unicorn dress

The Importance of Art with SmitKit Studio & #SpreadTheKindness Link Up #145

October 22, 2019 / 77 Comments
unicorn dress

“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.” 

Pablo Picasso

You probably remember this outfit from Thursday when I shared my Halloween Costume Ideas featuring a giant furry unicorn head and a witch hat. Well, after the photos were taken, I ditched the headgear and headed off to an art show at SmitKit Studio: Center for Creativity located in the historic Paddock Arcade in Watertown, New York’s downtown square. I know this outfit is a little bit wild for making my way around town on a Sunday afternoon, but it was an art show and I was definitely showcasing my artistic side. Plus I was already dressed. So I kept it on and headed off to view some original artwork by the local creative people.

unicorn dress

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.” 

Rainbow Rowell
unicorn dress

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.” 

Friedrich Nietzsche

I have featured SmitKit Studio a few times on my blog because I really do have a passion for promoting for the creative arts. Finding ways to express ourselves creatively is so important for our mental health and helping us to live our very best lives. Whether you are super talented or just like to dabble in creative expression, you should find the time to pursue it. For me, it is writing. If I am stringing together words to create an image or convey an idea or simply to just get the thoughts out of my head, I am truly in my happy place. And of course, being creative with my clothing also brings me much joy.

“Every artist was first an amateur.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson
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“A picture is a poem without words.”

Horace
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“It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.” 

Vincent Van Gogh

Speaking of my love for writing, I will be hosting a Creative Writing Workshop at SmitKit Studio on Saturday, November 16, 2019, at 10:00 a.m. I am looking forward to sharing creative writing exercises and other ideas on how to get your words to flow and your muse to cooperate. Registration is currently open for anyone who would like to join us. But act quickly because there are only 20 seats available for the workshop. Also, check the Events Page for other upcoming workshops. SmitKit Studio has a wide variety of things to do for all creative types of any age.

unicorn dress

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” 

Albert Einstein

My first introduction to SmitKit Studio was the artwork of TW Soderquist which I featured in my blog post Artistic Interpretation back in December 2017. In January of 2018, I took a tour Inside SmitKit Studio and in February 2019 I shared a post about the grand re-opening of the studio at their current location in the Paddock Arcade (see Just a Saturday in Watertown). Since establishing her center for the creative arts, owner Lindsey Paranzino has never displayed her own artwork as she focused on bringing attention to the artists’ creations that she housed in her studio. So this most recent art show was kind of a big deal of firsts for Lindsey. She was showcasing her own personal paintings and photography for the first time for public viewing. And she was performing for the first time in her new role as the lead singer for the DrayDoc Band. If you are a fan of live music, in particular, Jazz, Funk, Reggae, and Blues, do check them out! Lindsey’s voice has a very jazz-inspired bluesy tone that blends in the most perfect way with the instrumentation of the rest of the band. I couldn’t help but smile and jam to the music.

Lindsey Paranzino, Owner of SmitKit Studio

“Everything you can imagine is real.” 

Pablo Picasso
DrayDoc Band

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.” 

George Bernard Shaw

I took my 8 year old son, Archie, to the art show with me and I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by his interest in some of the paintings. As you know, original paintings can be pricey, so I had a little conversation with him about the importance of art and how cool it would be to one day own lots of original artwork. He told me that starting this Christmas, he would like me to begin buying him art to hang in his bedroom. And I am more than happy to oblige…I would much rather he acquire a personal collection of original and unique paintings that he can take with him when he leaves home rather than stock up on junkie toys that he will forget about or break within 2 months of receiving them. So this Christmas, one of these paintings will become Archie’s. We haven’t decided which one yet but he really likes the ones dabble in the gruesome.

The artists featured here are as follows: Lindsey Paranzino, TW Soderquist, Stow Dunham, Dean Robert Holmes, Khrys McGee, Christine Sharlow, Sally Taylor, Alister Whitcomb, and ceramics by Cathy Ellsworth. I wasn’t able to capture the artist information in every photo, but all of the pieces I am showing here are for sale. You can just contact SmitKit Studio directly or let me know and I will make the connection for you. I have numbered them for ease of identification.

