Digging Even Deeper…Inner Art Expression

Please read the past articles relating to this blog HERE (Going Deeper…Inner Art Expression) and HERE (Got It!  Inner Art Expression Expressed).

The Cosmos on a Canvas

A couple of weeks ago my hand, brush, paints and right brain hemisphere took my canvas on a journey into a very colourful cosmos.  Here is the outer manifestation of this inward expression:

‘The Bridge’ — Acrylic on Canvas — 18″ x 24″ 

I hope you like it.

If you are an artist, what are your biggest stumbling blocks?  What do you still wish you could do or want to achieve?

If you are an art lover, then what do you like to see in a piece of art?  What get’s you going?

I would love to hear from you…

My Top Art Picks for 2012

I’ve had rather a busy beginning to 2012.  What with my book finally being released whilst  keeping up on the art front to hold the fort in place.

For today’s art blog I thought I’d show you my favourite 6 painting picks from January’s busy and tousled easel.

I hope you enjoy them.

Red Poppies in the Forest

Zebra Love

Blue Poppies in the Meadow

Vase of Poppies

Rhapsody in Blue

Blue Poppies — Finding Beauty in Chaos Series

All the paintings above are sold but they are available as greeting cards and prints (just click on the image to take you to RedBubble).

Have a happy and productive Wednesday!

FREE BOOK GIVEAWAY

Get your FREE copy of ‘Creative Expression’ HERE

Or, alternatively, it can be purchased as a paperback at lulu.com.

“Bite size teachings on how to express your creative flare and how to ignite your passion for life.

Learn how creativity is food for the soul and that the world is just waiting to be shaped and moulded by you – the co-creator of your reality.”

My art portfolio book is available HERE to purchase or just to browse through (click ‘preview’ under book icon at lulu.com)…

What is Abundance and How Do I Get It?

Now Don’t Just Think of Money!

When we think of the word abundance most of us jump straight to material wealth.  However, abundance, like the word ‘wealth’, does not only mean physical treasures.

Wealth can be measured by your physical wealth or health.  Without your health you could be the richest person in the world and it would mean nothing.

“…the umbrella of wealth covers so much more than money.”

Wealth can also refer to your mental frame of mind, as in the case with health, if you are mentally ill all the gold in the world won’t help you.

Having meaningful relationships, whether romantic or otherwise is of great importance.  In other words, you have a lot of money but no-one to share it with – not much fun either!

“…you could be the poorest or the richest person in the world and still suffer a huge amount of pain if you feel that everything is worthless and your life has no meaning. “

Then there is of course the financial wealth which we all think will solve our problems but as you can see from the list above, this is not always the case.  Of course, it is wonderful to have no money worries and to be able to buy anything you desire or go any place in the world or just to have enough to pay the bills – I am not denying that.  But the umbrella of wealth covers so much more than money.

The most important of all is the wealth of spirit.  Without this you will be searching your whole life for meaning to it all and you could be the poorest or the richest person in the world and still suffer a huge amount of pain if you feel that everything is worthless and your life has no meaning.

The Distortion of Wealth 

Unfortunately, through most media outlets we are being pumped with the need for greed.  This is another clever ploy by the ‘elite’ to keep us in a cycle of want and ‘tunnel vision’.

“We are being manipulated on a massive scale to keep us from seeing certain truths about our reality.”

Be very careful of the need for riches and try to assess why you want all that money anyway.  Always try to see the root of the desire and be mindful and appreciative of the trees in the forest instead of not seeing the forest for the trees.

We are being manipulated on a massive scale to keep us from seeing certain truths about our reality.  This is being done to keep our minds preoccupied with meaningless pursuit.  This is what I mean by being ‘mindful’ of your desires.  Are they really yours?  Or are you having the wool pulled over your eyes?  So be clear about what you want and why you want it.

How Can I Feel Abundant When I Have Nothing? 

A good starting place, to manifest your dreams, is to start with being grateful for what you do have.   That which you consider being of wealth to you.  This could be having a close family or a special talent or even the fact that you have a roof over your head and food in the fridge.

To be continued…CLICK HERE for part 2

Thursdays Blog will look at the importance of gratitude in receiving true abundance.  To follow my blog, please click the ‘follow’ button in the right-hand sidebar.

The above article has been an extract from my latest book ‘Divine You — Redefining Love in the New Earth’ which is available now through all good bookstores.

Here is another article, about abundance, that I found helpful from the Deepak Chopra Center Blog —

Are You Ready for Abundance? A Letter from David Simon, M.D. – The Chopra Center Blog.

Photo credit:  “Green Dollar” by Scott Chan

Other articles you may enjoy:

How to find happiness without buying it

How Many Carrots does it take to Screw in a Light Bulb?

I’m not too sure what the answer to the joke is…perhaps none as they were all rooted to the spot?

The Vege-Tate Gallery — Beginnings…

My idea for a Vege-Tate Gallery grew into full blossom when my husband and I decided to try and plant a vegetable garden around the back of our house.

This was no easy task as we have vegetable guzzling baboons to contend with on a regular basis — so strong fencing and locks were needed for this venture to succeed.

I am happy to report that my actual vegetable patch is doing very well and is starting to bear the fruit of our hard-earned labour.  Well, except for the poor runner beans that never made it to the finishing line due to a critter biting them off at the base of the stem, which consequentially led me to create the ‘Has Bean‘ design.  You have to work with this!

Whilst planting the seeds of the garden, my mind started pondering all these crazy ideas for a vegetable joke shop with lots of corny but fruity ‘green’ humour.

The designs started to take shape as I sketched out the ideas as they came to me, with a little help from the hubby.

The Next Step

When I had a good 20 designs to work with, I began the digital journey of drawing them onto the computer (yes, using my mouse!  I am still using that old archaic rodent until I get my digital pen) and loading them as t-shirt designs.

