St. Dimitri's Ethnic Dinner is Sunday

Taste the zip of a Feta crumble tucked into a fresh tomato. Smell the golden spanikotpita, stuffed with spinach. Take a bite of baklava from the recipe of YiaYia Maria Marros and savor the flaky layers of honey and nuts.

On Sunday September 20th at 5:00 pm the members of the Saint Dimitri of Rostov Orthodox Church will host a dinner for the community where they will serve a sampling of ethnic and Mediterranean dishes.

After every liturgy, the families at Saint Dimitri’s they have a meal together. Because of their mix of ethnic backgrounds, they usually serve traditional foods from Greece, Russia, Bulgaria, Sweden and Romania.

“We fast before we come to church, and so we’re always really hungry,” said Elizabeth Bezzerides, “and we like to visit with each other.”

The United Church of Los Alamos has volunteered to let them use their dining space in Graves Hall at 2525 Canyon Road.

Bezzerides converted to the Orthodox religion after marrying her Greek husband and learned to cook Greek food by watching her mother-in-law (and later getting a great cookbook). She will be cooking Greek macaroni meat and pasta classic dish. “Food is basic to people’s relationships,” she said.

Even the kids help. A seven year old boy will help his mom make Spanokopira, phyllo stuffed with spinach and feta cheese.

For dessert there will be baklava, Russian tea cookies, and galactoboureko, a Greek custard pie, coffee and Russian Tea .

Seating will be limited. Make your reservations today by calling 661-7466.

Suggested donations are $15.00 for adults, and $5.00 per child of 10 years or under.

Dream method helps you overcome writers block and gain deeper insights

Eugene Kovalenko, Ph.D., from Los Alamos, NM, has created a simple method of using images from your dreams to infuse your writing with deeper meaning. It’s called the CREEI Method.

Remembering what you dreamed about can be a challenge for some people. “If you have to get up to turn on the light and start getting ready for the day, usually the dream will fade -- unless it was a nightmare!” said Kovalenko, who recommends keeping a notebook by your bed, or in the bathroom, so that you can write down your dreams with the least amount of effort. “If you make a minimum effort to wake up to record a dream, even a few key words can be like a little thread. You pull that thread and it becomes a string; the string becomes a cord; then a line, and before you know it you've landed a dream fish!”

“Dreams are your language, your personal metaphor. Every dream has something original in it, something new,” said Kovalenko. For writers, simply writing your dreams down can help you overcome writer’s block. The raw dream images can help you find your writing voice. Discussing dreams is a way to put aside ways of thinking that can hamper creative growth.

But CREEI can do more than help you collect images. It can actually change your life by helping you work through problems that lead to writer’s block.

Using CREEI people can record their dreams by answering 12 yes or no questions and plotting the answers on a spreadsheet. The questions are:
The questions are:
1. Is the scene Clear? (Can you describe it?)
2. Is your Role proactive Rather than absent, passive or reactive?
3. Is your Emotion (passion) high?
4. Are you Expressing your emotion?
5. Are you Interacting with others? (Rather than withdrawing or being alone.)
6. Is the scene complete or resolved?
7. Is it pleasant? Does it include satisfaction, joy, beauty, aesthetics and/or abundance?
8. Are you secure? (Do you feel safe?)
9. Do you have a sense of healthy self-worth?
10. Are you being your authentic present self? (Rather than pretending.)
11. Are you becoming all that you can be? Are you on the path towards self-actualizing?
12. Are you beloving of all beings? (Do they experience their own beauty in your presence?)
Answering them quickly makes it possible to avoid judging, analyzing and interpreting the dream prematurely. The questions lead to “AHA! moments” that foster creative and spiritual growth and also help you identify problems and issues.

Each dream is categorized based on how many yesses and no’s you have. Dreams can be “transformative,” “motivational,” “anticipatory,” or “traumatic”.

When a dream is puzzling, disturbing, or thought provoking, CREEI offers a technique to help you gain further insight.

In the three stanza poem, the first stanza is a word sketch that captures the dream as you remembered it. In the second stanza you can mess with the dream: ask questions, make changes, or reject certain parts. In the third stanza you rewrite the dream, bringing in heroes or outside support, so that it scores transformative. Kovalenko said, “The very act of writing these words actually makes changes in you, and they are permanent.”

Dreams are close to the boundary between the physical world and the spiritual world. Looking at that boundary will help you answer questions like Who am I? Where am I going? Why am I here? and will give you a new style of writing that is more creative, direct and honest.

Kovalenko offers a free online video course at www.creei.org.

Michele Tisdale

Fall is Michele Tisdale’s favorite time of year because it’s a great time of change. During this time of year she feels tremendous pressure to finish. She said, “There are so many things to paint and they’re going to be gone.”

