A NEW PAGE

So it’s now 2022. A new year, and with it always the pressure of “new you”.

I prefer staying outside of this slogan, and having said that it is also a time to set intentions and feel into the dreams one might have for this new year ahead. A page gets turned.

Personally, I have felt the need to set myself a new working structure: as I am writing a Children’s story and creating the illustrations for it, it feels apt to create a containment which will allow my creativity to flourish.

However… This also brings up much pressure for me. A structure, a discipline, a have-to. I really struggle with that. So there’s the need for flexibility inside of the structure, to allow for change when necessary. It’s not a military operation. I can feel the need there is for me to listen, listen to myself, to the whispers. What is this day calling for? In this world obsessed with productivity and result, how can I carve my own space, listen to my own needs?

My friend gave me this quote about productivity which I love:

“Productivity means being able to create something with ease, steadiness and joy.” Mary Jaksch

Meditation

For a few weeks now, I have committed to practicing meditation at least once a day. And it’s making a huge difference. Sometimes I listen to online meditations (it’s amazing what you can get for free), sometimes I don’t have anything on. I love to do womb meditations, imagining my head and shoulders as a big leafy tree, my torso and belly the trunk, and roots coming down through my vagina into the very centre of the Earth herself. It’s really helping me to stay grounded, and move through the different moods and emotions that arise throughout the day.

Before writing this I thought “What’s the point? Nobody cares about your meditation. Why do you even bother?”, but I let that voice do its thing, politely declined its invitation to follow her into the hole of self-doubt and paralysis, and wrote away anyway. I credit this to my meditation practice. The more I meditate, the deeper the meditations, and the more I want to meditate. I crave it even. Sometimes all is happening is lots of chatter, but I remind myself that the act of sitting down and the intention to meditate is powerful in itself.

Now I need to plan my week ahead. What do I want to accomplish this week? How do I want to structure it? I find this very difficult indeed. Being self-employed isn’t always easy. Whenever I have been at school, it being Uni or before that, I can flourish within the structure, excel even. But as soon as the structure was gone, I flopped and melted. I have decided to get a business coach for creatives, in part because I feel I really need the accountability it offers, deadlines to stick to, someone to report to, who can hold me to account. It starts on Friday. In the meantime, let’s create a week’s schedule! Til next time.

I seek...

I seek a different rythm,

I seek the milky Moon,

The gentle sound of the rain.

I seek to be close to the Earth,

Her seasons, music and rythms.

I seek the rythm of the Feminine,

The song of the body,

I seek the Divine.

I seek a deeper peace,

And to fetch treasures,

I seek to reveal and unravel,

I seek the Underworld.

I seek to be whispered to.

Putting forth the Feminine essence,

Is my life’s work.

I know it in my bones,

I have always known.

I know stand firm whilst acknowledging the shame, the hesitancy I carry,

From millenia of oppression, years of hiding and secrecy.

We are the daughters of the witches that didn’t burn.

After a few days of hibernation in my menstruation cave, I have fetched treasures I wish to share. I have bathed in the words of Wise Women and nourished my soul. Here is a little gem from ou Mother Clarissa Pinkola Estès, an extract from her beautiful book “Women who run with the wolves”:

“As a woman lives them, she will understand more and more of these interior feminine rythms, among them the rythms of creativity, of birthing psychic babies and perhaps also human ones, the rythm of solitude, of play, of rest, of sexuality and of the hunt.”

SPROUTS

So we’ve done it! We’ve planted our new babies. We’ve bought a little greenhouse, which we left in the house for a bit, just whilst the weather is cold. But they’ve grown a little too fast, some of them may not survive, the stems are too high. Trial and error.

What does this have to do with art you say? Everything.

Art is a slow, growing, dare I say birthing process. It takes a long time to make anything you deem worthwhile. It needs care, love, attention. Trials and errors.

I have a vision for my next artworks, I want them to be coming from the earth, I want to leave cotton inside the earth for a while to see what will happen. I want to make art by my favourite tree in my local park, which has been a life saver during lockdowns. The other day, I cleaned rubbish some silly people left around the tree. It is a beautiful spot, I want to take care of it.

