Mixy's Art Blog

Envelopes and Time (19/52)

I shared recently how sometimes I’ll drop into the future and leave myself a note. Turns out I’d done it again for last week’s page:

“Each morning I am born again. What I do today is what matters most.” Last week hadn’t kicked off to the best start, so it was maybe just what I needed to read. (Well done me-in-the-recent past). That in mind, collage on:

Hey, d’u remember the whole paper-dying obsession I had a while back? (it continues, I just don’t go on about it so much these days). Of all the scrap paper I LOVE to make use of, I really like to use envelopes.

What is it? Idk, maybe how they’re so readily discarded, they appeal to the rescuer part of my character.

Also, so often have such pretty patterns hidden inside. So junk mail arrived this week and it was inside one of may fav prettily-insided style envelopes.

I’m aware that’s quite a niche in geekiness to have a fav prettily-insided style envelopes.

This week the page as a whole left me a little Meh, but if anything saved it from it’s feel of half-arsed mediocrity, it’s this tiny honeycomb patterns.

So here’s how the page evolved….

I feel like it isn’t really ‘done‘ and that’s why I don’t feel happy with it. But whatever, it’s last week and in the past now. I like the colours and the honeycomb and sometimes that just has to be enough.

Onward and upward!

Newest Obsession: Chapter One

Since way back in the earliest days of exploring mixed media online, through the vast and wondrous wealth of blogs, the treasures and techniques that ppl share on YouTube, I’ve often come across folks doing this thing called altered books.

I’m going to lay it on the line here: it’s made me think Huh?

Sure there are some glorious creations, some splendid transformations, some real delights.

But it hasn’t ever struck me as a thing I’d find myself doing. (Although I watched a good few YouTube things on how it’s done. I gleaned information, and unbeknown to me, my brain squirreled it away.) Okay, so, fast forward to a couple of weeks ago.

The strangest thing: I must have reached one of those tipping points, inspiration had hit critical mass and I had to begin this new project. There was a sense of driven urgency that was singing in my head:

Find me a knackered book, I am compelled to bring it new life!!

One of my rescue books – too shabby to donate and yet somehow too good for the recycling bin – I’d maybe thought I’d read it some day, but I’ve got to be a realist just sometimes. I love books, I have many, but the pile waiting to be read is growing faster than the rate I consume them.

So the lonely third volume of Somerset Maugham’s short stories was about to be re-purposed into my newest obsession full of colour and faces and meanings.

I’ll show you how it’s coming on over the next while.

Meanwhile here’s a little peak ….

5 Stages of Creative Obsession

I’m working on a new project.

It’s SO Much Fun!

It really crept up on me, without realizing I’d run the full gamut of the

**5 stages of taking on a new and seemingly unlikely creative obsession**

What the…? Why would someone do that? That makes no sense to me…
I’m not one to judge, but I can’t see any good coming from that. It’s maybe a way of using up time and craft supplies…maybe creating another stage in the life-cycle of a thing in between ‘no longer fit for original purpose‘ and ‘recycling/landfill fodder’, but…
IDK, I can’t help wanting to know more. If I watch enough of the limitless number of YouTube tutorials, blogposts, etc etc I’ll figure out why folks do it. Yeh. That’s what I’ll do: solve that mystery and just move on.
Y’know what tho, that does look like fun. Fun is the primary reason I do a lot of what I do….
I have to do that now!! Let me play!!

(I’ll show you a bit later.)

Doubt and self deception

the question I keep re-asking myself this morning is: how is better not better?

Huh? I mean, if a change is for the better, indisputably, measurably improved, better, then what reason would there to be to doubt it? Sure there’s a compromise, isn’t there always? But the net is gain.

So what’s with the doubt?

Will it all fall apart despite the big life-shift?

Will it turn out that now I’m on the other side of the paradigm the grass is the same muddy colour?

Could it be the part of me that wants to pretend the uncomfortable bits aren’t worth it and revert to the full time discomfort of the old life?

Thoughts for the morning…..