Her studio is surrounded by her gardens, and she loves to bring flowers and plants inside to paint. She’s inspired by life and movement. She is working on a painting of a morning glory, climbing up a wall. She can only paint it during the short time of the day when the flower blooms. But it’s worth it to go back to the flower, instead of using the photograph that the layout of her drawing, because the photo doesn’t capture the light or the color the way she sees it.

Besides, she enjoys returning to the same places many times. It helps her capture the mood of a place. When she painted the gardens at Los Luceros, all the master gardeners were there and they were all talking. “There was this buzz in the air. It was wonderful.” She loves to paint areas where there is a farm, with pastures, like the place she grew up in Michigan and she love’s painting her friend’s home, which has tremendous warmth and beautiful spaces. Her painting at Chimayo includes a pilgrim, which was the most important thing to her, because she has done the pilgrimage to Chimayo a few times. “You keep seeing more and more. You can never get it all.”

About six years ago Michele had a head injury that turned her world upside down. She said, “I had perceptual problems, pain, difficulty reading and I was drawing everything backwards. My speech therapist said this might be an opportunity to change my life. To take a new direction. After years of dedication to watercolor I switched to oils.”

“The injury actually affected the way I see the world. Shapes are more apparent, colors are brighter and somehow different. Changing to oils was like taking a deep breath and feeling at home. I loved the texture of the paint, the vividness of the colors and the brush stokes. I felt I could render texture in my paintings and that finally I was achieving what I envisioned in color.”

“There are so many times when people are hurrying and there’s so much beauty around and they miss it. I want my paintings to help people pause. “

Like many people, Michele struggled to find time to be creative. But when she was thirty-nine she resolved to make it her top priority. “One day I just decided I could not wait another moment to devote more time to my art work,” she said. “I've never really slowed down since then. Painting is the driving force in my life. My brushes have mileage on them. There's a restlessness, a peacefulness and joy in the work. I'm always finding new things to learn and I know it is a never ending process I hope to continue as long as I live.”

Where do ideas come from anyway?

People always ask Carol Mullen where her ideas come from. "I can't tell them," she said. "I don't know."

But if you spend a little time with her she will give you a wonderfully useful demonstration of how creativity works.

Her dining room table was covered in fetishes (objects believed to have magic powers, a charm) shaped like little magical people destined for the One World Gallery in Taos, The Weyrich Gallery in Albuquerque, Conley and Friends in Madrid and she will show her work at Cathedral Park in Santa Fe during the last week of September. They look so primitive and different, it's no wonder people ask where they come from.

To show me, she led me up a wooden staircase to her studio loft. She didn't clean up for me, because she wanted me to see how she worked. It was a small room covered in piles, stacks and heaps of stuff. It was a trash heap. It was like stepping into the subconscious mind. It was the chaos that God used to create the world. It was a primordial soup.

The first thing that she could say about ideas is that they're everywhere. "When they come I write them down. I collect them."

Scanning the surface of her studio, she begins to point out the types of things that she collects. Homemade paper, dried leaves, beads from a thrift shop necklace, rusty bottle caps from Molly's Bar were people can take their beers outside to drink, pieces of plumbing, a piece of a watch that looks like a little llama, button collections from estate sales, snapshots and letters, gum boxes and car parts. People find things for her to use. Her husband Jeff goes with her to the car salvage lot where they walk around and pick up stuff. "I call it ephemera on the ground."

When people see her looking for stuff, they sometimes ask Jeff, "Is your wife OK?" She doesn't care. Looking for things is as much fun as putting it together.

In her studio she starts with the paper. "I sit here with the stuff," she said, "and don't think about anything, really. I start adding things and see what happens."

The process is spontaneous, and playful. She trusts her instincts, letting herself put things together in ways that appeal to her. She has stashes of old letters and stashes of old postcards and has plans to put the photo of the crazy looking guy with the misspelled letter about how Dorothy promises to send money to her brother so he can go on killing rats. She wants to pair the photo of the girl in a sexy outrageous outfit with the postcard from the sunday school teacher, inviting her to come back soon. Her collages tell a story.

Before she did collages she knit. She shows me a whole stack of photos of her wearable art, including a vest that Julia Roberts bought. She is so immersed in and comfortable with the creative process that I had to ask: Has she ever been blocked?

She said, "No. Well, once."

When her mother died it took her several months to start working again. She worked through it by making a grief collage that had images of mothers form other cultures, crocheted things, buttons and recipes. She took her time with it, and when she was finished she was able to work again.

Sally Hayden Von Conta's Pastel Awakening

When Sally Hayden Von Conta moved from New York to Santa Fe, she took an audio tape of the rivers; the Chama, the Pecos and the Rio Grande, and did a successful series of abstract paintings based on the sounds of the rivers. But then she went back to New York for a visit, just before the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

She couldn't go back to the studio and do what she had been doing. It was too isolating. She wanted to find a way to get back in touch with the land. So she joined a Plein Air Pastel class with Kathleen Schalock.