So I will take my newly dyed fabrics, a pair of scissors, maybe some thread and needle, and I will just see what happens.

NATURE IN COLOUR

A couple of years ago, I took a course on natural dyeing (dyeing fabrics with plants). It felt exciting and overwhelming at once, a lot to take in. I loved it, it came from a deep need I had to use natural materials that didn’t harm the environment. My love for textiles was reignited (I studied fashion), and I could see how I could use textiles in painting, as collage, going back to the sewing machine. It felt like a big step, and the processes seem complex at first, and I left it to one side (I did try dyeing with avocado pits successfully, and made ink with it).

Natural dyeing is time consuming, it’s slow, like the rythms of nature. And I struggled, so used to immediate, ready to go materials.

I decided to use plant powders to make watercolours, and then found out the dyes aren’t lightfast, they change overtime… Not great for making art! But now, I am embracing it as part of the proccess. Using organic materials means they transform, morph overtime, and that is a beautiful thing. But it goes against the grain of the artworld.

And now I have decided to experiment with natural dyeing again, it is calling me. So I am taking it small steps at a time, starting with onion skins. I cook so much that I have gathered many! I have also bought hollyhock and madder seeds to grow my own plants from scratch…! As I am growing vegetable seeds (we have an allotment), it doesn’t feel daunting anymore.

I will be updating you on the results!

The Divine Feminine

In the past few years, I have really been connecting to the Divine Feminine, to this energy that is unleashing everywhere in the world, if you know where to look. And it is so so necessary, women everywhere are organising circles (I am one of them), red tents, celebrating their cycles and periods, creating rituals, altars, experimenting with witchcraft. All of this has been inspiring my work of late very much. This piece, with its curves and layers upon layers, is a representative of this energy. I see it very much as a piece of jewellery, delicate and magical, like a talisman.

I am writing a children’s story at the moment, and I am very much speaking of the Divine Feminine in that story.

Here are some of the Greek Goddesses I am drawing inspiration from:

• Demeter: Mother of Persephone. The Earth Mother. “She is tall and wide of shoulder and hip. She’s bountiful, her breasts are always full of milk. They say a river of stars from the milky way flows through her” Clarissa Pinkola Estès, “The creative fire” audiobook

• Hecate: Goddess of magic, witchcraft, the night, the moon, ghosts and necromancy. She holds two torches.

• Selene: Goddess of the moon. Lunar sphere or crescent crown upon her head

• Baubo (my favourite): baxdy, fun-loving, sexually liberated, very wise. Baubo’s face is in her belly, with her vulva forming her chin

Nature and slowness

I don’t know about you, but when Spring is finally here -yesterday was Ostara, the spring equinox, the first day of spring- all I want to do is go outside, spend time with nature, and hear the birds singing loud. This morning I woke-up and decided to go for a walk, I love doing that first thing. I wasn’t feeling well, so it was a beautiful way of “walking” my worries and stress (I am very often worried and stressed). For some reason, this last weekend was full of anxiety. Whenever I go for a walk, it reminds me of a different rythm we can take, a slower more gentle one. We live in a world of “go go go”, but nature is slow, it takes time, care and love for things to grow, for seasons to change. Yet we live at 1000 miles an hour, and I don’t think it’s doing us any good.

When I go on instagram and I see some of my fellow artists being (seemingly) more productive and “out there” than I am, I start to panick, and feel I am not going fast enough, not doing enough. But the truth is, I very much feel that I have found my rythm recently. I move slowly, I just do. And I have my hands in many pies also (my art, my art classes, my cooking classes, writing a children’s book), some weeks it feels like nothing has happened, others feel very productive. It is the ebb and flow of life. I choose to follow my body, I choose to be with what is for me at any particular moment, give space for emotions to be released.

