 Good afternoon. Welcome to coronavirus and our mental health. My name is Ken Berthness and I'm coming to you from Haleiva on the North Shore and it's a hot summer day and I don't know about you but we've got road work up here. So there's lots of noise and lots of stuff in the air. The good news is that eventually the days are going to cool off, the trades are going to come up and refresh us and the roads are going to be smooth for nice traveling and I'm looking forward to that. The other good news is our coronavirus is doing well. It's slowly but surely coming down and we're averaging now about 300 new cases every day. Now if you compare that to where we were in May, which was about 600 new cases per day, we're doing well. We're about half that and if you take a look at the spike in January where we were over 4,000, we're less than one-tenth of what we were in January. Now there's a but of course. There's always a but but if we go back to March where we were doing really really well, we were averaging little less than 50 cases per day. So we're still about six times higher than our low point for the year. So we've still got a way to go. The other good news is we're doing well on coronavirus. The variant BA5 is still causing us problems but we're slowly but surely working away at that. BA5 is causing is so very infectious it's causing most of our new cases but we're working at it hard. We still have a way to go. You have to remember with coronavirus this is sort of like being on offense and defense and the virus is always on offense and we're on defense. So it takes us a while to sort of learn how to stop that offense and we still need to work on our bringing our vaccines up to date, our boosters up to date and to learn a lot more about BA5 but we're getting there. So that's positive. There's another but and that is you have to be aware of the fact that our cases per day go up when there's a holiday and we've got a big holiday coming up. Labor day is just around the corner so don't relax too much and take care of yourself and be safe and make sure that your loved ones are safe as well. Now because of all this we've been focusing our recent shows on positivity because right now we're surrounded by negativity not only from the coronavirus but from the mass shootings and from the war, climate change. Every time we turn on the television or social media there's something very negative that we have to deal with. So we've been focusing on the positive and we got a very positive show coming up today. There's one caveat that I need to give you before we start and that is we're not going to give you platitudes on this show. We're not going to come on and say hey everything's okay you don't need to worry things are going to get better just relax the future is bright etc etc and don't worry. Who me? Don't worry. I don't know how you feel when I'm down and I'm depressed and somebody comes up and says hey you know let it go you know be happy you know just go out and better times are coming. I don't know about you but I get pissed off. They don't know about my problems. They don't know how it's affecting me and it may be easy for them to be happy during this time but it's not easy for me and they don't seem to understand that. So like I said the show is not going to get platitudes. We don't have a surefire way of being positive and being happy but what we are going to do is we're going to share some of the joy that people are finding during this sort of dark time sort of the wonder of things and the joy of things that are out there that we're missing if we get too caught up in all this negativity and that's what we're going to do today. We're going to talk about the joy of art and to do that I have my good friend Tamara moaned with me today and I'm really looking forward to this and I hope Tamara is too. Welcome to the show Tamara. Thank you. Now Tamara is not only an artist she's a writer and she's a teacher so she's got a lot to share and I was thinking Tamara that maybe at the beginning of the show we could start off with a little bit sort of an overview of art the various forms and maybe wind up with what I'm assuming is the part that you like the best which is watercolors. So of course art encompasses an awful lot from performing arts music to visual arts which is what I do and pretty much since I came out of the womb I've been doing something creative. I have always drawn and I've gotten a lot of encouragement from my parents to do that throughout my childhood and then I also you know went on to get an art degree and it wasn't until I was done with college that I really started painting more seriously and the you know I'm I've taken classes in all kinds of media oil painting and acrylics etc but I really got on the watercolor path when I took a painting trip with George Belard who's a teacher and artist here on Oahu and I was prompted because of the the joy of travel I was looking forward to having this trip and it involved painting and the painting so entranced me that I've kept with it all these years that was in the mid 80s that I went on that trip. So watercolor is really a terrific medium especially if you're on the road because it's so portable and very very easy to clean up it's just water-based but it allows me to express a wide variety of things and I'll use it at all kinds of scales small little pictures in my sketchbook to really large works that are multiple feet across or high. Tamara tell me the interesting thing about watercolors and what you're saying is that it sort of reminds me of music. Somebody you know when I