Making art with my friends

‘A Million Candles Burning’ ©Kris Cahill 2024. acrylic and collage on cradled wood, 9” x 12”.  Purchase this painting.

Making art with friends is fun and rewarding.

Like many artists and creatives, I spend a lot of time working in my own little bubble.

I really like being in my bubble a lot of the time, some things are best done this way. I must find the truth in what I’m creating, I must take the chance and risk something to perhaps discover something else. It’s so exciting to have a breakthrough, and realize I’ve grown.

Even if I’m getting together with friends to create, I’m still doing my own work, showing up on my end with my vision.

And then… I want to tell someone. I want to ask for honest feedback from someone without an agenda. I want to share.

This is from a warm up exercise I did with two art friends a couple of weeks back. We passed these three papers around and each painted on all of them. Then we cut them up for collage, image below.

Here’s those 3 painted papers, all cut up for collage making. Plus we added a few others to the mix.

Earlier this year, I started casually getting together with my new friend Maria on Friday mornings, to paint together for a few hours. I pack up my stuff and go over to her house, which is about 20 minutes away. We drink tea, eat chocolate and sometimes other treats, listen to music, and paint.

We are both abstract painters, and really excited by a lot of the same kinds of imagery. We are also good feedback for each other - I didn’t realize I was missing that until I started to have it with an art friend.

Now Maria’s friend Mary joins us on Fridays too, and she’s becoming another new friend of mine too. We’ve started making a painting warmup the first thing we do together, then each of us works on her own paintings. We share and comment, and it is so much fun. Plus chocolate and tea!

I’ve noticed that since Maria and I originally started committing to Art Fridays together, I have grown as an artist. She’s said the same to me. We each do our own art on our own too, but we share information and ideas and experience. Now that Mary’s joined us, she’s doing the same.

For years, I’ve worked as a psychic teacher with a group of other teaching artists.

We are all creatives as well as being trained psychics and mediums, working at the art and craft of teaching others how to turn on and have their own abilities working for themselves.

We work together with a shared vision of clairvoyance as an art form. I’m always amazed and so grateful that the right people do tend to find each other, especially when they are each coming from having a creative attitude about life, and a curiosity about how to create something in a new way.

Here I am hanging out with some of my psychic friends and colleagues at a recent retreat we did together.

I’ve been a psychic and psychic teacher for over 25 years now. I’ve worked with many people in this field over the years, sometimes flying solo as a teacher, sometimes working within a group. This is my very favorite group of people to work with. I couldn’t do what I get to do all by myself.

The school we are all part of is called the Art of the Seer Academy, and you can find us online here.

My weekly writing buddies

Having people to meet and work with can make all the difference in getting something done. A little over a year ago, I participated in the #1000wordsofsummer project, which was an online project started by author Jami Attenberg.

In the #1000words group chats, I befriended a Canadian woman named Katie, and now she and I meet almost every week for an hour or so, simply to write, online. She’s got a friend who now also joins us. We say hello, talk about what we hope to write during our time together, then mute our sound and simply do our own work.

When the time is up, we chat and validate what we’ve gotten done, then go on our merry ways. It’s so very grounding to have this, and helps me sit down and get some real writing done.

For someone who’s been self employed for most of my adult life, and often worked alone, this time in my life is filled with really amazing people, artists, co-creatives, and accountability buddies.

Working with other people has made my creative and work life much more fun and rewarding, and I’m grateful to each and every one of them.