And for something fun, I recently took this quiz by Yamile Yemoonyah to find out what my spirit guide is, and it is a nature spirit. It makes so much sense to me, and somehow it’s made me feel more at home in my body to know this. I am a nature spirit, I do thrive in the silence of the open spaces, my heart comes alive in the forest. If this is all too airy-fairy for you just have a laugh for me!

COOKING

As well as an artist, I am a trained Macrobiotic cook and health coach, I studied at the International Macrobiotic School in Devon. Yesterday, I taught an online class, we made the food from this photograph: beetroot and chickpea burgers, staranise infused tempeh, orange and broccoli bulgur, quick greens and coconut sweet potato fries.

What does that have to do with art you say? Well, of course cooking is an art, and I very much approach it this way, playing with colours and shapes, tastes and cooking methods. Macrobiotics is a really creative practice, as it is based on the “5 transformations” or “elements” from Traditional Chinese Medicine: Water, wood, fire, earth and metal. Each transformation is associated with a pair of organs (metal with lung & large intestine for example), and also with emotions (metal is grief), and foods, as well as ways to cook these foods. To me, it is an endless creative exploration. The beautiful gift of Macrobiotics is the sense one gets of being more grounded, calmer and more able to approach life and its ups and downs. I have used this in my life in a big way: as a person with bipolar, it has helped me tremendously to stay more in “the middle”, and to not venture too high or too low (I should say here, alongside medication).

I really enjoy teaching these online classes, but I also have much more to learn: I get thrown off when a mistake has been made, or when I am not sure about something. After the class, I tend to worry about whether or not the students enjoyed the class, whether or not the food they’ve produced is good, and I panic I said the wrong thing here or there. I am grateful for the lessons this venture teaches me, and I can take that into my art practice too.

A new way of working

I got through phases in my work, I will often find a new way of working that I find exciting, and it stays with me for a little while.

This latest one is very interesting to me. I have fallen in love with monoprinting, and I create lots of drawings in one go. But I don’t usually like many of them, though they all have a section I will find interesting. So I cut them up, piece them together with the other bits I find appealing, then add colour, or leave them as they are. I have also enjoyed putting them on coloured paper which is a nice change from the white background.

I just love paper. Every now and again, I try working on canvas, but really my loves are drawing and collaging. It is not impossible to collage on canvas, but it’s a bit tricky if you’re using big pieces of paper.

I am also writing and illustrating a children’s story, and I have decided that the illustrations would be abstract. I have also been using this method working on them.

I am writing this on a Monday. Mondays are really hard for me, it takes me a while to get going, so I’ve decided to write a blog post every Monday morning…

Painting to fill a hole

It’s occurred to me in the past few months, which have been eventful to say the least, that often, I paint to fill a hole inside of me. I get to a stage where I want to fill the page so I fill a hole. I don’t know whether this makes any sense to anyone, but it’s almost like a distraction, especially the decorative patterns from my 2018 artworks. I can’t stand the silence, I can’t stand the stillness that there can be when making work, and so I paint lots and lots of colour, patterns, so that I don’t have to face the silence.

So far in 2019, my works have been monochrome, often black on white. I am facing the stillness, I am facing the empty space. I am facing the unknown. Letting things unfold naturally, following the trail it’s taken me to. It’s bloody difficult, and often I wanna give up. These works are so different from my usual, they are so bare, and stripped off of any decorative elements. So I continue, I face the fears.

"Work is love made visible"

"Always you have been told that work is a curse and labour a misfortune. But I say to you that when you work you fulfill a part of earth's furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born. An in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life, and to love life through labour is to be intimate with life's inmost secret... Work is love made visible." Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

Well that's a thought!

I haven't written a blog post in a long time, and I feel all sorts of things I want to share on here, many I feel too embarassed to.

I have been going through many changes in the past few months, a beautiful new home and a garden studio freshly completed! It's taken a while to set-up, and on a more personal note I had a miscarriage a few weeks ago, and so it's taking a while for things to get back to "normal" so to speak...

