thinkings – Page 9 – Mixy's Art Blog

The quest, should you wish to undertake it.

Black holes and bewilderment.

I was reminded of this article recently

Food for thought. Illness is illness, wherever it’s located, it’s all real. ‘All in the mind’ is a real place!

The writer, broadcaster, actor, avid twitterer (to name but a handful of labels), Stephen Fry, has spoken at length on this subject. Living with bipolar he does so with the hope of enlightening and openly addressing something that is still treated as shameful, embarrassing, or a weakness.

Ask someone with depression ‘what caused it?’ and you ostracize them, you’re suggesting blame – a thing or an event which can (could, should) be reduced, eliminated, forgotten, overlooked, gotten over. And it must be valid, it must have the appropriate magnitude. Maybe a bereavement or a diagnosis, a catastrophe that outweighs someone else’s definition of manageable.

Chances are there wasn’t a single event that triggered the episode, maybe it was a long grinding line of things added up to a tipping point. Or maybe it came from nowhere and side-swiped them.

Be kind, don’t judge, you don’t know their story.

Sometime stream of conciousness

Your heaving wheezes
On my bony shoulder,

Your angered fears
My limp empty smile,

Anxiety fatalism,
Fatuous platitude.

Outside looking in,
Inside looking out,
Eyes never meeting.

wishing

Just as a little aside from other makings, Not quite a scrap book, not quite a mood board… I’m calling it my Wish Book These are some elements for pages serving to crystalise in my mind the hopes I have for the near future… Delighting in the way they find their places together unplanned (such is my style!) these are the colors and shapes I am running towards the textures and lushness the future starts here! 😀

Metaphorical omlette

They say you have to crack eggs to make an omlette.

Right now I’m more than a bit absorbed in strategizing, selecting which eggs to crack next.

TBH, it’s gonna get a bit eggy around here, for a little while.

But my metaphorocal omlette will be delicious, not least cos it’ll provide space for me to create, that is in every way, a very big improvement on this:

This is my not-very-big bit of floor in the loft room. Ankle deep at the shallows, its main benefits are better light than the rest of the house and the radiator immediately behind where I sit! 😉

I’m still dropping by as often as I can to catch up on your doings and makings, for the invaulable inspiration you put out there, and cos you guys make me smile like a fool (quite a lot). Just I might not have so much time for posting as I’d like.
Wish me luck, folks! X

You feed my soul…

Just thinking to myself, as I click through your wonderous creations and thoughts, how much you enrich my days.

I might not say it often, but I love you guys! X

Boxy Day

As a kid I assumed Boxing Day was a reference to the amount of boxes strewn about the place after ‘unwrapping day’.

Ok, hands up: When you surveyed the goodies Santa brought you, how many of you were also eyeing up the boxes and packaging debris… as a wonderous array of new paper, card and art mmaterials?

Xmas was low key in my world this year – I’m happy with this – but was heartened by IK‘s delight at the fabulous orange gift bag and box I received. Oh yeh, and of course the thing inside it too. It stirred up young memories of hearing my mum on the phone… ‘yes she loved the gift… though TBH she spent more time playing with the box it came in…’

memento mori

My big project this term is entitled Memento Mori. Considering mortality.

The aspect of mortality I’ve chosen to illustrate is the fading out and tapering off that some lives go through toward the end; The detachment and fragmentation a person sometimes encounters in their final days, months or years.

I’ve created a series of prints and drawings, portraits of my mum, taken from a photograph of her on her 16th birthday. They are abstracted and distorted, a little surreal. Her final years were spent largely in a dream world, she’d tell me of her fantastic adventures and travels, peppered with memories and enriched by a life time of reading and absorbing information and ideas, as her mind escaped from the body which no longer worked.

The following short animation is made up of some of the images I created in the process.

corridor of doors

I love metaphors.

In my world knowledge presents itself as a corrridor full of doors.

Some are locked,

Some seemingly lead nowhere.

Keep on moving, keep trying the doors.

Many lead to another corridor. All these corridors are full of doors.

But gotta keep trying…

Today’s door opened to everything there is to photography beyond low-level point-shoot-n-hope set on auto. Totally loving college!

beginning of a new adventure

I started the page a day project on 16 March this year. 3 books and 6 months later, what began as a whim rapidly snowballed into an all-out obsession, and I have loved ever minute of it!

This is starting to sound a bit final, a bit endy, and it isn’t that at all. Although I won’t be starting the inevitable book 4 straight away…

Tomorrow I enrol at art school to begin my degree.

I did the same last year, but cos of lack of applicants/the college’s hugely disorganised system, we found out on enrollment day there was no degree course.

My fallback plan was to use this year as training, practice, to develop and explore my creativity alone.

It’s my belief that life throws us curve balls sometimes which don’t make sense til later. It turned out that the last year also saw my home life turned upside down. If I’d been at school most likely I would’ve missed time and been fairly unfocussed as a result. Instead what I needed to balance this chaos was plenty of quiet alone time and to throw my soul into my art. Which I’ve certainly done!

At the time of typing to you, I’m in that space between kid-on-christmas-eve-anticiptation and yeh-like-it’s-gonna-actually-happen-this-time-cynicism. Gotta say, this isn’t a comfy space, but one way or the other, I’ll know by this time tomorrow!

So, watch this space folks – I’ll let you know tomorrow! 😉