ever ray tova

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ever ray tova

welcome to cr8v rcvry projects by ever ray tova studio & sanctuary ♡

ever ray is an artist, writer, coach, herbalist & healing foods chef.

they are on a journey of multiple recoveries, supporting others along the way. stay tuned for more cr8v rcvry ♡

29/06/2025

i am heading out on a road trip to see one of my best buds, figured I'd need a good trucker hat for the road :)

19/06/2025

friday evening i will be participating in a community art gala Gigi's Cafe, proceeds go to support Art Shelf , a local non-profit supporting community wellness & recovery through accessible art making. its been a really valuable resource to folks in recovery, local artists, myself included.

if you're looking for a nice way to kick off your friday night, come see some art, support local arts & come see me in makeup & platforms & fancy frippery ♡♡♡

16/06/2025

i always love to see folx studios & their working process.
say hello & join me on a micro tour of my studio table ♡
oh yeah, I also joined tiktok... who knows how that will go, but feel free to say hello .ray.tova ♡

13/06/2025

did you go to prompts when you were in high-school?
I did. it was kinda the worst.
I am pretty sure next Friday will be great though ♡

18/05/2025

did you know that i also mentor & coach other highly creative/highly sensitive neurodivergent folks?

we use creativity, sensory sensitive approaches to mindfulness & life design, strategies for community care & regenerative ecological approaches to befriending this challenging & often stressful life.

mental health is but one way our relationship to the world & ourselves shows up. it also shows up in how we share our time, focus our energy, prioritize our lives. i loved being a mental health practitioner when i was still able to keep up with a 60 hour work week & setting aside all my creative goals & community dreams in service of a career. interestingly, professional carework made me unable to care for my most valuable tools: me, my mind-body balance, my relationships & my creativity.

the greatest gift getting sick & developing worsened disability gave me was time with myself. to understand the nature of my own failures to thrive, the strengths & the downfalls of survival strategies, time to understand how all i had done to try to keep up & perform capitalism changed me. time to understand how vastly my own & each our worlds are impacted by a dominant societal value set, and how detrimental that value set can be on sensitive, diverse & creative spirits. (that's most of us, by the way)

i don't have a ton of capacity & my ability is still very limited, but these few hours per month where I get to chat with some of the most precious brilliant people I've ever known, its a life giving gift. the tools we work with are tools i also work with in my own creative recovery journey.

somewhere between art school, nature sanctuary, peer support & tea time with your quirky Q***r Uncle, my coaching sessions are collaborative, creative sessions rooted in living our values & ideals, showing each other through doing, that we can create a more sensitive, cocreative world together.

as part of my own occupational therapy, trying to retrain my brain to read and comprehend again, I've been re-reading some books & articles, diving deeper into the work of people i love & also researching supportive ideas on creativity. i am currently reading lynda barry's book "syllabus: notes from an accidental profressor."

to say I love this book & lynda barry's work is an understatement. I adore it. her approach & style has resonated with me since I first learned of her as an artist student in chicago over 20 years ago. circling back now & integrating some of her approach and strategies into my own daily creative recovery work has been soul nourishing.

i have begun weaving some of her assignments into my own "emotional doodle" practice of daily visual journals. as a non-verbal processor & person with TBI, knowing how to express my feelings can come with challenges. daily creative exploration of emotions through drawing, doodles, little comics has incrementally helped me regain some capacity for self awareness & communication.

neurologically speaking, i have a long road to recovery. creatively speaking, this is a lit up brilliant time. and it is often the sparkling lights of hope & embodied possibilities arising from these coaching sessions & tools & the relationships they make possible, that let's me know the journey, however nebulous & uncertain, it is possible, it is beautiful & challenging & the most valuable journey of all.

to be a supportive community member to folks at the margins finding access to their creative brilliance, what a gift.

here's a couple examples of recent "emotional doodles" & the cover of one of my most beloved resources ♡

26/04/2025

i hung a little collection of watercolor & ink drawings at Gigi's Cafe in south uptown, it is the sweetest most surreal thing to see these little paintings on the wall. I've been painting them & lugging them around in a small sterilite container for a few years.
that sterilite box has been my traveling studio through years of houselessness & housing instability.
now i live in a house with my best friend & partner, we live a short walk away from a really lovely cafe that has become my regular spot & my art is on the wall.

my health journey has taken me to many unexpected and often challenging places, however, this has got to be one of the most meaningful thus far. for all that I lost, for all that I've had to let go, art, creativity & courageous friends have carried me.

its been a wild journey and now my life feels deliciously stable, art on a wall, love in my life, struggles still around but dang, this feels nice.

i love these little paintings so much. sitting having coffee after the install and knowing that folks will be seeing these little visions of planetary healing & gratitude, its so genuinely healing.

it's also got me excited to be working on a couple new series and let me say, I love these little images, but I am also ready to go large. it's been years of tucking my life and my art and my needs and my voice and my body into the corners of other folks homes and garages and back bedrooms and wowee, I'm ready to take up space.

