosh of red, like someone painted around it with light.

I created this image in a couple of steps. First I downloaded an app that made real-time waveforms of my voice appear full screen on my phone as I was talking. Then I proceeded to make a bunch of silly sounds. Off the top of my head I ohhhmmmed, and rolled my Rs, and probably face farted into my phone too if I know myself like I totally do. I took screen shots of the most interesting looking sounds and transferred them to my laptop.

With the now larger, full screen images displayed on the computer, I turned off all the other lights in my studio except for one bare LED bulb; which is actually a Halloween prop designed to look like a flickering flame. (Nick won it during a pumpkin-carving party his friends throw every year.) On a tripod, I pointed my camera towards the laptop and filled the frame with the glowing wave on the screen, then made sure the red light wasn’t spilling onto it. Between the camera and the computer screen I used a wine glass to distort parts of the screen, while also catching the ghostly glow of red light.

As usual, this photo, and a few others from this series can be seen either on today’s cover, in the show notes, or on my website which will be linked in the show notes, but, for now, let’s back to the significance of frequency, shall we?

Riding the Wave – An Exploration of Why Suffering Exists

[Story:]

I wish I could tell you who said this, because it hit me like a train would were I daydreaming along a track. “When you stand in the light, you still cast a shadow.”

In other words, it is impossible, in the 3d world we exist in, to have all light and no dark. And that fact seemed like an epiphany before I knew all that I know now... and I’m still learning my friends... I’m still learning.

So, frequency. We see examples of how frequency is measured in modern day life all the time. We already talked about heart rate monitors and audio files, but what about radio waves, earthquake measurement tools or polygraph tests? I mean a spoken lie is scientifically proven to have a different frequency pattern than a spoken truth. That’s kind of mind blowing, don’t you think?

While I was observing what sou...