Inspired by my research into what helps artists develop their career and profile in the market I decided I needed to enter a competition. What competition I did not know.

But I needn’t have worried because less than a week later while at a local gallery I picked up a brochure. Inside it detailed a portrait competition to be held less than two months later. I’d never painted a portrait before. For a moment I wondered who my subject matter would be. Then I remembered how, after seeing the artists in Thailand paint people’s portraits from photos, my mother wished she had a portrait of her mother, Molly. At the time she didn’t have a photo and so it was soon forgotten.

But now I had the perfect motivation to paint Molly’s portrait. I wanted it not only to be good enough for my mother but also hoped it would be good enough for the competition.

I found the perfect photo and laboured for hours. I studied from books and looked up skin tone formulas on the Internet. But more than anything I was inspired by my grandmother, Molly who I have always adored. She was such a gracious, beautiful woman. She, like me, taught herself to paint. She played the piano and always had a song in her heart, even though her life was marked with much hardship.

At the age of three she and her four year old brother were taken away from their parents by child welfare. Molly never saw her parents again. She was separated from her brother and taken into foster care and spent her life going from home to home to home until she married.

Her brother, unlike Molly, was adopted. Molly always wondered what was wrong with her: why didn't anybody want to adopt her? Years later her brothered committed suicide. For years no one ever discussed it.

Molly was very beautiful (as you will see from this portrait) and she told me how she was forced to eat her food away from the various families for whom she cleaned and the wives’ were often jealous and were cruel to her – sometimes beating her. Yet she never became bitter.

So I was really, really thrilled when yesterday I received confirmation that my portrait has been selected for hanging and final judging in the Adam Portraiture Award and Exhibition.

Without the motivation of finishing the painting in time and to a high standard I doubt I would have got off the ground. A big thank you to all my friends who with their well intentioned critiques/criticism helped me finish. Many artists hate criticism - the trouble is, I feel, is they take it too personally. I find that comments from others relly help me attend to things that I may not have otherwise.

“It looks too flat,” some people said before I started varying the skin tones with blues (to recede) or yellow/red (to advance) and shading. “She looks like a geisha” “what’s wrong with her eye?” others said. I must admit I was beginning to wonder if I would ever get it right. Still I perservered. The competition entry date was fast looming.

Finally, “what a beautiful lady” the ten year old daughter of a friend said. That one sentence was enough for me. In less than 4 words she confirmed that I captured a large part of what Molly meant to me.

If you get a chance pop down and see Molly and the other finalist’s portraits at Shed 11, Queens Wharf, Jervois Quay, Wellington Waterfront in mid-late Feb. Visit www.portraitgallery.nzl.org to find out more.

Labels: Exhibitions and competitions

“Creating your dream job/life”

Check out the video link and watch me on The Good Morning show discussing the power of creative visualization with Brendon Pongia and to see several examples of the things I'm discussing below:) http://www.cassandragaisford.com/media.html


"If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society"
JEAN PIAGET, Educational Psychologist

Issues:
• Many clients say they could do anything if they only knew what it was
• Many people feel trapped by lack of experience or lengthy years working in a specialist field
• Some people struggle with visualising their preferred future
• Others know what they want but lose sight their goals
• People struggle with maintaining motivation and following through on goals
• Fear and visualising failure consistently limits people’s potential


Keeping up with change, finding the job of your dreams and standing out from the crowd begins with an idea, a dream, a hunch about what you would love to do and why. However this is not the way that many of us have been conditioned to think about careers.
Historically people chose jobs or were matched to roles based solely on the skills they possessed and the skills required by a role and career practitioners favoured inventory’s checklists and personality profiles as part of this matching process. They often ignored the role of emotion, intuition and hearts desire. But being good at something doesn’t necessarily led to job satisfaction or success. There are too many variables that purely scientific, non creative approaches ignore.

“Passion is in all great searches and is necessary to all creative endeavors”
Eugene W. Smith


Solution – Create your preferred future:
Discovering and achieving what you want means allowing yourself to dream and explore. It means engaging the right side of your brain, and listening to your intuition and the stirrings of your heart. It means tapping into your subconscious where unexpressed desires dwell. It means allowing yourself to dream and imagine a reality that doesn’t yet exist. It means being creative.