🧡 here's to taking up space.

also, if u find yourself in south uptown minneapolis, stop by gigis and get something delicious & enjoy the art ♡

15/04/2025

growing at our own pace & going slow as we may need... it's not a terribly popular pace in this society & i absolutely know: it is the way for me.

how many times in life have we struggled with one another in our relationships that it was about pace rather than right ways or wrong ways?
we are taught there are right & wrong ways in colonialism. this isn't real, just fyi.

there are ways that affirm life, ways that expend life, ways that interrupt life, and they are only as right or wrong as they are for each person. for each person & the quality of relations we want to cultivate together.

i move slow
slower these days than before
slow & in fits and bursts & occasional beloved flows that easily shift to hyperfocus

colonial mindsets make it so we often feel like we're not doing enough, nor doing it fast enough... urgency isn't as real as it's made out to be.

we are allowed to move at our own pace. did you know that snails excrete a sparkly slime as a means to protect themselves on their slow path? the slime also is full of nutrients that adds to the well-being of most plants and soil they spread it on. moving at their own pace, snails protect themselves & offer paradoxical goodness to those paths they travel along.

25/03/2025

i finished this little painting a week or so ago, it's bringing me so much joy to play with textures like this.

I've been thinking about lot about liminal places, thresholds of change & the mysterious process of moving through big life change.

thinking about the layers beneath the surface that go unseen yet imbue all of life with nuance, sometimes chutzpah, sometimes sadness, sometimes that readiness to leap into the next era of our lives.

17/02/2025

i shared a gif a few days ago i'd stumbled across, it was of me making these patterns below using a friend's home theater projector as a design accommodation. i've been experimenting with different screen & projector combinations to varying degrees of success, this was a successful experiment, imho✨️

i learned design in the early to mid 90s, we used pencil, paper, pen, ink, xacto knives & a package of pantone paper. i loved it. i learned printmaking from the same salty curmudgeonly brit teaching at my community college, his lectures were brief, tactical, brilliant & wry, everything had this viscerality to it. i was hooked, i loved this approach to playing with imagery & color, learning theory thru doing & making.

design quickly went digital after my early education & i never quite caught up, from my first computer classes, i knew it wasn't my technology, i respected it & was in awe of what can be made, and my tools remained comfortably...well, digital but analog? with my hands, those digits...

weaving new and old technologies, in this case ink drawings & canva app tools, with simple shapes & grids of pattern, remind me in a felt sense of the excitement & delight those early years of learning design & printmaking. i appreciate the creativity that comes from these simple constraints, these ways of honoring limits & finding infinite possibilities.

the constraints of disability lead to creative reconsideration of available tools & creative rituals. when i look back at these designs made on a friend's projector, i feel a similar sense of delight making those early cut paper designs, playing around with color & shape.

these designs are certainly imperfect & there's different things I would do with the same tools today, and, they are this sweet time capsule of creative recovery & the tenacity of the creative impulse. i feel that so sweetly when i look at these again ♡

digital collage w/ink & watercolor colors, canva app, ever ray tova, 2022

12/02/2025

i came across this little gif i made a while back as a way to illustrate some of the accessibility journeys i've been on.

i love playing with pattern & collage, photography & digital tools, it's just that disability makes screens a very limited resource. i started experimenting with creating on screens using projectors.

this is when i was staying at a friend's house who had an awesome full theater style projector screen. i made these patterns on their wall! i really enjoy the textures & colors so much.

working this way has definitely changed a lot how i approach digital tools, they are a precious rare occasion rather than a daily tool, it's fun to play with ways to weave together both analog & digital sources.

these started as color ink & watercolor drawings & have become digital patterns i've used on a couple projects. this has me curious to play like this some more ✨️

04/02/2025

i'm so delighted w/this little experiment! i often carry a tiny palm sized notebook in my pocket, to keep track of little inspirations, lists, doodles...

i've been day dreaming about making a small line of stationary & these notebooks have been top of list. i made this little dozen as a prototype with oversized prints of the dream series cut down to hold handcut recycled newsprint notebooks.

i ♡ them so much 🤗
tiny notebooks coming for a pocket soon...

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