I am at a sort of crossroads with my work you could say, I can feel that something new wants to emerge, and I don't know "how to" birth it. Or rather I think I keep on being in the way. What's in the way is much much much fear, fear of letting go of "older" ways of working, older ways of making marks, fear that the new stuff won't be as good as the old one, fear that no one will like it or buy it. Fear that anyways I'm not good enough, never have been never will be. Seeing so much stuff on Instagram and feeling overwhelmed at the amount of art there is in the world, I feel swallowed by it all, confused, wanting to go into so many directions, scared that all of what I'm seeing in seeping through me and what I make is just a mish-mash of other people's stuff. I'll never be original, will never amount to anything, will never be good enough.

I keep on finding artists on Instagram who have 100k + followers... What? How? How do I... STOP!! That's not what art and life are about, I don't think.

The other day, I expressed to my husband that I really really want to make some sculptures, I haven't done so in a very long time and it's icthing me. He said "don't make sculptures, no one buys sculptures. You can't sell those at The other Art Fair". It's so easy to fall into this, so so easy. But truth be told, right now I feel I have nothing to loose. So I got some plaster and I am gonna make some sculptures, without feeling that they have to be something to be sold, or be liked. And let them nourish me, and the rest of my works.

And to end this post, a shout out to my friend Laetitia Sfez who's lauching her new brand "The Sundown Society", she interviewed me in her blog a while ago.

A month of breathing

So I have to be completely honest here, I have been feeling very very stuck with my art recently.
 I have not had a lot of drive, or desire to do much, and working from home now has its own challenges.

This morning, after a good bodywork and meditation session, I have come up with a brief for myself. Because I really do need structure, I need some kind of framework to work inside of. So I have decided that for the next four weeks, I would create artworks "from the heart", whatever that means (this came to me in a meditative state, so sometimes it won't make much sense to my head...). I want to take time to let artworks be, so often I rush, I feel I need to bring a conclusion, or else they'll escape me or something. I want to build them, slowly, gently. I need to give myself and the artworks room to be, to breathe. To really listen, to go slow, to love every step, enjoy every mark. To trust these artworks, however small or insignificant they may feel, will feed into everything else I do. To make them, in spite of my head wanting to wait for the "perfect" time, place, material, to make them "aimlessly", without the pressure of needing them to be somewhere specific, for somewhere or someone specific. To let them grow, like children and plants. To take time to appreciate their beauty.

This is what I will do until 12th March.

Well, Hello!

Oh there it goes again, I have not written on this blog in ages. This always happens, blablabla... Well it just does. Life happens, moved home and currently working from my spare room in my house. That is a big change, and I need to get used to it.

Last night I went to an event organised by Be Smart About Art, who really offer some fantastic resources for artists. I am thinking of becoming a member, as it would feel like being part of something throughout the year, which I could really use! Working alone from a studio is really lonely business, and sometimes I can just use that little push. It's also about being part of a community I guess. One of the things which inspired me most was the hand made brushes brought by the "Modern Eccentrics", they were running a small workshop using natural inks they made, and invited people to create marks using brushes they made themselves. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to participate, my mind was telling me to do "useful" stuff last night and so I didn't attend. But the picture on the flyer is just stunning, it made me want to dive into sculptures again and also highlighted something I am deeply interested in, which is the idea of the transient, and also making your own materials as an artist. Thinking about what we put into the world is a deep concern of mine, and there's a lot I don't love about the manufacturing of art materials as well as myself making so many sculptures and paintings that at times I have to throw away... 

On Saturday I went to a artist "crit" organised by Turf projects, and someone suggested that I "unpick" my sculptures and reuse them to create new work: light bulb moment. My sculptures have NEVER been fixed, in fact, most of them fall apart rather easily, as they are mostly pinned or stitched badly... When I created them, I loved putting them into different places, making them look different every time they changed context. As they're made of soft fabrics, they don't have "one way" of being exhibited, they move, change, transform themselves.

I also thought about using very basic techniques such as papier maché or Salt dough, both childhood loves of mine which are just fantastic, using recycled materials or non-toxic ones. I want to create "proper" sculptures again, and these could inform my drawings and paintings. I feel that January thing of making some very new and exciting works... And this morning fell upon this Artsy article about "non-serious" art and materials... It's all there! Happy new year.