Many people get caught up in the classical definitions of an artist when they think about creativity, but you don’t have to be an artist, painter or sculptor to be creative. Imagining what doesn’t yet exist and then bringing it into being lies at the heart of creativity.

Success Tip! Visualise your preferred future

Visualisation is a powerful technique used by many successful business and sports people. See your way to success. Try to visualise your preferred future by closing your eyes and imagining a time in the future 1, 5, or 10 years from now. What are you doing? Who is there? How are you feeling? Walk toward the future and look back to today. What steps did you take to get there?

If you spend time imagining the future you want you have without even knowing it begun to make it happen.
Benefits of creative visualisation:
• Opens up the sense of possibility
• Reawakens dormant dreams and passions
• Inspires self and others
• Can be used by everyone in the family etc
• Taps into creativity – using existing images to create preferred futures
• Leverages off the law of attraction – where you focus on you will attract!


Use pictures not words.
According to mind-mapping and creativity expert, Tony Buzan, we think in images not words. Surrounding yourself with images that symbolise or reflect the things you want to create allows these images to inspire and excite you. Adding a dose of colour and engaging all your senses makes this technique even more powerful. Colour experts recommend surrounding yourself with warm, expansive colours such as orange to stimulate creativity, ingenuity and desire.

Strategy: Create your own story
Imagine you are a character in a novel and mapping out what will happen to your character is the story unfolds. Plan for a happy ending!
Creating your own story begins with creating a story or image board and gathering images that help capture the essence of what you are wishing to create in you life. These may relate to career, lifestyle, weight/wellness, financial, relationship, spiritual goals or something else you want to achieve. Strengthen the impact of this powerful visual strategy by combining the motivational power of words, symbols, and motivating colour.
Take control of your preferred future by adding new inspiration and looking at your dream board daily.
Many best-selling authors begin plotting their books in this very visual way – sometimes they can map out a whole book on one board!

A similar strategy is to create a dream journal – check out the video link and watch me on The Good Morning show discussing the power of creative visualization with Brendon Pongia and to see several examples


Remember - IT ALL BEGINS WITH AN IDEA!


Tips to create your life/career story board

If you are starting to design your life/career from scratch, then it makes sense to consolidate all your random ideas into some sort of order. The best way of doing this is to put them onto paper. Take a leaf out interior designers books and create your own story board.

Designers use story boards to show clients what they are thinking. They include samples and photographs of the sorts of fabrics, colours and furniture that will make up scheme and use sketches and magazine cut outs that sum up the atmosphere of the proposed room.

These boards take their name from the notion that good design does indeed tell some sort of story. Their advantages are three-fold:
• They give a three dimensional format to a set of ideas and themes
• They allow you to see how different elements will work together
• They show where the inspiration has come from

Storyboards often begin with one glorious image, from which the rest of the design inspiration comes from. It could be an art exhibition catalogue, A glossy fashion photograph, a postcard from an exotic location – absolutely anything that sparks off a new set of ideas. Sometimes the starting point comes from me, but often it comes from the client, who might have collected ideas from magazines. One thing leads to another and soon the board will be covered with all sorts of images to support the first one

To create a career story board you might want to include the following sources of inspiration:
• Images of your ideal work environment, colours, furniture, settings, people, animals (I know of a Wellington legal firm who has a pet dog, some people have pet fish, why not a cat?
• Cuttings of role models, inspirational people (John, dreamed of being a professional speaker. His story board had pictures of Zig Ziglar and Tony Robbins)
• Your preferred daily, weekly, monthly, year planner – scheduling in all your preferred activities, peak times and rest times
• You may wish to start with a central theme to kick start your inspiration: Claire didn’t know what she wanted to do yet, but she did know that she wanted to feel happy. Her career story board contained all the images that made her feel happy such as sunflowers, her family, worklife balance etc. Common themes are passion, love, life purpose, success.

Collecting these images will help to keep you visions alive, clarify your preferred direction and remind you to take action to achieve your goals. Best of all it's fun!.

Watch me on TV chat re these ideas and others

Labels: Life coaching