Arpita Sharma

About Arpita Sharma

https://arpitasharma.net

Posts by Arpita Sharma:

How art can help

Art can help you cope with the pandemic.

,

I don’t know about you all, but I’ve been struggling a lot recently – feeling more lethargic, lost, and void of meaning. As someone who still has a job, a home, and whose family is relatively healthy given everything, I feel pretty privileged (knock on wood). Even so, this pandemic has taken a major toll on my mental health and really restricted my ability to do the things that gave me joy and helped me be more resilient.

One thing that has gone right for me though is my effort to continuing to make art and trying to connect with an art community during this pandemic. At the beginning of this year, NPR shared an article called Feeling Artsy? Here’s How Making Art Helps Your Brain. I’ve been thinking about this piece a lot recently as the pandemic continues to disrupt our lives and makes it difficult to connect, explore, and expand our worlds. I wanted to share some of the key benefits of creating art from the article. Hopefully, it will encourage you to do something a little more creative in your spare time.

1) Art helps you imagine a more hopeful future.

Photo by Mushegh Hakobyan on Unsplash

Girija Kaimal is an Associate Professor at Drexel University and a researcher in art therapy, leading art sessions with members of the military suffering from traumatic brain injury and caregivers of cancer patients. She wrote a recent piece for the Journal of the American Art Therapy Association theorizing that art-making helps us navigate problems that might arise in the future. She argues that the act of imagination is actually an act of survival. It is preparing us to imagine possibilities and hopefully survives those possibilities.

I see this play out often with the folks who come to my art classes. They feel more hopeful and creative when they spend their evenings in a community with others creating something. The process of creation opens up their imagination to new ideas or approaches to the world.

2) Art makes you happier.

Photo by Alex Alvarez

Kaimal and a team of researchers also discovered that making art may benefit people dealing with addictive behaviors, eating disorders, and mood disorders. They measured blood flow to the brain’s reward center, the medial prefrontal cortex, in 26 participants as they completed three art activities: coloring in a mandala, doodling, and drawing freely on a blank sheet of paper. They found an increase in blood flow to this part of the brain when the participants were making art. The research suggests that art may activate reward pathways in the brain that can benefit them.

I have personally experienced this in my own life. I started painting during a period where I was struggling with how to managing life expectations and disappointments. Art allowed me to feel happier and better manage those challenges.

3. No matter your skill level, creating art makes you less anxious about life.

Photo by Hans Vivek

A 2016 research paper found that 45 minutes of creating art in a studio significantly lowered stress levels. The paper also showed that there were no differences in health outcomes between people who identify as experienced artists and people who don’t. So that means that no matter your skill level, you’ll be able to feel all the good things that come with making art.

A struggle I hear from many people I try to convince to take up art is the fear and anxiety around not being good at it. One of the great things about this article is that it reinforces that you don’t have to be greatly skilled at art in order to enjoy it and reduce your stress levels.

If you read this and want to try painting, check out my other article where I share my top 5 youtube art tutorial channels. If you are interested in a community of hobby artists, come to my art class on Wednesday nights. I’d love to have you.

A Year of Loss

A year of loss

We are in the moment in history where the sting of loneliness and loss are global. Children have lost mothers and fathers. Brothers have lost sisters. Friends have lost their nearest and dearest. And we, collectively, have shed entrenched parts of identity as workers, providers, doers, and builders — giving up our daily patterns of existence to now, if we are lucky, work from home.

The loss of identity and connection is hard to swallow. The truth of life — that we have never had control — stares us in the face, ready to punch us in the gut when we least expect it. The anxiety inside swells as we think about all that we have to lose. And yet, we continue, as much as we can, with courage, trying to string together a sense of normalcy. When we lose our battles on some days, we drown ourselves in Netflix or some lonely hobby — consoling ourselves with the idea that we can handle it.

But should we be handling it? Or is this a moment for us to shift to a more collective mentality?

A few years ago, I was in the Bay for a summer internship almost a year after my brother passed away when I started having panic attacks. Growing up in a close-knit family, where my sick, paralyzed brother was the center of our lives, I had never really considered what it would mean to lose someone you love permanently. When he passed, I was in the middle of midterm exams in my first year of graduate school — which I had just started a few months earlier. After sobbing uncontrollably for a few moments as my apartment neighbor tried to console me — I grabbed my phone and started driving to the hospital in the Inland Empire. It feels strange to be stuck in traffic for three hours — knowing that your brother has passed away. The feeling dawns on you that life doesn’t stop just because you are in pain. The world doesn’t revolve around you.