"It's full of things waiting to be turned into other things"

L. Cornelissen & Son in London, my own studio space "full of things waiting to be turned into other things" and "Told You Twice" painting by Heather Day.

This morning in the car, I had the delightful surprise of stumbling across a BBC Radio 4 show about one of my favourite art shops in London, L. Cornelissen & Son. Beautiful wooden floors, ancient smell reminiscent for me of my former drawing school in Toulouse, smells of oils, pastels, wood and the staggering beauty of intense colour pigments. There's no place quite like it, although being French there's the Sennelier shops in Paris of course, but the kindness and generosity of the staff at Cornelissen make it a truly unique place, a chance to take the tunnel into the past.

A few sentences caught my ears this morning as I was listening, somebody used the phrase "Jars full of potential" and the presenter spoke of the shop being "full of things waiting to be turned into other things". Music to my ears and my heart, the deep feeling and knowing that it is also all I am doing, being an artist means to be surrounded with things that have potential, little jars of beauty, and indeed all of my papers, collage materials, paints, pencils, brushes, they are all waiting peacefully to be turned into other things, for transformation to occur. My studio IS full of things waiting to be turned into other things. What a beautifully simple way to put it...

There's an object that has been waiting patiently for a while now, something I used compulsively when I was studying on my MA in Glasgow. It's a little microphone, a little gem of a recorder. I used to speak to it, record myself making art or simply talking. I've had some intense moments with that little machine, and I haven't had any use for it since. However in the past few days, something has occurred in me, something unexpected, I want to start recording and interviewing people I know, people i find interesting, people I admire. It may even turn into a podcast... Shhuuut... It's a secret...

In the recent few days, I have been taken by the works of an artist I have just discovered called Heather Day. Heather's work is absolutely gorgeous, so is she, and she lives in a truly beautiful reconverted warehouse in San Francisco of all places. One of those people you cannot help but be just a little bit envious of... Heather seems to be working with numerous brands and that seems to be supporting her career as an artist very well. I find it interesting, refreshing and very contemporary. It's the first time I come across someone who does that. She has even worked with Facebook to develop some wandering paintings. There are so many ways to be an artist, and Heather seems to have found a way of doing so that works well for her and has a flourishing career. Hats off to her!

Digital Amusement

Folks it's been a very long time... Every time I start a blog (this is probably my 5th), there's a always a point where it dies down a bit. It seems inevitable somehow, the blog supports me up to a point where things are better, I have gotten what I needed from it and I do not feel the need to write in it any longer. This one is no different.

Let's see if that can shift.

In the past few days, I have been working on a new series of "Digital Découpages" (a series of digital artworks -collages made from photographs of my own works- entirely made on Photoshop), as I am participating in two art fairs in September and October (Roy's People Art Fair in Angel and The Other Art Fair at the Old Truman Brewery). I enjoy working on these immensely, they really are a lot of fun, they're quick and I get get many ideas down quickly. I also love how they give me an opportunity to "re-work" some of my work, in a way open-up each piece to another possibility, one I choose not to take when I made the work.

It has to be said, they are also a good way for me to make up the money for the stands, as art fairs are very expensive. I am also working on a screen print I will actually get to make in August before the start of RPAF. I have never really made a proper screen print, just played around mostly with single layers I then painted on top of. I was always reluctant to finding some more "commercial" artworks, however I think it is indeed necessary!

Those 15 minutes

Today I want to write about those 15 minutes when I "leave" the studio (but don't). I take one last look at the works I have produced during that day, take photos, and... Oh let's change this bit, or that bit. And I end-up staying 15mins longer, or an hour. In those 15 minutes, there's so much less pressure, and perhaps I've come to a certain place in the process where it feels like I've been "rehearsing" all day for that final moment, and I just go for it. I almost "don't care", in a good way, and often I end-up being more productive than I have in the previous hours of studio work. And there is this lingering feeling that I don't want to leave the pieces alone overnight, that I will miss them like babies. There's for sure an attachment to my pieces, especially when they are not quite finished and anything is possible. I love that feeling that anything is still possible, that I can still completely fuck it up or turn it into something great.

