thinkings – Page 8 – Mixy's Art Blog

the midweek weekend

I love and hate time.

I don’t believe in time per se, not as a strictly regulated measured thing. I think of it more as a malleable substance that (with practice) can be manipulated. And with just the tiniest amount of neglect, can run away (forever).

Some years ago I worked an office job Tuesday to Friday. It worked out well. I did my own thing on the weekends and took Mondays off. Sometimes I took a 3 day break. I enjoyed that choice of freedoms.

Then things changed: I switched to just Thursday-Friday in the office.

And time went totally out of control.

Suddenly I had a 5-day stretch of not exactly weekend, and before I knew it I was beginning another ‘week’. The whole thing spiraled out of control and the weeks and months flew at a devastating rate. I didn’t enjoy this and only lasted it out less than a year (which felt like a lot less!)

Sure, I know many folks who wish their working weeks away, but that’s wishing away a lifetime bit by bit. If you hate your work, change it, don’t rush through in the hope that one day you’ll be on vacation, retired, dead, or whatever is lined up next.

Nowadays I work for myself. I have some regular routines, but they’re all flexible. I wake up early and have long days (thank you insomnia – some days are verrrry long!)

I think the key is to keep mixing it up.

My newest routine is the page-a-week art journal. Today starts week 3, which as the year began on a Thursday, so now do my weeks (in a sense).

It’s helped lift the pressure of the Monday to Friday VS Saturday/Sunday rut that’s so ingrained. One week ends on a Wednesday, Another begins the next, another ends the next. Perhaps it’s like I’m squeezing 2 weeks into every 7 days, but it’s really slowed it down to a manageable pace!

Pedantry and Pointlessness

Exercise for the soul:

I notice how I have to disagree so fundamentally with you.

What u say is so utterly wrong.

Your black is my white.

Your down is my up.

So utterly different, so poignantly opposed. Taken from one extreme limit to the other where they almost meet again.

Signs Everywhere

If I said you: look up from the screen, look about you for something blue. You’d look cast your gaze about and suddenly so many things in your field of vision are blue. You never noticed how many blue things there are about, right?

It’s not a blue thing thing, it’s a noticing thing.

Until you need to get a new carpet, you don’t notice how many carpet shops you pass on your journey to work everyday. Where they always there? Until you think you might be pregnant you don’t notice so many folk pushing buggies, then they are everywhere. When you’re hungry but can’t stop to eat, there are food smells, adverts for everything delicious and people eating whichever way you look.

It’s perception. It’s synchronicity. It’s coincidence. It’s whatever you want it to be. But it’s real and it happens all the while. I like to think of it as a sign, a nudge, the universe saying Yup, that’s where we’re going, you’re on track my friend.

Like many folk I’ve spent time recently considering what shape I’d like my 2015 to take, and this includes developing sides of my life that have gone a little wanting in the past. Personal stuff, and largely stuff that could be termed ambition. The put-off-able, for all the reasons.

I saw this cartoon today and it resonated so much with my desires to jump into life with both feet, I gotta share it with you.

The Power of the Wish

I posted this image yesterday.

Ive read these words in a few memes lately and they really appeal to me.

But I posted this particular one as it’s one of my yoga wishes. As I said yesterday, if I could do this it would make me really happy

So this morning’s Yoga with Adriene (don’t you love a bit of serendipity) gave me exactly the nudge I needed into really nearly doing it! As my strength and balance improve, today for the first time I managed a brief hover with all tippy-toes off the mat!
I have been grinning on the inside ever since 😀

I wish you all a really lovely weekend, guys, I hope it brings you all you wish for! X

nen nen ju shin ki

Thought forms are the children of an earlier project, my final project in the first year of my art degree. Focussing on the idea of meditation: trying to still the crazed jabbering of monkey mind, find some spaces between the thoughts.

Thought following thought following thought – rattling by. That internal monologue of commentary, judgements, relentless parroting of worries… do you listen to the babble? Do you try to drown it out? Music, TV, incessant banter – some folk don’t keep it inside – they are a non-stop torrent of witterings.

It can be exhausting.

And fascinating.

This piece took shape as a 3 metre x 45 cm relief collage constructed from reclaimed bits and bobs, mostly painted paper, card, pins, tiny scraps of wood, wire, staples. These kinda things. The things and stuff that came to my mind as I was making it. Positioned in a corner it draws the viewer in so they become a part of the work, surrounded by the noise.

Complex trains of thought – interconnected and overlapping – are represented by the darkest and most detailed elements.

The process of meditation calming the mind from the persistent banter of thoughts by suspending this mental chatter from one moment to the next is represented by diminishing detail and lighter tones reducing to nothing in the centre.

