Ready to get creative in 2025?
The Total Artist: An Adventure in Expressive Living is BACK! (Starting Monday 30 December 2024)
If you are ready to get creative in 2025… you are in the right place!
The Total Artist: An Adventure in Expressive Living will officially begin on Monday 30 December 2024.
Originally, 2024 was going to be the year of The Total Artist: An Adventure In Expressive Living - however I didn’t even make it through a full month before things were completely derailed by a variety of personal challenges.
So it is with gratitude and excitement that I am returning to this idea for the coming year.
If you want to read a bit more about the inspiration for The Total Artist, I explain more about where the idea came from in the original announcement post.
However, I’ve excerpted all the most important details below, so you can simply read on for a recap of what to expect in the coming year.
What is The Total Artist?
The Total Artist is a digital programme created to be done in company with others. The prompts may take the form of emails or videos, and will be delivered directly to your inbox. The Total Artist exists somewhere in a space between a blog series and an online course, so I have called it an ‘adventure’.
Most importantly, it will be fun!
The Total Artist will unfold as a year long experiment.
Each month will be dedicated to a different medium of artistic expression. (These will be timed to coincide with the moon cycles rather than the calendar months, as a nice little way of encouraging us to be in tune with the world around us.)
As an example: Month 1 will focus on writing - particularly the dynamic tension between clarity (prose) and mystery (poetry). Both these modes of communication have a valuable place in our lives. How do we decide which facets we want to tap into when expressing ourselves through language and text? And what role do clarity and mystery have in other mediums of creative expression?
My greatest hope is that this can help unblock the areas where we feel stuck.
Never know what to wear in your author photo? Maybe the Body Art month will unlock something.
Do you hate writing the grants you need to fund your dance practice? Maybe you will find a new approach in the writing month.
Feel like you struggle to be fully present within your artistic practice? Spirituality is a chance to reflect on what gives your work meaning.
Rather than considering artistic forms in isolation, we’ll be constantly aiming to connect them to other mediums and our own artistic spirits.
It would be impossible to cover every kind of artistic practice. The goal is to stretch outside our comfort zones, engage all of our senses, and embrace a broad definition of what includes ‘art’.
We will cover the following areas:
Writing (30 December)
Photography (29 January)
Music (27 February)
Dance (29 March)
Cooking (27 April)
Acting (26 May)
Visual Art (25 June)
Spirituality (24 July)
Body Art - Fashion & Style (22 August)
Space Art - Architecture & Design (21 September)
Culture & Geography (22 October)
Wildcard (19 November)
Ending & Reflection (19 December)
I don’t claim to be an expert in all of these areas (far from it, truth be told).
However, I am an expert at helping artists (normally writers) get unstuck and look at things from a different angle.
That is what we are essentially doing here.
One of the things I love most in my own teaching practice is making the frame where other people have room to explore. So that is how I see my role - holding space for myself and my fellow travellers.
What do I have to do to if I want to participate?
Nothing! Or everything! It’s totally up to you!
You can read the the prompts as a way to notice and reflect how you encounter these aspects of creativity in your work and life.
Or you can jump in with both feet and get your hands dirty by creating your own projects within these art forms.
As with most things, the more you put into it, the more you get out of it. But also, there is something to be said for being gentle with our expectations of ourselves. Just the subtle act of paying attention can be a powerful thing.
Throughout the year, I’m going to be sharing my own experiments and creative discoveries.
If you decide to join, I’d really encourage you to give yourself a space to reflect. This could be a journal, voice notes, video blogs, etc - there is room to be creative! It’s in that reflective space where the creative magic generally happens. (More inspiration for how to make your creative cocoon can be found in this post from last year’s programme.)
I’m hopeful that there will be a sufficient critical mass of people to create a lively comments section and share discoveries as a community. I’d love to hear from other thinkers from a variety of disciplines.
Who is this for?
The Total Artist is pitched at a level where it will be engaging and stimulating for people who already have a serious or professional creative practice and want to expand the scope of their artistry.
However, everyone is welcome and appreciated! If you don’t consider yourself an artist, but want to access more expressivity, this is also a place for you.
I take the viewpoint that living itself is the ultimate form of creativity, so even if you just want to find a bit more magic in your life, this series of posts will hopefully support you in doing that.
Do I have to pay anything? Or signup?
It costs nothing to join in this programme. The creative prompts (videos and emails) for The Total Artist series will be totally free for the duration of the yearlong programme.
How to get the info? All you have to do is sign up to the newsletter ‘Where The Roses Bloom’ and you will get them automatically as a special strand within this digital space.
What if I’m interested but not ready to engage right now?
That’s fine - join us when you can. The beauty of a year is that it is cyclical. Anything you miss will wind back around again.
Thanks for reading about this. This project been a long time coming, and I’m really excited to see what unfolds over the coming months. Hopefully we can explore creativity together in the coming year!
For those people who signed up in 2024 and have hung in there for nearly a year waiting for this programme to resume - THANK YOU.
I’m really excited to share this journey with you and see what awaits us in the year ahead.
For now,
Alli
Photo by RhondaK Native Florida Folk Artist on Unsplash