I'd like more of the day to be like those 15 minutes, care-free and intense.

Compete

My head has been buried in the sand with competition deadlines for the past few weeks. There are four I want to enter int he next couple of months, and so I am working towards creating new works for them all. I'll probably need to submit a few older works too.

Competitions can really be so disheartening, they're expensive to enter (especially when you have to pay them back to back in the same month!) and the chances of actually getting in are so small. Many of them make some very conceptual choices when it comes to their selected artists, and to be honest this year I won't apply to some major ones because I know I simply don't stand a chance. I'd rather focus my energy on some that I actually feel a kinship to, and for the first time I read all of their blurbs about how they judge and what they are looking for.

This year I discovered the Luxembourg Art Prize on Facebook (thanks to being connected to so many artists around the world) and when I read what they were looking for, I literally jolted: I had never come across this type of language in the arts in the UK, and I feel a real connection to what they are saying, and it feels so refreshing to me.

"For example, the Committee may be sensitive to the following points: the originality of the work, technical mastery, coherence of the work, freshness, novelty, historical continuity, the artistic, literary, historical, scientific or philosophical references in your work, the message conveyed, the poetry that emerges from the work.

The Committee hopes to find works that have been produced in a unique moment of grace experienced by the artist at the time of their creation. These magical creative moments are what make a work unique and unlike any other."

For the first time in a long time, I feel hopeful that I actually stand a chance. Luxembourg here we go!!

What the flower can teach me

I wanted to write about flowers, and about a few thoughts that have come since buying a bunch. I was slightly mocked and looked down on when studying my MA for bringing flowers into the studio to use as inspiration. Flowers are not very post-post-modern or post-post structural (me neither, don't know what it means), and so it wasn't seen as a very "cool" thing to do, looking at flowers or nature in general. And I wasn't putting any irony or cynicism into it either, I wanted to access something through the flowers, something about simplicity and beauty. Now I have said it, the very big taboo word, beauty. It is so sad that we cannot appreciate the simple beauty of a flower, that we've become so cynical that e cannot let it touch us. To me, it seems that all these things have been belittled in the post-modern ear in art because they are attached to the feminine in our subconscious. But because of that, we don't allow ourselves to take from the flower big lessons, flowers and nature have so much to teach us, about colour (just this photo of a close-up shows how many different shades there are, from the pale yellow to the pale pink, to the white and the fuschia, how extraordinary!) about being alive, about breathing, about dying, about transformation ultimately. On this note, I love these quotes from « Mindfulness & the Art of Drawing : A Creative Path to Awareness » by Wendy Ann Greenhalgh:

“What I discovered that day when drawing a rose is that when we’re drawing and seeing with awareness, we draw closer, and come into relationship with the thing we are drawing. In truth, drawing is all about relationship, because it requires us to build connections with the world around us, to get to know it better and deeper through the process happening on the page. When we draw something, the nature of that object, place or person can communicate itself to us and we can reciprocate and reply –show that we have noticed- through the marks we make as we draw. What we are starting, in fact, is a dialogue, and talking is how relationships are formed.”

“When we are drawing and seeing mindfully, then, we are encountering the world in an intimate way that we may never experience anywhere else, or in quite the same manner. The connection we form with what we are seeing, what we are drawing, goes beyond the intellectual, beyond words and language, or even marks on a page. It even goes beyond the thinking-mind. This is the relationship of two bodies in space, an intuitive relationship of the spirit, where we begin to sense the nature of things, their “is-ness”, their “being-ness”. And when this happens, we can simply be with them in our completeness too. More than that, we start to lose our sense of subject –us in here, and object- it out there."