I’d love to recreate this on an even bigger scale some day.

2015: Setting the Scene

Striding into January, this first Monday always has a first day back feel. Back to school, back to work, back to routine… and I love it. That fortnight of chaos just makes me relish the normal I’m all amped up and ready to run. Sure, I’ve got dull stuff to contrast with the fun, but it’s all in balance. The yin makes no sense without the yang, and flat-lining is no fun at all. And this week is so full of great intentions, which although they might not all last the course, I feel like if I run with them fast enough some will stick with me.

A little while back I was telling you about my Word for 2015 which at the time was Reach Beyond and the associated frustration that my word was in fact two words, and I was struggling to come up with a snappy substitute.

I pondered long n hard.

The Facebook group of some >1200 or so folk on a similar quest have been amazing – super supportive to each other’s stories and full of enlightening thoughts and amazing links off and about the internets to like-thoughted places. And helped me add a bunch of other contenders to the list of words.

I settled, finally, on Focus.
focus

My intention is to:

Focus on what I am doing at any one time – I am typing this post, I am mindful of my fingers on the keyboard. It’s all a little brighter and sharper when I’m just considering these words, nothing else. I’m not eating, not fretting, not rushing up to do the thing I forgot earlier because I was only part-minded on the thing I was doing then – part-minded on the previous part-minded task – and so on….

Focus on the bigger picture. Is what I am doing now contributing in a positive way – to my well-being, health, happiness, or is it a foolhardy shortcut, an excuse, another getting away with it? Does it matter? Can I be wiser? Can I act more in tune with this bigger picture I’m compiling, the picture I call my life?

I’m focussed on my path. I’m there in the now after now after now, footfall after footfall, mindfully aware. Moment to moment to moment. It’s all a bit Zen.

Of course it flickers in and flutters off – my concentration is a butterfly – but my intention for the year is to come back to the focus every time I remember.

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!)

Resolutions or Wishes

NY Resolutions with a subtext: I must try harder, be this-er or that-er. I’ll do more of the things I don’t want to and less of the things I enjoy. All those unrealistic, unwanted demands pinned to a future version of self. So often they’re rolled out – same every year – safe in the understanding it’s just empty words that can be consigned to oblivion by the time you go back to the usual routines next week. Do you do this?

Fuck it, yeh? Never really meant it anyway.

And we begin this dramatically different, new phase of life with indigestion, a banging hangover, the tormentful regrets of the hazily recalled night before….

‘did I really say/do that? did that happen? what did happen? …..?’

Cos that makes sense, doesn’t it?

….so it’s just another Wednesday night in my world, then?

Heck NO!

Like the New Moon on the Winter Solstice just 10 days ago, like every New Moon, New Month, Birthday (personal New Year) I like to set New Wishes. It’s punctuation in my life: a pause for consolidation, review, and rev up for the next phase.

Tomorrow I’ll share with you my first Wishes of the New Year.

Meanwhile I wish you all, dearest digital friends, the happiest of beginnings to this new phase. May it bring you abundance and joy beyond you expectations. Love to you all X

2015 in words

I often find I have a word in mind for a period of time – I’ll jot it in amongst diary scribblings. Earlier this year was a period I called transition – it named the phase I was finishing up my studies and also handing over a bunch of my work to someone else. A release of the old and opening to the next – in sure and safe knowledge I had no idea at all what that next would entail! I named other months consolidation, transform, and flow.

Recently I fell across Susannah Conway’s Find Your Word for 2015 which seemed to pick up on this theme I’d unconsciously begun.

The process sets out to imagining and exploring possibilities, dreams, aspirations and desires for the next 12 months. What’s the overarching feel for this year? What’s the biggest wish that will help the smaller wishes come to pass? What’s the magic guidance to hold my hand into the coming year?

Like a few others in the group, no single word that expressed the exact what-I-wanted-ness of it showed up. It was a bit like Stretch, or kinda like Explore, or something…something… that sounds like horizon but not so literal and feels like limitless but phrased in a positive way. So I settled (for now) on the two words: Reach Beyond.

I’ve got ideas, I’ve got aims and targets and goals to strive for and stretch toward but not to be limited by, I want to Reach Beyond them.

Part of the process is using a Pinterest board to gather imagery, memes and themes, words and whatnot, that embody the essence of the word(s) for the new year.

I don’t know where this will go – it might just sit here forever or it might add something to the way the months pan out, I can let you in a year!

It’s a fun and harmonising process – if it sounds like your kinda thing I heartily encourage you to spare some thought, if time allows, what will your 2015 feel like?