was studying music and I've studied the arts mostly because I'm not good at any of them and I wanted to appreciate them so I wanted to appreciate music and somebody was telling me that Mozart playing Mozart is one of the easiest things to music to play on the piano and then they followed it up with saying and it's also probably the most difficult to do well and I thought of that with watercolors like you say it's easy but it's got to be very difficult as well at least that's what I understand. It is and a lot of people find it very very challenging because it's unpredictable it moves in its own way and it's also very hard to cover up your mistakes and so a lot of people just paint in one go you just go from beginning to finish and that's it you can't it's very hard to go back in and correct something and it really has a mind of its own but that you know that's part of the beauty of it too it's very spontaneous it really captures light well which is another you know an element if you're a landscape painter or something of course that's very ephemeral too so you're sort of matching the elements with the media that you're working with and I think because it continues to be challenging that's probably why a lot of artists stick with it too they don't ever feel like they have complete mastery of it and it you know it continues to be a challenge. When you talk about light I'm fascinated with light for for obvious for many reasons but it brings me to color you know and how it changes the colors and to me I feel such a lifting such a joy when I see the colors in paintings and watercolors and that can you talk a little bit about that joy of the colors and how you how you do that it's way beyond anything I can imagine. Well with watercolor you have the luminosity of the paper that you're painting on that's really what makes it glow and so it's learning how to how to use the light in a way that's furthering that brightness and the saturation and luminosity of the color. Yeah color is really color is one of those changeable things that is around us all the time that you don't realize really necessarily what the components are but of course we live in a place too with a lot of really bright sunshine which makes the colors very intense and clear. Well thank goodness. You know when I'm writing and I'll share with the audience that Tamara and I met through writing and not through art because we're both writers and I would be writing something and it just wasn't working you know like you're talking about painting and I would just put it aside you know not throw it out I'm I'm you know pretty anal so I would hold it but and then other times I would be writing something that I hadn't really planned on and all of a sudden it opens up and comes to life and I'm saying whoa I didn't realize I was getting here and this is great I mean you have those experiences with your art. Oh absolutely absolutely I think any kind of creative work has that I mean you have you have moments where it's just not coming together and you just have to either move through it or move on let it rest and then other times everything clicks and it just you know it's like magic on the page. Yeah one of the things that I asked Tamara to talk about was in addition to painting for a long time doing art visual art she's also been teaching for quite a while and I also do teaching and teaching is it's a whole different ball game because we're focusing on helping other people with this joy and it's wonderfully rewarding but it's it can be very difficult and maybe you could tell us a little bit about how you manage to to teach people to not only do art but enjoy art. Teaching has been really rewarding for me I started out teaching at Lenicona the school that's associated with the Honolulu School of I mean the Honolulu Museum of Art and I've taught all levels from preschool age kids to people in their 90s and what I've always enjoyed about it is the creative nature of teaching you have to approach each student as new territory and fit what you're doing to what they are willing to receive and I find the biggest challenge with teaching adults is that you have to work at getting them to quiet the negative voices in their head those have really been ingrained over years and years and years and years and especially with art a lot of people had an experience as a kid where somebody told them oh that doesn't look good or you shouldn't try that and it's just that can be a deadening kind of message. During the pandemic the challenge has been how do you translate an in-person class into an online experience and I was lucky enough to get chosen to be one of the teachers for Adventist Health through Castle Hospital they decided they needed to reach out to some of their people who weren't able to get out of the home very often and they really felt some creative activity was beneficial for health and so they started a series of online classes and they had three or four teachers doing that and that really prompted me to learn how to do the online sharing. Another thing I did because my position at Linicona disappeared with corona virus they the school completely shut down and they let go all of their faculty and so I was looking around for some income replacement too so I ended up getting on the state teaching roster which puts teachers into DOE classrooms and through that experience I also they gave me some helpful training on how to conduct online classes and at least it was you know it was a way to connect during a time when all of us were really limited in how we could get out and how we could