All of it, all at once

On this beautiful Saturday, I bought myself a beautiful bunch of flowers and went to the farmers market, a weekly ritual of mine. And of course, one of the reasons why I bought flowers is that I want to draw them. And there it starts, the "monkey mind" limitless loop of feeling that I have to "do" something, that I have to sit down and make artworks. And they have to be brilliant of course please, they have to be earth-shattering, the best I've ever done. And in that endless mind game, there is absolutely no freedom, in fact I cannot breathe. And I draw or paint very quickly, as if my life depended on it. But in fact, all along I was missing the point, missing the moment where I can relax into the object I am looking at, where I enjoy every single mark, one after the other, slowly, as if I was sipping a delicious elixir of life. And here the analogy with food is very pertinent, because I have noticed -as I am studying Macrobiotic cooking and going deep inside my patterns around food and how I eat- that I do exactly the same thing with food. Now I am a good cook, I love doing it, it's creative, it's all about colours and textures, you can play with tastes and shapes, I feel like I'm in some magical laboratory in the kitchen. And although I put so much care, attention and creativity into the food I make, I then sit down and gobble it at the speed of light, scared at every fork full that someone is going to steal the plate away from me. And in both cases, in art as in food, I don't get to enjoy it very much, I only ever get glimpses where I really savour the food or the mark. I want to create all of "it", all of life, all at once. I want to eat all of it, all at once too.

So what about pausing? What about taking a minute or two to enjoy, to really watch the brush as it is leaving behind a trace or gooey pigments on the page, to make sure that before I rush to make the second mark -panicking it won't be good enough-  I take a few seconds to breathe? It's all down to breathing, really. A very good friend of mine once told me "the only thing there really is, is breath" and it's true. The worries, the paranoïas, the rollercoaster of thoughts, it's all in our heads. So back to the breath, the only "real" thing.

“When we are drawing and seeing mindfully, then, we are encountering the world in an intimate way that we may never experience anywhere else, or in quite the same manner. The connection we form with what we are seeing, what we are drawing, goes beyond the intellectual, beyond words and language, or even marks on a page. It even goes beyond the thinking-mind. This is the relationship of two bodies in space, an intuitive relationship of the spirit, where we begin to sense the nature of things, their “is-ness”, their “being-ness”. And when this happens, we can simply be with them in our completeness too. More than that, we start to lose our sense of subject –us in here, and object- it out there." From « Mindfulness & the Art of Drawing : A Creative Path to Awareness » by Wendy Ann Greenhalgh

From the old... The new is born

A while ago, a thought came to me that I would like to tidy-up my drawers where I stock my papers and artworks, a big chest my husband made for me... It's been a mess from day one and I can never find what I am looking for in there. But I was being so resistant, tidying-up was gonna take precious time on my work and those new pieces I want to make. But somehow, in the midst of making work, I found myself tidying those drawers without even realising. And it was a lightbulb moment: I found so many treasures in there, old works I had completely discarded, works I had started but not finished, bits and bobs, scraps etc... If there is one thing I love, is to completely forget about an artwork in progress, put it away because it isn't "good enough" and find it again months or years later, and to be able to see it in a new light, see in it a fresh new potential I hadn't seen before.

I started to cut-up, to throw paint around, glue pieces of paper together to change the scale of a work, I used a new exciting sponge tool I made to createmarks, used a big brush (as I want to make bigger works), not caring so much about the preciousness of it all. Lately, I have been very precious about paper, not wasting it, making sure it stays clean, and I have been working smaller and smaller scale wise. Nothing wrong with that but slowly it felt my world was getting much smaller. In the past two days, I have told myself "even if I think it's rubbish, I can cut-up a part of it to use it in something else, maybe in a year's time".

And it's been so liberating, I hadn't felt this excited about making work in a long time. I have dreamed about them, and have been sad to go home in the evenings and leave them all alone in the studio... Being less precious, putting the pressures of creating art "good enough to be sold straight away" to the side has been a gift, and it needs to carry on, as that's how works develop, get refined and keep being exciting, relevant. You can get very stuck and routine-like even when your job is to be an artist. And my sketchbook has been a very precious source of inspiration indeed. I have been drawing in it lots, it's been like a visual diary for me.