Imagine my chagrin when I checked my email the morning of April 18th and realized that I’d completely missed the Liberate Your Art 2016 Blog Hop! I was sick for days about it. I blamed Tax Day and the madness of April for my missing out. Oh well. I eventually dusted myself off, and now LYA is my first blog post for May.

Again, I participated in Kat Sloma’s Liberate Your Art Postcard Swap, a swap she founded to encourage artists of any medium to share their art with the world. The postcard party just completed its sixth year.

This year there were:

• 1050 pieces of art liberated
• 175 artists participating
• 12 countries represented

I received all six of the postcards that were sent to me this year. Here they are:

Amy hails from Rosemount, Minnesota. She created a handcut collage made of paper, ink, paint, and gel medium transfer.  The attacks on Paris in November 2015 led her to create this piece, a commemorative of lives lost.

Linda sent greetings from Sunny California.  She shared a reproduction of a painting she had done in her art journal while visiting her son in Missouri.  This image with earth tones and splashes of reds, yellows, and blues is calming and exciting at the same time.

Mabuhay from the Philippines!  Rosanna sent her beautiful flower with God’s blessings of love and a reminder that the good news is written on God’s handiwork as well as in the Good Book.

Diana also hailed from California.  She shared her “twilight eagle” with a gorgeous purple sky and the silhouette of trees in the background.  On the back of the card, she penned a poem by an anonymous Native American poet:

What is Life?

It is the flash of a firefly in the night.
It is the breath of a buffalo in wintertime.
It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and
loses itself in the sunset

While we’re on the subject of birds…The artist who created this gorgeous mosaic did not sign a name, but wrote a brief poem on the back of the postcard:

Light and Bird
fused
in the
transparent
morning
sky…….

If you’ve been following my blog over the last year or two or three, then, you’d know that the last postcard sent for the “official” LYA swap, comes from Kat, the swap’s founder, coordinator, and all-around awesome person. She sends her card as a “thank you” to participants.

Trees are among Kat’s favorite thing to photograph, so I wasn’t the least bit surprised to see the trees. I love the way she “stacked” this photo allowing the trees to serve as primary frame for the moon but still hold their place as focus of the photo.  You can find more about how Kat crafted this photo here: Masking in Stackables (Mobile Tutorial).

She typically includes the a LYA motivational thought on the back. This year:

And Kat’s last word of the swap–

Kat typically ends the celebration with a piece she creates. Notice how she weaves the postcards sent for the swap into her “final” creations. She writes:

I created this year’s final celebration art piece to remind each and every one of us that we are on a journey. We may start on the path of liberating our art timidly, fearful of the response we are going to get. Art is such a personal thing, it can feel like we are putting a piece of our heart and soul out there, where others may reject it. But you know what? The more you liberate your art, the easier it gets. The more confident you get. You just have to keep taking small steps.

Thanks, ladies, for all your beautiful work!

Now, of course, we can’t “participate” in the swap by simply receiving postcards. We have to create something and share it with the world, so tune in tomorrow–or maybe, the next day–when I’ll share the postcards I sent for LYA 2016 as well as postcards I received in “side swaps.”  I still have many left, by the way, so if you’re interested in a “side swap,” let me know.

Want more artistic inspiration?  Check out the LYA 2016 Blog Hop.  Hop to it!