April Miller McMurtry (she/her) is the founder of THE MOON IS MY CALENDAR, LLC and creatress of the New Moon Calendar Journal. She is also a visual artist, mother, and creative lunar guide. Her work reflects her passion for nature-based cycles and creative expression.

Trained as a Spanish teacher with a background in international youth leadership, girls’ education, intuitive art, and mediation, she now loves to share the language of the Moon! April supports people on the path to growth and transformation through meditation, creative process, and awakening cyclical wisdom.

April is interested in how healing work is connected to our relationship with Earth and how following the moon helps us find ourselves and trust the process of life to unfold through co-creation. When she is not in her studio or cooking with her family, she can be found communing with flowers, trees, and the cosmos.

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What does Art is Magic mean to you?

To me this is a truth that I have lived by ever since I was a child! Art is central to learning about inner and outer worlds. Art is Magic and it is healing. It helps process emotions, connect with spirit, move energy, reveal what may be hidden, consolidate symbolic meaning, enter a meditative zone, and bring dreams into form by working with the elements from ether to earth.

"MY ART IS THE WAY I REESTABLISH THE BONDS THAT TIE ME TO THE UNIVERSE."

This powerful quote by the artist Ana Mendieta says everything to me about the drive to create and connect with nature through the ritual of artmaking. Her earth-body-works made a deep impression on my understanding of place, belonging, mother nature, identity and the body as nature many years ago.

The creative process helps me access my essence. Sometimes painting puts me in a trance or an altered state so that when I look at what I’ve made the following day it seems like it came from somewhere beyond me. Art allows the artist to be a channel for something magical. It is the exploration of the intersection of source and self.

What is currently inspiring you?

Flowers! As I am writing this, Spring is emerging and flowers of all shapes, sizes and colors are showing their faces. I love to draw from life and am currently working on a daily flower study quick sketch to document moments with flowers as a meditation. It keeps me connected to this buoyant phase of the seasonal cycle of Spring. Flowers are amazing teachers.

There is a beautiful poem by Thich Nhat Hanh that say: “Breathing in, I see myself as a flower… Breathing out, my eyes have become flowers.” I imagine seeing the world through the eyes of a flower with my heart glowing like the full moon. This feels inspiring to me right now.

What does your creative Practice look like?

Creativity is an act of creation. Creativity is making something out of nothing. Creativity is a way of BEING, not an end result. Art becomes the way you live your life.

Personally, I allow myself to ebb and flow - I don’t need the pressure to create visual art each day to somehow prove that I am an artist. So I go through phases and fill up sketch books when the muse moves me. I’ve taken a lot of online classes in the past few years and all my notes are covered in drawings. For anyone who is a visual learner you know that “doodling” is actually a way to process and integrate audio information.

I like to illustrate astrological concepts through expressive art to get to the heart of the energy behind the concepts. I also teach people ways to illustrate the breath as an extension of the lunar cycle. Drawing and painting can be a meditation in itself.

My ongoing creative practice involves creating a moon mandala each lunar cycle to hold the energy of my intentions. This started about seven years ago, so that's almost 100 moon mandalas!! It’s like an ongoing conversation with my future self.

For more involved paintings I will make sketches or gather reference material ahead of time. It's rare, if not nearly impossible for me to plan how something is going to look ahead of time - and to be honest that is not the point of making art for me. The magic is in the process, it reveals the form it wants to take through co-creation. It asks us to struggle with the unknown, listen to intuition, and have a sense of humor in the face of perfectionism. Shifting the focus more on how something feels than how it looks is one way to do this.