First Meeting with Mentor

So, this morning was the exploratory meeting with the mentors, the meeting I don’t pay for. It was with Teresa and Wiley and Teresa had already told me she would be fifteen minutes late. I got there early {Of COURSE I did, I am always early } after a night where I had woken at 3, 4 and finally got up at 5. One of the reasons I left early was to hopefully get one of the few parking places at the front of the building. Because I was early, I walked to the cafe around the corner and had hot chocolate with cream. What I thought was amusing was about a third of the people in there had computers open on their tables and ALL the computers were Apple!

Anyway, I walked to the place where I was going to meet Wiley and we started. First she asked me to tell her my experience with making art and she took notes but very brief ones. Then she asked me me what I expected to get out of these sessions, and after a lot of "ummms" and "ers", it seems the bottom line is that I don’t want someone to tell me what to do but I do need direction.   It is actually possible to be helped with direction without being told what to do, honestly!  It was actually a very interesting 90 minutes in which I talked as much as they did. Teresa asked if I felt OK with having Wiley as my mentor  for the first couple of meetings rather than her because she was going to be very busy with the children’s classes she had agreed to give. This was fine with me. Although I have only just met Wiley, I like her work {she is a fabric artist} and the way she talks about things.

Wiley said she would type up her notes and send me a copy. At this point I said what I would like to do was to write responses to what she had written and start a book of plans and my reactions. I envision my part of this, as I told her, to be writing about what I am trying and what works for me and also what doesn’t work for me–a dialog I can bring to the next mentoring meeting. She seemed pleased by this. She also said that she thought I would learn a lot from seeing what other local artists are doing and she suggested that in the last 15 minutes of the first mentoring meeting, she could take me to a couple of local galleries which are within walking distance. I am a bit excited about this because I know from past experience I can and DO learn from looking at what someone else has done and trying it myself.

After that,  I walked out to my car and found I didn’t have my keys! So, I retraced my footsteps to the cafe but I hadn’t left them there. Then I walked a different way back to my car because that was the way I had walked to the cafe earlier. I was looking at the ground thinking I might have dropped them when suddenly I realized I was shivering and mentally said, "Why am I so cold? I wasn’t cold this morning…" and that is when I realized that I had worn a puffy vest then and immediately remembered I had put the keys in the pocket! So, I went back to interrupt the class Teresa was giving and found my vest and the keys! Finally, I drove out to Walmart’s which was a bit of a letdown since I had left my list on my desk at home and apparently everything except the rest room had been put in a different place from where I remembered it being!

 I am grateful for finding people I like and whose expertise I trust who will help me continue with my art.

Some people try to turn back their odometers. Not me, I want people

to know why I look this way. I’ve traveled a long way and some of the

roads weren’t paved.

Will Rogers

"I yam what I yam."

Popeye