Indigenous Artist's Group

[Larry McNeil]

Hello everyone. I'm in art making and traveling mode, but wanted to say hello to everyone and hope that this site can be useful to us! Thanks for inviting me to participate.

Take care from Idaho,

Larry

[Cerisse Palalagi]

Kia ora,
I am excited that we can all use this site to see and hear where everyone is currently at in their Art practice.
Mauri ora,
Cerisse

[Elisabeth Alani]

Hey guys

looking forward to sharing ideas on this site :)

Liz

[zora feilo]

This is excellent- feels good , looks good so has to be good! :) look forward to chatting with you all...

[Natalie Robertson]

Kia ora koutou, thanks Larry for getting a discussion going. I'm on the road too, well, I'm trying to be :) The balance between being an artist and being an arts educator stretches me like chewing gum in all directions and sometimes I feel spat out and on the sole of someone's shoe, lol!! End of semester burnout. With my projects, I'm always in the process of learning something of the art of writing, budgeting and project managing with more creativity going into a Excel spreadsheet sometimes than actually making work. Hey, getting on the road blows the cobwebs out of the cameras and the car. Looking forward to having something to post when I get back to this realm. So, it's coming into mid-winter here, and it's mid-summer in your world Larry, so what's driving your work at this time of year? And, here's one for anyone, how do the seasons affect your art practice?

Mauri ora, may the life-force be with you :)

Natalie

[Larry McNeil]

Hey Natalie, finding that balance is what it’s all about I think, especially for someone who is both an artist and a scholar. I have found that I really need to be guarded with my time from academia. If you let them, they’ll suck the life right out of you, and one needs to have the ability to set boundaries with everyone while simultaneously meeting your expectations for teaching and research, especially if you’re on a tenure track that has acute annual evaluations. It is always a balancing act when you teach and are also an artist, because both require talent and passion to do well; at least in my opinion. I think that everyone has end of the semester burn out; it really is a marathon session. My answer is to finish all of my grading as early as possible and get the heck out of town so people can’t get in touch with me (especially those few whiny students who slacked off). It makes for a clean break and gets you on the fast track to new art-making.

I’ve been fortunate with my art in that my main challenge isn’t figuring out what to do, but rather wrestle the time for making it. I think that this is common with art professors, which is why it is so important to not let the academic side dominate who we are. Maybe that means instead of writing that essay, we’re making art instead. On the other hand, it is critical to have essays written by artists, because we have a unique point of view that art historians, theorists and critics sometimes miss completely. Hey man, there’s that balance thing again.

It is mid-summer here and I definitely needed some time off to just become human again prior to making new art. Spending time with my family, walking the dogs, riding my bike, reading a good book, going to see a couple of movies, and going out of town just for fun (wow, a new concept here) and teaching my son how to fish are the things that I’ve been doing. On the other hand, since my media is photography, I almost never stop shooting images. I got myself the new Canon G9 camera at the start of the summer and have shot an amazing amount of stuff. I had it converted to shoot Infrared; I’ll put the details in the indigenous photographers forum about the stuff related to photographers. Anyway, here’s to making new art!

Gunalchéesh,

Larry McNeil, Xhe-Dhé