Sundarbans is a delta where hundreds of rivers meet the Bay of Bengal represented by the wavy vertical lines of this artwork. This original collagraph is hand pulled onto Somerset Velvet 300gsm paper using Cranfield inks with watercolour detail.
Having a bit of a silly sense of humour I like playing with words and especially in art form.
Sold! From Studio No 71 in Totnes, my Barn Owl with Stopwatch original painting with gold leaf.
Barn Owl framed
This weekend after a trip to Dartmoor we dropped in to collect some work from Studio 21 which has a great position at the bottom of the High Street. The shop is small but packed with interesting things to discover; pictures, sculptures, plates and bowls and glass and pottery and more!
Not only did we arrive on a day when a customer was about to purchase one of my original paintings, but Studio No 71 had also sold a framed Moongazing Hare print of mine during that day too.
How strange, not to have sold for quite some time, and then two in one day and when I was visiting!
It is so nice to meet the individual who likes my art enough to buy it and hang it on their wall. An image that I have formed from my imagination strikes its own chord with another person, and off it goes on its own journey, in this instance wrapped and strapped onto a bicycle!
Grateful for time with friends and walks on Dartmoor just as the season is turning and when such coincidences are a delight.
Yesterday I started an attempt at declutttering. What should I keep and what should go? I headed for my bookshelf and targeted some old sketchbooks having decided to photograph pages I liked and store them digitally instead.
In amongst artist and nature books are malingering sketch books from over many a year.
Some of the sketches have sentimental value, and are a visual diary hinting at events and places sporadically over the year. Some of the sketches were a means to an end. They were good practice for observing and drawing.
Other sketches were experimental when I had been involved in course work and attempting to work outside my usual method of creativity.
So I took sketchbooks which were not essentially full of great stuff and photographed those images I felt connected to and transferred them to my computer. The nice thing about looking back at sketch books from years gone by is that a lot of the images look better to me now than when I created them. The space and time that has passed makes them feel like they are not quite so firmly attached to me allowing me to be less critical.
The other nice thing about storing the sketches digitally is that they take on a more professional look on a screen than in the sketchbook.
I agree with the declutter theory that you feel lighter and freer without hanging onto lots of stuff. This is a start but I still have a long way to go.
A variety of pages from 2004 Sketchbook – from life, mixed media and character development.
Despite the fact that I live in a smallish town in the Cotswolds UK there is a significant population of artists. I nearly said thriving artists. They are thriving as far as their art might be concerned but I doubt that they are thriving as far as their contribution to their cost of living. There just has to be another job in the mix to enable most artists to “indulge” themselves their creativity. I digress…..
Stroud in the Cotswold Hills (UK) is a town of artists and creativity, music and alternative therapies, alternative remedies and alternative people. We have Open Art Studios in May and festivals of Music in the Summer and all sorts in between. Our Museum is the best ever for a small town, and within the same building is an exibition room which celebrates art of all varieties. We are lucky enough that the local Museum is currently hosting a selection of art from Matisse. Cut-outs (collage shapes cut with a scissors) was Matisse’ form of art which he made during the 1950’s.
Matisse Lithograph
To be honest, this work which must have been quite a revelation in that era does not do alot for me. But it must have been quite a development for that time and the evolution of different creative expressions have enabled us to have the freedom to create across all sorts of media and mix them up too, the ultimate in this being Mixed Media.
Still, even if Matisse is not your bag it is good to be in the presence of original art and have feelings toward different styles and media from the art world. You might want to buy only what you like, but witnessing and processing what art history and contemporary art has to offer will help develop your own view about your art and your art process and where it sits on the spectrum of creative expression.
My artist friend here is using her creative expression to mimic the art!
My creativity shut up shop for the Christmas period. I could sense my focus slipping as extra festive activities took hold. Rather than wrestling 
between the two I gave myself a break. I let myself off the hook.
Creativity is often seen as an easy kind of self indulgent luxury. Those that feel they have not been bestowed any creative talent imagine the enjoyment and loveliness of making pictures. Perhaps it does come easily to some, but I would imagine that like me plenty of artists procrastinate, heading off down the path of least resistance, that is any other activity except creativity.
Even washing the car has an easily perceived outcome…you wash it, it looks clean. With shopping, you shop and hey presto you have food you can cook with. What about a bit of decorating? Assuming you buy the right paint, paint it on in a sensible fashion, the room looks completely renewed. Having done all these things before there is no real danger of me straying into unknown territory and making a complete hash of this lot.
As for creating art, well only hundreds of decisions have to be made as you progress, tiny but important ones, the outcome of which make or break the painting. One of the hardest decisions is eliminating your options, what should one do next? And when things are not going right do you keep on with it or bin it?
So enter creativity as a discipline. I gave myself a Chrismas break, now I have to reintroduce my creativity. Like a daily supplement. It needs to be rated as essential, like fruit, or vitamins to let it grow, grow, grow.
Today being the first day on my renewed creative path I have gathered some ideas and started on something new. There are polar bears, hares, wolves and owls, cats and mice. Harvey the Aardvark is still hibernating, but only for a short while, he will be back soon.
Wishing anyone taking the time to read this a very Happy New Year for 2014. And for anyone wanting to be creative and not quite getting around to it, do a little bit each day and make it essential, just like your daily fruit and veg.