It’s also enlightening when you realize that this is it. This is the imperfect, shabby reality of life. It ends. You go on, acting as if everything is normal — pretending that a big part of you isn’t gone. That’s how it feels again right now.

The loss of the life we used to have feels insurmountable — and we are presented with a new reality — we cannot leave the house, we cannot spend time with people we love, and we cannot do the things we loved to do.

But as I slowly and painfully learned that summer in the Bay — we cannot go on pretending that everything will be okay forever. At some point, we have to let ourselves mourn the loss of the year that has passed and acknowledge the good and bad that has come with it.

Spring Washam, the meditation teacher I visited that summer at the East Bay Meditation Center allowed me to understand this. “As we courageously walk forward on our spiritual path, we all eventually experience what is called “a spiritual death”. It is a transformative process followed by a beautiful rebirth. Like a snake shedding its old skin, this is a profound and necessary part of our spiritual growth.”

As we go through this journey of spiritual growth and rebirth this year — let us show ourselves a lot of compassion. We could all really use some right now.

With love,

Arpita

National Data Sources on People with Disabilities

Data Sources for People with Disabilities

As researchers, we know it can be really challenging to find data for people with disabilities that are available at multiple geographic levels. Here are a few resources you may be interested in:

IPUMS ACS Microdata

The IPUMS American Community Survey microdata has data on people with disabilities. There are several variables including identifying those with cognitive, physical, self-care, vision, and hearing. The lowest level of geography this data is available at is the public use microdata level.

Unbanked/Underbanked Supplement to the Current Population Survey

The Current Population Survey (CPS) is the source of the official government statistics on employment and unemployment. The CPS has been conducted monthly for over 50 years. Currently, they obtain interviews from about 54,000 households monthly, scientifically selected on the basis of area of residence to represent the nation as a whole, individual states, and other specified areas. Each household is interviewed once a month for four consecutive months one year, and again for the corresponding time period a year later.

Food Security Supplement to the Current Population Survey

This data section provides information about publicly available national surveys that include questions from the U.S. Food Security Survey Module. Public-use household-level Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement (CPS-FSS) data files are available for each year since 1995.

National Health Interview Survey

The National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) is the principal source of information on the health of the civilian noninstitutionalized population of the United States and is one of the major data collection programs of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) which is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The National Health Survey Act of 1956 provided for a continuing survey and special studies to secure accurate and current statistical information on the amount, distribution, and effects of illness and disability in the United States and the services rendered for or because of such conditions.

Leave a comment below if you know of any others that may be useful to others!

Grocery Store

Why don’t we have more neighborhood grocery stores in LA?

I traveled to London last year and stayed near the Canada Water station. I fell in love with how walkable the city streets were, and how accessible shopping, nature, and transportation were. One of the things I did frequently during my trip was walk to the local Tesco Express to pick up food I could eat at my Airbnb home.

Now we are in the middle of a pandemic, and when I take strolls through my “family-friendly” historically Black suburban neighborhood and I feel nostalgic thinking back to the convenience of easily accessible small grocery stores and social life of Londoners. It especially gets to me because the closest walkable store to my home is a liquor store – which serves nothing to a person like myself who doesn’t drink but also doesn’t fit with the residential family housing it surrounds.

According to Los Angeles Food Policy Council, with over 800,000 residents in South LA, there are 119 liquor stores and only 91 grocery stores.

Why is that?

I tried to find any articles or reports that might tell me about the history of liquor stores in Los Angeles – but I was at a loss. From what I could piece together, there seemed to be many first-generation immigrant Korean Americans who had opened up liquor stores, gas stations, and small markets across South L.A. in the early 1990s. Many of these liquor stores were burned down during the 1992 LA Riots – and since then community opposition has prevented most of about 200 liquor stores burned in the 1992 Los Angeles riots from reopening.

South Los Angeles liquor stores
Community opposition has prevented most of about 200 liquor stores burned in the 1992 Los Angeles riots from reopening. Korean ownership, which was concentrated in South Los Angeles, has also dwindled in the last two decades – LA Times.

Even with this, many liquor stores still continue to run and have helped many of these immigrants create opportunities for their children – as chronicled by So Yun Um, an emerging documentary filmmaker in her short documentary Liquor Store Babies. 

 

Liquor Store Babies from So Yun Um on Vimeo.

What confused me though were two questions. The first, why start a liquor store specifically, and why not more local grocery stores instead? Liquor stores don’t provide many resources to a community, they tend to exploit them. There is also a significant correlation between liquor stores and high crime rates.