be together. Now I'm really happy that we can be in-person again it's just a completely different sort of animal you know when you're in a room together you can draw on the energy of everybody and you can take each other on and encourage each other in a way that's really a lot more difficult through Zoom when you're each plugged in individually there's something that happens in the room when you're all together that can be really magical but I'm really I'm so I feel really grateful that I still have the opportunity to share what I love doing with other people and help them find expression that way. That's terrific and I have to share with the audience. Tamara is doing her classes now in a tent outside in her yard which is one of the most beautiful places on the island. It looks out at Kailua Beach and God it's just wonderful out there and that must be a great experience for you and the students to be out. Yeah I've gotten a lot of positive feedback about the location. How is that teaching outside though that that's got us challenged right? It's not too bad I mean the tent really keeps us dry and it gives us some shade and it's really nice to have the air moving around and you know the birds singing and stuff it's not really too challenging unless it's quite windy so but we figure it out. Well that's great let me go back to one of your previous comments about when things get frustrating and I know that you know it's difficult you know whatever I'm doing I'm doing well and all of a sudden something goes wrong and it's very frustrating and I can't seem to know how to fix it. As a teacher how do you deal with the frustration sometimes that you know that gets your students and sort of stop that brush mid-air as they're trying to think about what to do? One of the most useful tactics is just to change direction and completely divert onto another track and usually changing your attention to elsewhere can help break that log jam. A lot of times if it's if something isn't going right you can figure out how to I mean a lot of it doesn't matter if it's a class or not in in my individual work too you'll come across something that's not working and as my mother told me when I was a little girl and I would be doing a drawing and suddenly there's like a big splot of ink on there she'd say turns into a spider. You just have to you have to open up and allow yourself to see other possibilities in what's happening and it might not be what you originally envisioned but a lot of times it's even better. That's terrific. I'm thinking as you're talking I'm thinking well you've got a subject in the middle and then you've got background and you've got you know all around and when you switch that attention that can really open up things that you hadn't thought of before I would imagine. So it's like you're looking at a picture and all of a sudden instead of focusing on maybe the person that's in the middle you're focusing on trees behind or the ocean coming in. Wow. Maybe now's a good time to bring in that since we've talked about art and teaching let's maybe we can bring in writing because you know I know you've been on various projects with writing especially that chapbooks that you've that Tamara gave me one of hers which was very nice and you know I have no talent as far as art goes a little talent as far as writing goes and I've always thought if I could only draw the illustrations for my own work you know because nobody else seems interested in drawing stuff for my writing if I could do it you know that must be a great freeing experience and tell us a little bit about the interaction when you're actually writing and drawing in this on the same track is that that must be phenomenal. It is it is some really interesting cross pollination can happen and I actually used to teach a class and I still may teach a class again called side by side which is visual work with written work and I used to teach it with a friend of mine who was also a visual artist and a writer and we would alternate activities writing visual writing visual and it it brings you to a different places both with the writing and with the visual work and what I did for these chapbooks that Ken mentioned I had a bunch of poetry that I had you know written over the span of about 10 or 15 years and during the pandemic I had enough time to actually take on this project which I'd had in my head for quite a number of years and so I organized the poetry into little collections that each had like a dozen to 20 poems and then I made I made each collection into a small book and although the book isn't illustrated per se it does have a cover illustration and there was a lot of artistic consideration in terms of how the pages are laid out etc and I don't know if this would be a good time to pull up my website but there is a picture on there of the so on the if you see here the on the left side there's a a shot of four little books so there was a rapper that went around each volume and each volume had a different set of poems in it so that was a really great a great little project that had a lot of hand work involved in the stitching and binding of each book another project that I did more recently was a collaboration with a friend of mine who's a print maker and there were a whole group of us who were making handmade books and the theme that we were trying to fulfill was in my neighborhood was the title so it could be anything related to your neighborhood and because my friend knew that I wrote and I also have a letterpress which allows you to print writing we ended up making these little tiny