Anything from not changing the brush to not changing the water, not being lazy means making less mistakes and mess and is more time effective in the long run. I could have done with a list being given to me many years and many mistakes ago.
The Lazy Painter from Manic Illustrations says: don’t be lazy – turn the paper around for best results when painting up to an edge!
When you are painting up to an edge place your paper so that your brush is inside the edge and your brush point is against the edge as in Bunny 1 and Bunny 3 . So many times I have been too lazy to turn the paper round and would reach over the edge as in Bunny 2. Bunny 3 is happy to be upside down as it is easy to paint accurately this way. This is for a right handed person, for a left hander just flip the images horizontally.
I walked this morning along the unused canal near my home. Hovering alongside the water were many many tiny damselflies. These little creatures are only around 3cm long – tiny, delicate, like little blue flecked fairies. As I studied them with their framework-like wings and iridescent cerulean blue markings I wondered at such things that people and children might never notice or even know of. There is something heartening about discovering the beauty in nature that gives a sense of lightness to any moment.
Blue Tailed Damselfly
The damselflies are surely things of beauty and colour but nature does not have to be so showy to bring an uplifting moment. Even in our inner cities there is reward for paying attention to nature while in the park or a tiny garden where shiny beetles, spiders weaving, and hopping Robins will reveal themselves, although you have to focus somewhat to feel that awe. And keep the phone off.
So how about the common snail? I think that the difficult bit for a lot of us is the actual act of being still and allowing these moments to unfold, this includes me of course. Also we have to overcome some assumptions. Take the common garden snail. We know what they look like and they are kind of annoying when they are chomping on the hostas and other prize garden plants, so why on earth bother to pay any attention to one?
Here is a snail on my garden pot. This is surely an amazing feat for a design’ the snail shell and not the pot of course 🙂
The shell coils clockwise from the centre like most snail shells do. This is a logarithmic spiral meaning the distances between turns in the spiral increases in geometric progress. The formula for this is the Golden Section. It is used to approximate good composition in creating images. Using this ratio helps to construct pictures which are pleasing to the eye. Nature uses this ratio or rule in all sorts of examples – the approach of a hawk to its prey, the construction of the eye’s cornea, the centre of a sunflower, galaxies and so on. There are some good examples and explanation of the golden ratio in nature by GEORGE DVORSKY on this blog.
This may have all got a bit technical, rather the point I was trying to make was about looking at the pattern of the snail shell and seeing how it is both beautiful and remarkable it really is.
If you slow down and stop for a while, and take a good close look around you, even if in the most unlikely of places you will surely be amazed.
You often hear of artists heading off to the coast to get away from it all and give their creativity space and time and to further render their craft. Each year we drive to the Welsh coast, and I pop my transportable art equipment into my bag ready to grab all that inspiration that is about to descend upon me. A day or two would go by and with all the organising that went on before the holiday there is not much more to do than make sure kids were occupied and that the ready prepared meal was defrosting. By this time I am wondering why I am not using my sketchbook or getting out the watercolours. 
Over the years I have made a few nice informal drawings and paintings but the truth be known my creativity evaporates on holiday. Perhaps it is because I am not a landscape painter or just because the heart of my creativity is figurative and so the quiet coastal locations we choose just don’t rock my creative boat. But then surely I would still be brimming with ideas?
More likely then I am suffering from a form of writers block with all that leisure time. Perhaps it is because an example of the theory that when you do nothing in order to focus on being creative it then hides away in an inaccessible corner of your mind, waiting until you start to hoover or cut the hedge whereupon ideas will pop up effortlessly knowing you have not got a notebook to hand! This post relates to content in a post that I made in June called Accessing Your Creativity Whilst Watching TV? which describes how the brain prefers to be occupied with undemanding tasks in order to be able to explore different avenues. So instead of chasing my creativity into a corner by relaxing, I will be encouraging it out with a mundane task or two when I am back at home. And as for my holiday I have found I can quite happily write for my blog ready to post when I get back. As for the rest of the time it is fresh air, sea walks and sunshine.
My breakfast last week!
Sometimes it feels hard to be creative and other times it comes quite easily. The barometer for this may be the number of teeth marks in the pencil end as you sit there chomping away with not very much else happening. I recently saw a program by the BBC where it was surmised that mundane tasks or doing something that requires minimal thinking like taking a shower, or washing up allows the brain to be more creative. Whilst solving a creative problem or trying to come up with new ideas or solutions a mundane task allows the brain to meander around the thousands of kilometres of connections. Under pressure to be on task to do a job in hand, whilst sitting chewing the pencil in an attempt to be creative, forces the brain to concentrate and fast forward on the most direct route to the supposed answer, without paying attention to any other possible junctions along the way. In this instance if no solution comes to mind this presumably is the equivalent of writers block. In its simplest form less brain efficiency means more creativity.
I subscribe to this theory as ideas come more readily to me when I am watching TV in the evenings and I will just scribble them down for another time. Of course I do not mean whilst watching a film where it is critical to pay attention, and definitely not where subtitles are concerned! Even if the ideas are hardly legible, they at least have been captured and logged ready to work on properly in the morning. In the morning the need for that elusive idea forming creativity gives way to a more strategic approach and putting the idea to good use. Here the brain can concentrate fully and hopefully without too much distraction (except for the odd blog write up of course!).
BBC Article – Five Ways To Be More Creative
Diane Young Artist 