I am officially launching my new gallery entitled ‘The Vege-Tate Gallery’ — I do hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed creating them.

The link to the store is here.

Below are my personal favourites.  Next week I will showcase the rest of the store along with some other fun merchandise from this range.

Literally for the man who has everything!

This one is for the ladies — especially the ones that can make a grown man cry!

For The Beatles fan

For the humble…

For the melon appreciation club

For the overworked!

For the political activist

Keeping abreast of things

Please let me know what your favourite design is!

My Best Selling Art as Prints and Posters

What the Public Want

I’ve strung together some of my best selling art prints (taken from online sales) over the years.

I thought it was quite interesting to see what was popular in my collection and perhaps, you the viewer, will get a kick out of seeing what people are buying to beautify their spaces.

Heck, maybe one of them will even tickle your fancy!

To visit the print store — where you can buy not only framed and mounted prints of all the art below but an array of other products from canvas prints to skirts (select ‘Available Products’) — just click on the pictures below.

Let’s Get Started…

Number 1 is ‘Raw’ (painted to the music of Jeff Buckley) and is part of my Rock Art Series (read more about that HERE). At the moment, this painting is hanging above our bed and I’m in love with it.

No. 1 ~ Raw (Rock Art Series – Jeff Buckley)

Jeff Buckley --- Raw 24 x 36 LR


Number 2 was also somewhat of a surprise as it has turned out to be not only a best-selling print but also the most viewed item on my RedBubble portfolio, clocking up a whopping 15 254 views as of December 2015.

No. 2 ~ Tree Silhouette

The next one was inspired by the Lord of the Rings trilogy and is called ‘My Precious’.

No. 3 ~ My Precious

Frodo by Cherie Roe Dirksen

My Tree of Life Series watercolour called, ‘Dusk’, is in at no. 4.  It’s currently clocked up more than 14 000 views.

No.4 ~ The Tree of Life Series – ‘Dusk’

Tree of LIfe by Cherie Roe Dirksen

In at no. 5 is ‘Zebra’ — a macro painting of a zebra’s face.  I just happened to sell a poster of this one today!

No.5 ~ Zebra

And here is Three Pink Poppies.  I must admit that this is one of my favourites as well.  Just because I loooooove poppies so much! 🙂

No. 6 ~ Three Pink Poppies

Pink Poppies

Number 7 on the list is my reproduction of Starry Night.  Vincent Van Gogh is my all-time favourite artist and I wanted to re-create this work.  This does come as a surprise for me as one would think that if you were going to buy a print of this, you would buy the original as a print.

However, I am flattered but have to give all recognition to the original artist for the beautiful rendition of the night sky.  The original was never sold as my husband did not want to part with it, so I gave it to him and it is in our bedroom.

No.7 ~ Reproduction of Starry Night

This painting was the first I did in my Rock Art Series and it was painted to one of my favourite bands, Radiohead. This is now hanging in my hubby’s new music studio.

No. 8 ~ Escapism (Rock Art Series — Radiohead)

Escapism - Rock Art Painted to Radiohead by Cherie Roe Dirksen

And, again, another one from my Rock Art Series makes it into the top selling prints — ‘Metamorphic Dilatation’ (The Beatles). This one is quite funky, vibrant and colourful and also hangs in the music studio.

No. 9 ~ Metamorphic Dilatation (Rock Art Series — The Beatles)

Beatles Rock Art by ©Cherie Roe Dirksen

The next one has a similar theme to the previous painting but was a mural I did on the wall of my husbands music studio in our previous house. Alas, we had to leave it behind but at least I have the photo!

No. 10 ~ Musical Mural

musical mural hi res

I would love to know which of these stands out the most for you?

Thanks for looking!

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Christmas Gift Ideas…Part 3

A Recap

In the past 2 weeks I have discussed great sites such as RedBubble and Zazzle for creating your own gift designs, whether it is from photographs or your own personal artwork.  See Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Need inspiration?

Today we are going to go behind the scenes and discuss getting inspired.  It’s not an easy thing to obtain if you are stuck for motivation or ideas.  This is where perusing other artist, designers and photographers websites or works on sites such as RedBubble is such a great way of seeing what other creative beings are up to.  Not that you want to copy their ideas but it does, more often than not, lead you to do something that is triggered by someones idea but made completely different by your creative style.

A lot of these gift ideas use captions along with images that can really have that added ‘wow’ factor touch.  So, to get you going on some inspirational visuals, I have been introduced to a site called Pinterest and I want to share this wonderful site with you.

Pinteresting…

For those of you who are not acquainted with the site, it is a really great visual social network.  Displaying not only art, design and photography but also captions, short quotations, illustration, fashion, home decor designs, food and a whole lot of other fantastic things to stir up your creative juices.

“Set aside some good quality time for this as I guarantee the candy feast your eyes will be lapping up is going to make time fly…”

It is a fairly easy site to navigate and it allows you to ‘pin’ any image you like, adding it to your pin board on the site where others can have a look too and repin if they desire.  You also get to check out what other people have pinned on their boards, whether it be their personal creations or other images they have nabbed off the web.

Again, these pictures do fall under copyright laws — so obey!  But have fun getting inspired and motivated to start your own creations.

Set aside some good quality time for this as I guarantee the candy feast your eyes will be lapping up is going to make time fly out the window…next thing you look at the clock and hours have passed as you have perused the many visual delights!  Enjoy and, most of all, have fun.

Future projecting

Can you imagine how impressed your family and friends will be when you present them with a gift of your very own design?!

It is a great way to express yourself, feel a sense of achievement and to get that Christmas list looking good.

If you still feel like making your own gifts is just not for you, here are some more gift ideas from my store: