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52/3 – Manifestery

manifesto ~ manifest ~ manifestation

What do I want to manifest this year? I forget now where the idea came from, but I was mulling over these words….Yes, I’m still inhabiting that whole new year, new, newy nonsense. Excuse me if it’s beginning to grate. It will wear off (perhaps) ………….. but y’know I started out 2015 with some fairly specific wants which (and this might be why I’m perpetuating the thing) are panning out pretty well so far.

Targetted, focussed, my most defined wish was to deadlift (at least) 60kg, I was doing 30kg at the end of December. This week I did 40kg. The goal posts are closer than I reckoned on. For context, at the start of October 2014 I laughed at the suggestion of doing weights. ‘I’m not sporty, I just want to be a bit stronger, and bit less, y’know… wobbly and pathetic, maybe tone up a little…’ whilst firmly fixed in my head was the knowledge that lifting weights is a thing that other people do.

And then I tried.

And then I switched over to being one of those other people.

Some amount of sweat, aches and grim determination later, I’ve progressed from someone who lifts the tiniest weights available, a bit more each time.

I’m just using this by way of illustration.

Doing something in one area of life can open the mind in all the others.

This is a lesson I learnt in art school: Separating not being able to do something from not having done that something before.

Or not being good at it, to being not good at it yet.

The same thing, but from a very slightly changed viewpoint, is not exactly the same. Subtle distinctions. Nuances.

I LOVE nuances.

So I set about listing (the power of the written word) the essence of my intentions and what I want to manifest.

My manifesto for 2015:

Follow the Signs.
Stay Focussed: One Thing at a Time.
Always Try New Things, Go New Places, Meet New People, Have New Fun.
Have Love, Be Love, Have Fun, Enjoy
Keep Questioning, Keep Learning, Keep Notes, Keep Ideas, Keep Going.
Reach Beyond, Reach Past, Carry on Beyond the Horizons.

Then as an aside……..

I read an article recently, it was along the lines of how the physical act of writing something embues it with a power, seeing those words written in your own handwriting reinforces something at a very primal level, it is exclusively connected to the writer. Darn it I wish I remebered where this was so I could link you. But, in the small search I made for it, I found this instead. If you have any interest in the whole manifestary musings, take a mo to see this.

So my manifesto is embedded in my psyche, and sits on the opposing page to my vision board/bagua map. As I close the book they smoosh up against each other, and can embue each other with magic as the book rests. Meanwhile, watch this space for future manifestations!

52/3, Bagua Map and Coloured Wordery

Welcome to part next of the weekly unfolding of my year…

I was reading this week about Vision Boards. As my MO in life is heavily weighted toward visual inputs I leapt at this new (to me) strategy. In the words of my inner kid: Squeee I wanna make me a Vision Board!

If you’re intrigued, this is where I started out, and I can’t imagine there’s a better place. Jean Van’t Hul’s Artful Parent site is just brimming with all you could want to set you off, and then a list of books and resources to take you on from there.

I especially liked the way Jean sets out her Vision Board as a bagua map. This is a 3 x 3 grid dividing a physical space into sections representing different aspects of life. It’s origin is in feng shui, but it’s been adopted as a tool in various fields of personal development, self care, life training, newage wishy-washery, right across the board to even include more down-to-earth folks like me (ha!).

So this is the layout, the skeleton of the Vision Board, on which to hang wishes, dreams, intentions, ideas, metaphors and so forth. Jean uses magazine snippings – images and text that inspire and illustrate.

Off on a tangent here – I really love the way an act of creativity shows up so many metaphors for life, cos right off my brain is spinning out: I don’t need all those categories… some just don’t apply and some can be lumped together. (Follow that to it’s natural conclusion and yes, my bagua is just one box with a confused, homogenised version of me sat in the middle, puzzled and pissed off with the whole business. Ok, so I’ll go with the boxes…. But I wouldn’t choose those colours. So, which colours would I choose? where do I find the pictures that are the right colours for each box? or do I find B&W pics that I can colour? or should I do it all in photoshop and fuck it, I can have a digital one as a screen saver instead… <some more time passes>. FFS, brain, take what you’ve got. You can’t afford to dwell on all this not-knowing when there’s a thing to be done. Get on with it!

Life lesson: Just get on and do it. I was pretty certain in the early stages I wouldn’t know what I wanted in each box, or how I was going to set about acheiving it. Also, as it was the thing I wanted in this week’s page, and that’s a fairly rigid time limit, if it spills beyond its alotted time the whole thing will unravel and fall down the rabbit-hole of what am I doing, where am I going and a great big enormous whole what’sthepointofitall. And that’s a place I avoid at all costs.

So I left that part of my brain running round with all the I don’t know what’s going to happen while the rest of me got down to drawing the boxes, writing the words, colouring the colours, and accepting it will probably turn into something, even if I don’t know what (yet).

And, as suspected, it did.

I’ve come to find, if you let go of the wanting to know, the what it is will show up. And often in a surprisingly pleasing fashion.

The words and phrases defining the grid were down: ‘Power, Abundance’, ‘Health, Well-being’, ‘Career, Work’

Curously, just the act of writing these out – and once I let them settle – they began to spawn new words and phrases. Ones I’d already been playing with in the quest to find my Word for the Year, words that encourage possibility. Some of them cropped up again and again (Relax, Nurture, Nourish, Enjoy, Strengthen, Develop…). And magically the crossing over of categories adjusted from the chaotic blur as I had previously seen it as, into a self-supporting web.

2/52 Dream Big

One of the purposes of this weekly art journal is to offload some of the stuff I pick up through what I read and hear. Already I’m feeling the benefit of unburdening my busy head! I might never need to read these things again, but it’s a way of filtering them out of my internal monologue.

This week’s page has got a bit busier since last time I showed you. Curiously, the first words I wrote on this page asked “where are the words?” (on a day when I was unable to find the what I needed to say …) and since then there has been a steady flow of must write that down things.

Filling up the space with stuff that keeps showing up on my radar….

I have big dreams – by which I mean I have big plans and hopes for the future – but I also have big colorful episodes of imagination at night time. And I don’t distinguish much between them. Just the nocturnal machinations often want for some translation from the garbled jumble of metaphors my subconscious knits together out of the day’s happenings. It doesn’t always make sense, but often they are fun.

Sometimes the meaning shows up a long while later. sometimes it doesn’t!

These words come from Connie Solera of Dirty Footprints Studio. I love her style and she has a beautiful way of describing the creative process. She brings sunshine into my spirit.

A Sacred Space

I was pondering this thought: a sacred space doesn’t have to be a physical space.

It can be a space in my day, a number of minutes I hold back from everyday use.

A little bit of room in the day to release some thoughts into the ether.

And ask the rhetorical questions.

A few moments to flick water at a book and not care if you get ink splashes on your face.

Time to draw round the edges of that beige smeary paint. Because you like the sensation of pencil over grainy gesso. Also, just because.

These times the what and the why don’t matter. Only the doing matters. And the allowing the chance to do that matters most. This is a sacred space.

Color and Eye-Fish 2/52

My weeks now begin (as this year did) on a Thursday. I like this! It breaks up the week/weekend pattern in a refreshing fashion and in a way seems to make time stretch. I’m a busy person, this is enormously helpful! Week 2 of this year started out on a drainy-grainy grey day and I really needed to counteract that, so I did in the only way I know how: with colors.

I began with a wash over white gesso with Pebeo Colorex chartreuse ink I LOVE this color! This is my happy color! although it gets covered over through the week, little bits are still shining through.

The page already had a smeary something (acrylic paint? I forget already) on the right page which discolored to a nasty beige with the ink smears. But no matter, it’ll be obscured with stuff before long. To begin with, the same three strange eye-fish as last week. I can’t really explain them yet, I’ll come back to them later.

Swimming through the inks.

Slipping behind the doodled-on beige paint slick. The eye-fish do their thing…

Then it got some washes and splashes in Adirondack Stream. Close and open the book for a bitova Rorschach style ink spreading manoeuvre.

That puddly wet ink was just crying out for something a bit more lively and vibrant, so on with the Derwent Inktense

I love the variety of marks you can get scribbling on splashed paper, the wet and dry work well for doodling into with a fine paintbrush and water.

So that’s where my week began, It’s progressing a bit more each day so check back soon to see the next transitions 🙂

week by week 1/52

There’s something so deliciously enlivening about the start of a new thing

…a new year

…a new book

…a new project

In past years I’ve played with different art journaling projects, from page a day to a page a month. This time around it’s a page a week.

So, 2015, here we go!

Week 1 has been a painty brain-dump.

The only thing I had in mind to start was colour: I’m in a big ole red/magenta/turquoise vibe this week. Look at them ZING!

I primed the pages with gesso and began with some dollopy finger-painting. This process was fun but produced a textured surface so crunchy it really precluded writing with anything finer than a big soft marker. So the words are big n few.

I found some phrases through the week which stuck in my head:

Focus (my word for the year)

Let down your guard and Trust (I’ve read this in more than one place. So it’s a sign, right?)

Stand in your Light (I’ve heard myself say I’ve been standing in my own way a few times, this is a better place for me to be!)

Speak your Truth (it doesn’t have a meaning I can grasp at the moment, but I sense I might come back to this one later and see what I can’t see right now – ‘the woods for the trees’ maybe. What the hey, good solid advice.)

I wrote out the Holstee Manifesto. It’s mostly buried under layers of paint now. But I know it’s in there….the line “Some opportunities only come once, seize them” is just showing enough still to remind me: I want to compose a 2015 manifesto for myself.

Then there’s the three eye-fish. I’ll talk about them another day 😉

Meanwhile it’s day 7 of week1… I wanna get home and get my last bit of painting done for this page. I’ll post the finished version tomorrow.

Til then, g’night folks – sleep like kittens and dream of joyful things X

Unstuckness

Do you guys know Jane Davies? I’ve just watched this video of hers. Really simple black and white mark making, so vibrant and lively and really ‘in the moment’. It made me think how great this would be as a kick-start when I can’t get going. A reminder: don’t try and make something just do.

I was reminded of the stuckness all us artistfolk get somewhile.

It’s a bitch: that art-void head space. Can’t think, can’t make, creatively constipated.

It’s tiresome, it’s draining, it’s vexacious, and until you’ve gotten through it a few times, it can scare the pants off you: “What if it’s all gone? Dried up? Never coming back?…”
When I finished school last June I got struck down by it big time, and it didn’t let up for AGES. Months.

I tried to to coax my mojo back into being by sorting out my art making space. I tidied and reshuffled and organised… I even had a fantastic commission to get on with, but I was stubbornly standing in my own way and refusing to budge.

So I waited it out, I lined up ideas in my head and on paper and physically in little heaps about the place. (I think the 2 years of intensive study and practice running in parallel with some big life shifts in my personal world had just run the tank dry and I needed this long while to regroup.) So I used the time to seek out and absorb new influences. I played more with words than colors. I began to enjoy the world outside the confines of my head.

I haven’t entirely got back in the art-swing still yet. Doesn’t seem to be an ON / OFF, more a growing appetite. But everyday I’m feeding the spirit with the nourishing goodness on tap here in the online community and in the books I’ve acquired over the years; The simple beauties around and about in nature and people-made-stuff.

Today I’m beginning a new year long project – a page a week art journal/sketchbook. I feel sore and rusty in the art-muscles, but it’s coming back. (I also bought a bunch of new colours to play with in the sales!)

Thought forms

This is one where I’m beginning in the middle. I’ll catch you up on the beginning next, but let’s start off here, just coz I feel like it.

Thoughtforms are a series of relief collages I’m making from the dyed paper (way back… remember the dyed paper?)

and the don’t-know-why-but-compelled-to-keep-making-them funny little colored rectangle things.

So these loose ends are also finding each other and forming into slightly more coherent entities.

Thoughtforms are continuing that recurring theme: trains of consciousness & patterns of thought. More on that later.

I’ve made 6 of a series that will total 9, 3 are still in progress. These 6 are on display (and for sale – if you’re quick before they get snapped up!) at the Upstairs Gallery

Each one is named after a fragment of text found somewhere in the piece, serendipity giving them eclectic names such as: Spacecraft, Puddings cakes etc, Fortitude and Adversity amongst others.

The next series will include more textile elements, but the overall feel will be similar.

Still with that one theme leads to another, one thought folds round a corner and opens out into a coiled up spring, some buttons and a rivet, stitched onto the overarching idea of something else.

Or something. Y’know, like it does. The beauty is they can represent whatever you want them to. Or nothing at all if you .

More Than The Sum Of Its Parts – Part Next

I want to draw together some of leftovers and dangling ends from recent posts. The person who will enable this is Franz Ackermann.

Faceland/White Crossing I - Ackermann — Faceland/White Crossing I – Ackermann

There’s a charm to this portrait that hooked up in my head with the (so far very much) unconnected themes I was juggling. It was my missing link. Ackerman’s brought the map like quality in, and that high contrast, vector style I love as well.

So, am I going to show you the portraits now… or am I going to keep you hanging on?

Well, kinda neither…

The screen print portraits are still a work in progress as other priorities have leapt the queue in my sphere of makings.

But I’ve been dabbling with other prints and watercolor doodles. The first of which is………

acetate printing

Messing about with the stencils I cut from acetate sheets…

progressed to monoprinting with the stencils

My challenge was just to use 2 primary colors: red and yellow.

(yeh, + black and white, of course)

strictly speaking reds and yellows (but restricted to only 2 of each)

Love the effects, but the urge to throw in a bit of purple…

turquoise… blue?…No. Temptation was resisted 😉

More soons!
Happy weekending to you alls X