What is Heron Dance?
Heron Dance is company for your creative journey. It explores the inner work underlying creative work. It is an art journal of quotes and reflections from the journals of artists, filmmakers, novelists, poets, searchers and seekers.
Heron Dance is the creative home of Roderick MacIver. For twenty years he created realistic and impressionistic work for the Heron Dance Art Journal. Now he strives to create abstract works that embody a sense of peace, that bring a sense of peace to a room or home. Sometimes he succeeds.
The online publication, Journal Meditations of a Working Artist, chronicles that creative evolution.
Dear Heron Dance reader:
We’ve come to a place and time where readers who receive my work, and appreciate it, and wish to continue to receive it, need to support it. You can do that here.
If you’ve only recently become a reader, and would like an opportunity to first assess its contribution to your creative work and life, you can receive a one-month free trial. You can do that here.
Going forward, this Substack will focus on Heron Dance gallery openings, Heron Dance Press books (including excerpts) and occasional posting of new art. If you’d like to read more about this decision, visit Projects and Random Thoughts.
If this is where our trails part company, thank you for your past interest in my work.
Rod
PS If you are a Member of Heron Dance, and earlier today received the post below, (Cathartic focus), you are on both the paid and free lists so please ignore this post in its entirety.
Cathartic focus — more aware, less effort.
At the end of the day, where we want to get to is a place where we are progressing, where we are evolving. Where we are becoming something. If you have a personal stake in who you are as an actor, as an artist, as a human being, in becoming something more than you are – that’s what I call a cathartic focus, trying to elevate or evolve yourself - then the stakes are for you. It is not about applause. It’s not about accolades. It’s not about trying to prove yourself to someone. It’s that you want to become someone more than you are. . .
- John Markland, The Markland Studio
. . .
Much of my life these days is about that "cathartic focus" to which John Markland refers – achieving clarity about what I need to focus on, and maintaining the internal momentum to keep that focus. I need to keep my eyes on the prize -- the prize being abstract work with the ability to transform a room, to bring — or add to — its sense of peace.
And so I paint twelve hours a day, seven days a week, pursuing that vision. The crazy thing is that when I tell myself that what I want to paint is an interesting background for a realistic/impressionistic painting, I have no problem painting what is in my imagination. But when I set out to paint an abstract painting, I may paint something that I really like, that would have been completely fine a year ago or a month ago, but that is too overworked, too heavy, too dramatic for what is in my imagination now. To try to get and keep on track, I've posted in my studio:
Peace, Serenity, Gentleness, Simplicity: Minimalism
A couple of more thoughts by John Markland on the creative process:
The tone of voice with which you speak to yourself will be the one everyone eventually hears.
More aware; less effort.
. . .
For the art and words in this post, visit here. The painting is larger there.
Yes, Minimalism is the path. Enjoy your journey Rod!