OmJah talking + The dashing world of an art trekker

Lately when I do OmJah talking it’s been all about enjoying what’s happening in my life and amplifying that.

What I mean is that I’m forgetting the daily skirmishes and pains. Instead I’m riffing on about what is so very cool about this experience in this world.

For example: I’m on the road, missing my family and friends.

But here’s what I’m talking up.

I’m getting paid to run from art spot to art spot around the country. I don’t know if you know this, art destinations are unrelentingly fascinating. I’m either going to an art town or to an artist’s studio or to an art buyer.

Art areas are the places you want to visit. Not only for the rampant creativity on display, but also because they are situated in some of the most crazy beautiful places on earth.

Santa Fe, New Mexico. Scottsdale, Arizona. Palm Desert, California. La Jolla, California. Asheville, North Carolina. 

Or they are in cities made even more interesting because of the art connection. New Orleans. Atlanta. LA. NYC. Chicago. Miami.

Visiting artists: Is there an English word that combines curiosity and intellectual heft and creative mojo and experimentation? I know they’d have a word for it in German. They have the words we wish we’d invented.

Zeitgeist.

Schadenfreude. (If you don’t know this one, look it up. We Americans love our Schadenfreude.)

Angst.

Hausfrau.

Wanderlust.

Kitsch.

Gestalt.

Blitzkrieg.

Gesundheit!

When you visit an artist’s studio, like Alice in Wonderland — Hey! We speakers of English can concoct spot-on words too! — like Alice you fall into and under the spell of another reality. The good artists create a realm so thoroughly their own you feel its gravitational pull the moment you step into their studio.

So there’s that: Visiting thoughtful creatives in their lairs where they fabricate meaning from the wispiest of materials . . . except sculptors who work in bronze . . . there’s nothing wispy about bronze . . . to visit the spaces where art is made, it’s a thrill. I literally get tingles before arriving.

And then there are the buyers. Who tend to be lifelong learners. And wildly successful. And interesting in their own right, for they’ve done something the world values big time.

Did I mention where they live? On mountain tops. On seashores. Abutting marshes. In often wild places where humans wouldn’t have dreamt of placing a home . . . until this century made it possible to place homes in rare and dangerous places.

It’s a burden to go from  geographic beauty to creative explosion to the studios where art is made. But somebody’s got to do it.

I want more of what is amazing . . . so I ferret out what is electrifyingly good and talk it up.