Studies show that ethnic groups in the United States tend to concentrate in certain businesses and that these small, socially-isolated groups attain considerable financial success through this type of concentrated entrepreneurship, it didn’t really explain why liquor stores specifically. So, I looked into why people own liquor stores in general and learned that apparently – liquor stores are recession-proof, have a low barrier to entry, are great cash businesses, and don’t require a lot of knowledge to upkeep and manage.

So why weren’t small neighborhood grocery stores a better alternative? For that, I went back to Tesco and dug in a little further. I found that Tesco had actually had the same question – and tried to expand into the United States market in 2007 with a $500 million dollar investment. Strangely enough, they tested their first pilot effort in Los Angeles, California under the name “Fresh and Easy” – but eventually failed and left the US market.

So why didn’t LA work? Because we don’t have the environment to sustain it. Our cities are planned for automobiles and American consumers work longer hours and tend to limit their grocery shopping to once a week at stores with larger selections. 

It’s a weird paradox – neighborhood liquor stores are successful and earn good money, but small neighborhood grocery stores don’t. Organizations like ChangeLab Solutions have been working with local government agencies to create more healthy retail options, but changing the structure of a city like Los Angeles will take a long time. Let’s hope it is within our lifetimes.

Stuck_in_the_mud

How to deal with being stuck

Have you ever felt stuck in a rut? Like you had so many visions of what you wanted to do, but when you started doing them, it felt like everything you produced was a failure? It looked nothing like you imagined, almost like you had lost the magic touch from your hands. That’s how I’ve been feeling for the last month or so.

For a long time, I would sit there consistently every day practicing my drawing and painting, and it felt natural and easy.

Then it stopped.

I got scared.

I had grand visions of selling my artwork, I created a store. But no one bought anything (except for one special person). I started to fear that no one actually cared about anything I produced, it wasn’t good enough to sell.

Why was I doing this?

What was the purpose of it all?

These are the actions I took to get out of my rut and move forward. Hopefully, they will help you too.

Meditation

I took some time to meditate on the feeling of feeling stuck, accepting the emotion, and enjoying the parts of my life which were moving forward. An article on Tiny Buddha delves into this more deeply, if you are interested in how to do this.

Meditation helped me release the expectation that I should always be moving forward or making progress. It made me realize that it is okay to take breaks and have seasons of life where you make less progress. Just as each year, we have winter, spring, summer, and fall, we also have times in our lives where we have more energy and other times where we need to hibernate.

Continue to show up

Showing up even when things aren’t easy or you don’t know the answer is part of the process. Trust the Process delves into the notion that sometimes the creative process can be difficult – but being lost is actually a very important part of it. Shaun McNiff says it best – “When we are constantly keeping ourselves from falling and shielding ourselves from experiences, we exert tremendous energy in controlling our environments and defending ourselves from imagined threats. Falling becomes a release, an immersion in the process of life. Trusting the process brings a realization that miscues, mistakes, and failures make important contributions to the creative process.”

Part of the reason I was stuck was that I was afraid of not producing art that was perfect or of the caliber that people expected of me. When I tried to make something, it felt like it wasn’t good enough to share with others and it fed into my own insecurities of being a mediocre artist. However, this book helped me realize that those insecurities are also part of the creative process. We have to be willing to rework our original ideas in order to complete our projects.

Concentrate on the process

In Keep Going, Austin Kleon, a person with vastly more years of experience than me made a whole book to guide himself out of getting stuck. I think one of the most important lessons I took away from it was that it’s better to concentrate on your system for doing things than what you produce. His words really hit home when he says, “The creative life is not linear. It’s not a straight line from point A to point B. It’s more like a loop, or a spiral, in which you keep coming back to a new starting point after every project. No matter how successful you get, no matter what level of achievement you reach, you will never really “arrive.” Other than death, there is no finish line or retirement for the creative person.”

Those words helped me to reframe my feelings of stuckness. I felt I should be at a certain destination by now – but his words reinforced that there will never be a point of “arrival.” That point in time does not really exist, instead, the process of creation is the only thing that really exists – and it is the only thing I should focus my attention on.

In the end, dear reader, my main takeaway from doing these things was that I should go easy on myself – I don’t have to have all the answers – I just have to hang in there. And I hope, this will be your takeaway too.

Film 101

Examples of Contemporary Global Cinema

Spirited Away and Roma, while very different styles of film, represent examples of contemporary global cinema because they are artistic tools that give us the opportunity to reflect themes such as greed, class, and power. These films are recognized for their ability to shed light on these issues while also keeping the viewer entertained and engrossed in the experience of the story. The directors use well-thought-out plots and cinematic direction in order to draw the viewer in and keep them hooked.