Sally wasn't a pastel artist - she was a watercolorist, and at the time she really just wanted to join the class to have some company while she worked. She loves how five or six people can be looking at the same sight, and none of the paintings come out the same. She said, "It's the inner vision that comes out."

After a few sessions where she sat in on the class, painting with her water colors, Kathleen told her, "I don't care if you don't pay me, I don't care if you don't want to be taught. But this is a pastel class, and if you want to stay you have to try pastels."

"It was like eating candy," said Sally, "I was so at home with pastels." The vibrant colors and the texture helped her to finally get the impact that she was looking for in her art.

Once she fell in love with pastels, there was no going back. She and a friend, Janet Shaw Amtmann, travelled to Italy and stayed for three weeks on a working farm in Umbria and painted. She came back with nine finished pieces. She has since gone to Montana and all over New Mexico.

Her work will be displayed at Harry's Roadhouse on Old Las Vegas HWY during the month of November, and her piece received the "Best of Show" award at the Twenty First Annual Fine Arts Show at the Old San Ysidro Church, October 2-10.

Mastering Fundamentals Helped Molly Hyde Find Artistic Freedom

When I visited Molly Hyde in her studio she had just finished a twenty minute exercise to get ready for a painting session she was planning with a friend the next day. She didn't know where she was going, or what the conditions would be like, so she made a chart of the colors that she might encounter. She said, "If you're painting in New Mexico, you have to pain cliff walls, rocks and skies. The skies are so beautiful."

She especially loves the sky over El Dorado, where she lives. Streams of air come over mountains on all sides. The air eddies, and creates storms.

Her goal is to master the fundamental technique, and to have it so ingrained that it comes automatically. That way, when she's on location, she can just paint and not have to struggle.

She learned the importance of classical artistic technique when she lived in Putney Vermont. In 2001 she became acquainted with a group of artists who asked her friend if they could use her big barn as a place to paint. The painters turned out to be led by Richard Schmid, and the group of 11 would later be known as the Putney Painters.

She got her classical art training as a member of the Putney Painters. She painted with them for 4 1/2 years and learned things like color temperature and value.

When she and her husband retired and moved to Santa Fe, she joined a plein air class with Anita Louise West, so she could continue developing the skills that she was learning in Vermont.

Another way she is improving her landscape skills is by studying with Kevin Gorges, concentrating on still life. Painting onions and peppers helps her to paint mountains because it makes her more conscious of value shifts. She always looks at one shape in relation to the shapes around it. She's always comparing one patch of shape to another. With still life she can take her time and concentrate on this.

When you paint outdoors you have to do the same thing, only very quickly. You have three hours to work, maximum. With her still life pieces she has stretched her range of values. She has deeper deeps and lighter lights. She is able to simplify the forms that she sees in nature. She said, "There's so much out there. You have to focus on a few shapes."

After 4 1/2 years, it can still be a struggle to get the New Mexico landscape. "Coming from new England to New Mexico was a challenge to my palette. I was using New England greens, which have a lot of blue in them, instead of New Mexico greens, which have a lot of orange. But a challenge is not necessarily a bad thing. It can be really fun!"

Janice Muir wants to take you to a peaceful place

Growing up in Albuquerque, Janice Muir spent a lot of time watching the clouds with her father. "My dad was a great skywatcher. He loved weather. Loved the outdoors."

So naturally, she loves to paint outside, on location. She is drawn to places of peace, of meditation, or places that just make you smile.

She recently painted at the Grand Canyon, which is a challenge for any artist. She said, "There's something awe inspiring about the Grand Canyon. But how do I transfer the feeling I had while I was there?"

When she teaches Plein Air painting, the first thing that she tells her students to do, and the thing that is hardest for beginners, is to edit. Ask yourself, "What's the most important thing about this place? What makes you happy about this place?"

Things change fast when you're painting on location. Especially the quality of the light. She said, "When you see the light, paint it and leave it."

Janice often uses a journal to take notes on the place. Once the image is down she takes notes on colors and sounds. Anything to help her remember where she was. She takes her time setting up so that she can center. She said, "Take the time to set up your easel. To put out your paints. Listen. Smell. Is it sage? Is it wet earth? What's that sound? Is it slow moving water?"

Once when she painted at Anniversary Trail (one of her favorite places) she heard coyotes across the canyon. Although she didn't paint the coyotes, listening to them while painting added another dimension to her art.

"I have a lot of spiritualism in my painting," she said. "My spiritualism is connected to nature."

The skies look alive and changing in her paintings. She said, "I watch sunsets, being very observant about how light changes. Skies are extremely important to me. It goes back to my childhood. For a long time I didn't want to paint a cloud until I could do it well."

The greatest feedback Janice can ever receive is when someone views one of her paintings and says, "That's a place I'd like to be," or even, "I feel like I've been there." When that happens she feels like she has made the connection.