In a world that often pushes artists to focus on productivity or perfection, the STORIES framework offers a different path. This isn't just about making "better" art or building a more successful creative business. It's about liberation - both personal and collective.

Do you know what I have learned this week?

Time management is a bullshit concept.

We’re all just showing up, doing the best we can, and moving on to the next thing.

Sentipensante is about putting ourselves back together. It's recognizing that our emotions inform our thoughts, and our thoughts shape our emotions. It's understanding that the most profound truths often come from a place where feeling and thinking intertwine. Sentipensante in Spiritual Archaeology is about putting myself back together through my artistic practice.

I'm going to walk you through this archaeological dig of the mind. We'll explore how a children's book series and the soundtrack of my youth combined to create something entirely new. Buckle up, art adventurers – we're about to get weird, nostalgic, and maybe a little paint-splattered. Ready to start digging?

The edge effect reminds us that borders aren't just lines of separation - they're zones of possibility. In art, as in nature, these in-between spaces can be where the most interesting and innovative things happen.

Elle Billing is named a recipient of the 2024 Midwest Award for Artists with Disabilities.

Elle Billing and Connie Solera discuss the transformative power of creating a body of work through the BOW program, which Elle described as an act of re-mothering herself. They explored themes of self-discovery, creativity, and the healing power of art, with a focus on the symbolism of blue.

My last two series — Ophelia in 2023, and now the Tempest-inspired series in 2024—have started as one thing and evolved roughly halfway through the process: the pain that initiated the project alchemized into something almost triumphant. I paint to give voice to the versions of me who need to get on to the canvas. But I am not her. At the same time, She survived so I can be here today.

And that is the story of my art— everything I used to push away, the parts I thought were too broken or too messy? When I share them with you, we can see them in a different way. We can hold multiple truths, witness them with love, strengthen our connections.

Each of these collections combined my own history, my own interests, and my own idiosyncrasies at the heart of the work. The heart and the soul and the guts of the work are what make the Work work. I had to know what I liked in order to include it in my artwork. The excavating meaning — the Spiritual Archaeology, the inner work — starts with that kernel self-knowledge. It starts with showing up, with a desire to know and be known, even — especially — in the face of the unknown, blank canvas.

It is no wonder that my visual art style relies so heavily on making associations among multiple influences. When I talk about my process — Spiritual Archaeology, for the new folks around here — I refer to this as synchronicity. If you’ve heard me get excited about it, you may have heard me talk about “pings.”

So what does it look like to be a process-driven artist? Well, in my case, it looks a little like chaos, a lot like ADHD, and a medium amount of me listening to the same songs over and over while I look at half-finished paintings. And sometimes it looks like me sitting at a computer in a grain inspection building and suddenly grabbing my pen to excitedly scribble down the perfect idea.

One of the biggest processes for me, as a person with acquired disability and chronic illness, has been unlearning my internalized ableism. It's important to acknowledge that so much advice, so many online courses, and basically every Instagram challenge, is not made for me. I’m not a bad artist; the influencer life is simply incompatible with my needs as both a caregiver and a care-receiver. This means that setting expectations and adjusting my goals looks very different from literally everyone else.

“Wellness” and “adjustment” to the present state of the world — be it war, genocide, the housing crisis, climate catastrophe — seems like madness to me. Award shows and Super Bowls and March Madness brackets feel like madness to me.

My upper level religion professor in university ended every class meeting by saying “Stay sane out there.” My friend Peter and I (who met in university) used to exchange this farewell. We don’t anymore. I have reached the point where I only trust the mad, whose madness comes from a deep well of love and grief for the burning world.

In 2022 I meditated on the state of this with a series of watercolor paintings I called “how do you hold a memory?” A series of 80+ paintings of stones, rocks, and pebbles taking different arrangements, in different colors. You see, stones have longevity. Think of Stonehenge. or even mountains. They tell a story of time that stretches out before we were here, and long after we leave the planet. The cairns of Ireland, and the handbuilt stone altars of the Hebrew scriptures also influenced this series: humans use stones to mark significance and to create a tangible anchor for an otherwise ethereal memory.

When I paint, my heart returns to my backyard garden in Idaho, to all those layers, the careful hand digging with a garden fork. The layers are important. The slow remediation of the soil was hard work. Painting feels easier than that, but not on the days when I’m stuck. In the end, it’s the same intentional process of working through a season, season after season, and seeing what fruits emerge from the soil.

The first poem I had published outside of university featured wild sunflowers. They symbolize hope and resilience. I guess it’s time to lean in and start painting them.

I guess if I had to show you the roots of Spiritual Archaeology, this would be my illustration: the fleeting moment of seeing these deer among the several young trees, one old tree, and these old iron wheels. All these layers of what this parcel of land has been, is, and could continue to be; layers of time stacked on top of each other into one image.

I use a lot of vintage paper and other found materials for collage material in my artwork. This is a resource post where I’ll update periodically my favorite places to source my preferred kinds of materials.

Dictionary and book pages help infuse the work with meaning. And art is a meaning-making process— the creation, consumption, curation, collection of art requires meaning to be created and negotiated.