Spirited Away is a Japanese film that tells the story of Chihiro, who is whisked into a world of fantastic spirits and must use her wits to survive and find a way to her parents and return to the normal world. The movie uses Japanese folklore to shed light on issues of greed, overconsumption, class, and power through Chihiro’s experience with spirits and demons. From how her parents are transformed into pigs from overeating at the beginning of the movie to her role working in the hotel, to the sorceress Yubaba’s extravagance, grandeur, and ego in the movie, there are lots of tiny lessons placed throughout that make the viewer reassess their values.

Roma, is the story of Cleo, one of two domestic workers, who help Antonio and Sofía take care of their four children in 1970s Mexico City. The film follows their story as Antonio suddenly runs away with his mistress and Cleo finds out that she’s pregnant. Roma similarly makes social commentary about class and love through the story’s plot. It is clear there are major social inequities from the onset as we watch Cleo and her fellow domestic worker cook, clean, take care of the children, and manage the household, with barely a small room to themselves in the big house. Even when the viewer feels like Cleo is somewhat part of the family, the illusion is broken when she is asked to do more work. Her “class” is also called out when she finds out she is pregnant and finds her boyfriend to tell him, instead of supporting her, he disparages and threatens her for contacting him, calling her a servant as he leaves. Sofia similarly is put into a precarious situation when her husband is found having an affair – and the film delves into the strange relationship of love, but also awkward boundaries between homeowners and domestic workers.

In conclusion, the themes and art direction make the two films powerful tools that shed light on societal issues. They have inspired a generation of filmmakers and audiences to look at life from a different perspective, and I am incredibly grateful for that.

Film Production 101

Film History 101: How did the Production Code change films?

How did the Production Code change how films presented controversial content, like sex and violence? 

The Production Code had a dramatic effect on how American cinema presented controversial content like sex and violence on screen. Unlike today’s rating system, the 1934 Production Code covered all motion pictures and set definitive limits on what could be shown on the screen for any audience.

The Motion Picture Production Code was pioneered by Will H. Hays and administered by Joseph Breen. While the code was around since the 1920s, it remained largely unenforced until complaints from audiences upset by suggestive films came rolling in. The complaints were in relation to several films including Grand Slam (1933), Baby Face (1933), The Story of Temple Drake (1933), and Murder at the Vanities (1934).

Prior to the enforcement, stories were bolder, staring characters that wanted to exploit others to build wealth and gain power and were successful in doing so. Baby Face is a good example of this. The film follows an attractive young woman who uses sex to advance her social and financial status. The film gives the young woman a lot of agency over her future through her ability to attract men into sleeping with her and helping her progress up the career ladder. The ending was also controversial because the main character doesn’t lose her wealth or status due to the discovery of her sexual vices.

After the ban went into effect, movies appeared to have more of a moral undertone, where the main characters receive retribution for their acts at the end of the story. Double Indemnity exemplifies this. In the movie, an insurance agent helps a woman murder her husband and the rest of the movie is spent hiding from discovery over the murder. In the end, neither the wife nor the insurance agent has a happy ending.

The two films also contrast in their explicit display of content on screen. Baby Face is much bolder and displays issues of sexual harassment and the use of sex for career advancement on screen, whereas Double Indemnity, while pretty explicit in it’s topic, had to reduce the display of violence in order to be permissible by the Production code administrators. There were key scenes removed or altered from the movie to make it acceptable.

How did films comes to be?

How did films come to be?

How was film created?

Filmmaking techniques and styles vastly improved throughout the silent era (i.e. 1890s to the 1930s). The techniques change both how films were created and viewed, while the style of filmmaking became longer, more complex, and more storytelling focused due to advances in technology and thought-process.

The main source of this improvement was a series of happy accidents that produced the first version of the camera or the kenetigraph and the first version of the projector – the kinetoscope. These were amazing inventions at the time because they introduced the world to motion pictures. However, there were many challenges with them as well, mainly that they were heavy and static, kenetigraphs required lots of light, and kinetoscopes were only available to one person at a time for viewing. Another issue – the film couldn’t be edited. The second version of the camera, invented by the Lumiere Brothers solved these challenges by creating a two in one motion capture and projection device called the Cinematographe. The device was light enough for one person to carry, had a hand crank, and could be used with a 35 mm film. When they revealed it in Paris in December 1895, it became a huge hit for being able to convey the illusion of reality to a mass audience for a communal experience. However, this camera couldn’t handle longer films – thus the third camera came into existence. The Vitascope solved the main problem of the Cinematographe by preventing the breaking of film strips by using the Latham Loop. Edison patented this machine and began using it for profit. 