books that each had a separate poem in them that related to the theme of in my neighborhood so I printed the poems we made them into a little sort of like a little folded origami thing that got inserted into this book and you opened the book and it was like a little magic box that unfolded and this is the picture that has come up is the chapbook that I mentioned earlier these other poetry books I don't think I have a photo of them on my website but they were like little jewels people really loved unfolding them and finding out what was inside so in that case yeah in that case the imagery my friend worked on the imagery and I wrote poems that were in response to the imagery it was really nice partnership wow you know and again for the audience Tamra and I often meet at the Windward Community College for their writing retreat and Lillian Cunningham who runs that and teaches that oftentimes gives us a prompt and in some of the writing groups I'm in have a topic and so a lot of people write on the prompt and the writing retreat and in my writing groups people are writing on the same topic how does that work when you when you're teaching art for instance do you ever give them a topic and have every library student that's with you on to draw and how does it how does that work with art I know it works it's interesting with writing yeah yeah it's very similar for instance I'm teaching a class right now that's a painting class and we I'm I'm basing all of our work on the theme of place like our place on the island our place physical place that we grew up in or a favorite place that's special to us that we like to go to so all the paintings are based around that and yes just two days ago the students started working on their bigger painting pieces and so the location where we're painting happens to be right up against the Kuala Mountains and several of the students chose that to paint which they could do by direct observation but several of the other people were painting a place that was important to them in their childhood and so we were talking about what colors those places evoke what the emotions those places evoke and how do you depict that as well as what the landscape the physical landscape might look like so it's just you know it's an idea that's a starting point and then with painting a lot of times the painting itself will tell you what it wants to be about and just like with a piece of writing it might end up in a direction that's a surprise to you you know that's you know that brings up so many images and so many thoughts as we go along the koalas you know I live on the north shore but I make trips to down the windward coast many times and just driving by the koalas is an awe inspiring experience I look at those green mountains and I just you know it almost brings tears to my eyes it's it's there's such beauty in this island and all the islands yeah in Hawaii and I've been to all of them that I was allowed to go to yeah and koalave but uh the beauty is just around us and uh and to be able to to uh do it with art is phenomenal tamer we're running a little uh short on time and I've been asking a lot of questions uh I would like to turn this last couple minutes over to you in anything that you would like to add something that that struck you with art uh that you wanted to say you know it would be a good time okay that uh I can I can tell you that the last couple years has been especially challenging I mean like like everybody else I've had my challenges too and art has really saved me I feel um and part of it is not only having the ability to continue to do creative work myself but also the last couple years I have done collaborative work much more than normal and some of it has been male art that I make something I put it in the mail and send it to a friend of mine they make something send it back to me um some of it has been work that has gotten traded back and forth between me and another artist friend um some of it has just been checking in with my art friends and giving each other feedback and those connections have just been so vital to me um they were there before the pandemic and to a lesser degree but all of us all of the creative friends that I work with felt it was really essential that we crank it up and support each other in that way and it really made me feel not so alone going through all this weirdness that we've had the last couple years um and I think a lot of us have realized how much our relationships mean to us um and so it's been a nice melding of my relationships and the work that I find so gratifying and satisfying. Emma thank you for for saying that because that's one of the things that I run into all the time with the coronavirus uh with the coronavirus and the pandemic and the lockdowns and everything people have felt so alone and to cut or act that is to reach out and make those connections and be part of that connecting uh it's it's terrific and thank you so much for for being on the show it's been a pleasure and I hope I can talk to you that coming back soon. Oh it's been it's been fun thank you Ken and thanks to everybody here at ThinkDekowai thanks to Jay and Hailey and Eric and Michael and everybody and thanks to you all in the audience who joined us today and my wishes for you are the same as for everybody let's uh let's find our own path and find our own joy and uh and thank goodness we're living in Hawaii aloha. Thank you so much for watching ThinkDek Hawaii. If you like what we do please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn and donate to us at ThinkDekHawaii.com. Mahalo.