Artists, Alicia (Alister) Whitcomb and TW Soderquist

“Creativity takes courage.”

Henri Matisse
Artists, Alicia (Alister) Whitcomb and TW Soderquist

“Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.” 

Stella Adler

The Artwork

“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.”

Leonardo da Vinci

“I dream my painting and I paint my dream.” 

Vincent Van Gogh

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”

Pablo Picasso

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” 

Kurt Vonnegut

“Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.” 

Clive Barker

“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.” 

Emile Zola

“Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.” 

Chuck Klosterman

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”

Pablo Picasso

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”

Edgar Degas

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”

Thomas Merton
SOLD

“We have art in order not to die of the truth.” 

Friedrich Nietzsche

“Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” 

Oscar Wilde

“When I was a child my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll be the pope.’ Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.” 

Pablo Picasso

“The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.”

Leonardo da Vinci

“Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do.”

Edgar Degas

“A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.” 

Diane Arbus

“The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.” 

Pablo Picasso

“Well, art is art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh… now you tell me what you know.” 

Groucho Marx

“Style is the answer to everything.
A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing
To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it
To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art”

Charles Bukowski

“Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.”

Leo Burnett

“Art without emotion its like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag.” 

Laurie Halse Anderson

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. … No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.” 

Martha Graham

“Art is the proper task of life. ” 

Friedrich Nietzsche

“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.” 

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last, you create what you will.”

George Bernard Shaw

“The first step – especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money – the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.” 

Chuck Palahniuk

“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” 

Aristotle

“He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.” 

Saint Francis of Assisi

“I don’t paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.” 

Frida Kahlo

“Creativity comes from a conflict of ideas.”

Donatella Versace

“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”

Bansky

“Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.” 

Alice Walker

“You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.” 

George Bernard Shaw

“Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.” 

Flannery O’Connor

“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.”

Ray Bradbury

“A writer – and, I believe, generally all persons – must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.” 

Jorge Luis Borges

“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”

James Baldwin

“Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change – it can not only move us, it makes us move.”

Ossie Davis

“Art is what you can get away with.”

Andy Warhol

“Creativity is a drug I cannot live without.”

Cecil B. DeMille

“Life is a blank canvas, and you need to throw all the paint on it you can.” 

Danny Kaye

“The beautiful is always bizarre.” 

Chalres Baudelaire

“No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.” 

Ansel Adams

“Creativity is contagious, pass it on.”

Albert Einstein

Do you own any original art? Is it a good idea to start a collection for my son now so he has accumulated a variety of pieces by the time he is ready to leave home? What are your favorites?

And now onto the featured posts from last week’s link party.

Reader Favorite (Most Clicked Post)

Kathrine of Kathrine Eldridge Wardrobe Stylist showed us how to style leather for a work environment in her post Leather Layering at Work. She also effortlessly has taken a summer top straight into fall with her perfect layering tricks.

Kathrine of Kathrine Eldridge Wardrobe Stylist

My Favorite Outfit Post

Lorena of My Every Day Wear absolutely caught my attention in this vibrant striped dress by Adriana Marimekko in her post Maxi and Cardi. I love the vintage vibe she created with the brown and rust additions in her accessories and cardigan.

Lorena of My Every Day Wear

My Favorite Non-Fashion Post

Yvonne of Yvonne Chase aka The Single Woman’s Cheerleader left me in deep thought with tears in my eyes after reading her post, Who Knew a Hug Could Cause Such Anger! I was not familiar with the story that prompted this post and getting familiar with just that alone sent me into some intense internal debate about the world we live in. I don’t want to say much more because I want you to go read it. It is some seriously powerful stuff.

Yvonne Chase aka The Single Woman’s Cheerleader

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Thanks you to everyone who stops by to see what I am sharing from my little corner of the world. I am immensely grateful for each and every one of you.

Keeping it on the edge,

Shelbee

Linking up with these Fabulous Link Parties.

I am a midlife woman, wife, and stay-at-home mother of 2 boys and 2 cats. I have a passion for helping other women feel fabulous in the midst of this crazy, beautiful life.

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