The styles of films also improved significantly to become longer, more complex, and more narrative. The first decade of filmmaking is considered the “Cinema of Attraction” where people were awed by the newness of the technology. Georges Melies, a magician, learned how to edit by using in-camera effects such as double exposure, split-screen, matting. He used these techniques to create the movie, “A Trip to the Moon” which follows the journey of a group of scientists to the moon and their adventures. It was one of the longest and most complex pieces of cinema made at the time. Alice Guy-Blache was the first female filmmaker who made her mark by using techniques such as color tinting, rudimentary sound, and pictures sink. Edwin S. Porter used cross-cutting or parallel action in his work to create more complicated narratives such as in “The Life of American Fireman” and “The Great Train Robbery.” Griffith created the first feature-length films at the time and is best known for the very controversial “The Birth of a Nation,” which inspired future longer films, but was very racist in its storytelling.

The Art of Website Design

The Art of Website Design

I recently redesigned the site that you are currently on. Here are some tips I have developed to help you master the art of website design based on my long hours and hard lessons.

  1. Identify your key audiences for the site. I’ll start by saying that I have tried to design my website several times and always run against roadblocks. So, I began this time by watching a website design workflow video by CharliMarieTV. She talked about identifying your main audiences for the site, and I realized my audience was two groups of people – people who are interested in purchasing my products, and those who are interested in my content and art classes.

  2. Create a mind map of all the pages you would like to have, and then a minimal viable product (MVP) or the version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. CharliMarieTV, as well as many other designers, talk about doing this. In this instance, since I am currently using Redbubble to sell my greeting cards and art prints, I chose to keep that as my main site, while I worked on creating this beauty.

  3. Develop a mockup of your website pages before you begin. Trying to create a website without having a clear idea of what you want will lead me to waste a lot of time. I know, I have wandered down many a hole in the past trying to figure out how to both design and implement in WordPress at the same time. The main thing that increased my speed and effectiveness this time around was using PowerPoint to layout my page design and color scheme prior to learning how to input it onto the website.

While the initial draft was very rough, it allowed me space to research and identify the items that I really liked in other people’s websites, as well as conceptually understand what might be the best types of graphics based on my content. Then, when I went to design my site, I knew the core elements I wanted and how I wanted to organize them. I was able to figure out how to implement most of my desired items using this approach.

  1. Watch youtube tutorials of people who walk you through setting up your site on your desired platform. I was really struggling to find a template that would allow me to sell original art pieces on my website until I searched on youtube. There I found numerous videos by various YouTubers who walked me through the whole process from start to finish. This youtube video was particularly helpful in walking me through how to set up the template for WordPress with eCommerce.

  2. Seek feedback from friends and family. After I finished creating my site, I shared it with a few key friends who navigated through the site and told me any issues they were having with it. That helped me identify anything I might have missed before sharing with everyone on my Instagram account.

These are the tips that really helped me have a smoother and easier process in creating a personal website. Let me know if these tips work for you!

Text content

2

Art is a Tool for Resillience

Last year I did an experiment.

I started painting art pieces for each of my coworkers in the office. I took requests of what people wanted and then I would spend my evenings and weekends time making work they found meaningful. I made 20+ art pieces and am still working through more.

Why did I do this?

Because I wanted to use art as a way of connecting with people. I didn’t want my art to just be a beautiful item that hung on a wall. I wanted it to be something that touched people’s hearts and brought me closer to them. Here are pictures of some of the items I created, and three key takeaway lessons I learned from this experience.

1. People derive meaning and value from different things in life.

Some of my coworkers and friends valued experiences, while others valued relationships, inspiring leaders, and others valued animals. By creating art that visually represented something they valued, I was able to understand them and support them on a deeper level.

2. I felt less stress and anxiety about my life.

Instead of anxiety, I felt more rejuvenated through the act of drawing and painting on a regular basis. This isn’t just true for me though, a 2016 research paper in the Journal of the American Art Therapy Association found that 45 minutes of creating art in a studio setting significantly lowered cortisol levels.

3. Through consistent practice, I was able to see the world differently.

I was able to exercise a new mental muscle and skill that allowed me to see more beauty, love, and meaning in my own life as well as the lives of others. I became more human.

If you want to learn more about the positive impacts art can have on your brain, check out this NPR article. If you are already using art as a creative hobby, read my other post about developing a style. To check out more of my recent art, follow me on Instagram

Load More