Dropping, honing, fine tuning

some twelve years or more ago I deliberately began to drop.

I forcibly dropped worrying (I’d been trained from the earliest times that this is a vital life skill). But I was coming to understand how much it blocked my path, challenged my happiness, obscured my view.

I’ve chipped away over the years, breaking down the patterns of reaction, exploring other options.

Last year I took a big step into the unknown, I released some old habits that no longer served me. Had they served me in the past? I think so, when I only needed to hide, I hid inside them. I propped them up around me as a fortress. I played pretend.

I wanted to see clearly, be authentic, find out what I’d been missing. Explore unhindered.

Since then I’ve challenged more beliefs than I knew I had. I’ve dropped and picked up the most unlikely ways, I believe all these are for the better, but I’m playing the long game, I’m watching it pan out and observing the path.

I am witness.

the other side of the ugly (18/52)

Yesterday I was sharing about the ugly side of creativity. When it’s in that worse before it gets better zone.

The only way outa here is forward: Charge on forward through this zone.

If you can’t carry on right now, let it rest.Let it settle.

When you come back it’s going to look different:
—If it looks better – let this spur you on in hope.
—If it looks worse – take the nothing left to lose impetus to make changes:

Whatever you’re creating, from a painting to a song, a novel or a dance, a dress or a manifesto, try any variations of these things:

Paint over it.
Mix up the harmonies.
Cut it up and reconfigure the bits together in a new shape.
Record over sections of it.
Photograph it from obtuse angles: review it through the viewfinder, on screen, through squinting eyes, or print its negative.
Speed it up, slow it down, add trumpets.
Change two of the colours.
Stitch, glue, staple, splice. Rinse and repeat.
Play it backwards / turn it upside down / inside out.
Take out every other word, or every other adjective, or swap about all the words beginning with vowels.
Pick it up by the ears and shake it hard.

Do some radical dismantling, recreate with hope and a conscious understanding it’s only wrong at the moment; it’s maybe uncomfortable but it isn’t doomed.

Know that you’re through the worst because if you’re moving you’re making progress: It was the ugliest thing in existence, so by logical deduction it must be getting better, right?

Right. Then keep on going. If the bigger picture is freaking you out,

Just look at the detail…

Find some solace there, some shhhhh…some calm

Befriend the details. Examine them closely for inexplicable creatures.

The only thing not to do is sit and dwell on how a different course of action somewhere in the past would have made it different. That then is gone. Focus on the now of it.

Then see where you find yourself, recombobulate, know the process works, and carry on.

midweek mayhem (18/52)

Y’know when you hear about a new thing, then you hear about it again within a really short time, and you think:
Hey, Universe, are you trying to tell me something here?

Well, this week I’ve read in more than 2 places the suggestion of freeing up your creative mojo by drawing freestyle, playing about at mark making, with your non dominant hand. It kicks the brain into action in a way doing the usual things in the usual way just can’t.

So with some degree of awkwardness I set about some cack-handed doodles. Scribbles. Scraping of pencil across page.

Not pretty, not descriptive, but after a bit of warming up the eye-brain-hand coordination came together a little better and it did at least begin to look and feel a bit more deliberate. And it’s only a first layer. With some more colour it’s already becoming much more backgroundier.

There it goes, merging behind, blending away.

Some collaged layers begin to add structure and I’m back to my usual right-fisted chaos. But…….

The other reason I’m posting these stages is to make the point that pages can go through really ugly phases; totally scrappy and uncohesive. I mean really, really URGH. Really WTF is going on, ‘I honestly thought I could make pretty, creative, loveliness…. then I go n do this thing and it’s just so… just so… I can’t even look at it….’ <sob>

The key to getting through this is to keep on going! Don’t stop here!! It’s just a phase. It’s easy to get despondent looking at such an incoherent ugliness. It’s a shambles. But it’s only a shambles at the moment.

It’s a very rare art that can’t be pulled back from the edge of ugly in some fashion or other.

I’ll be back tomorrow with how this got saved, there is ART after URGH.

Dangerously Close….

Get Rid Of The Corrupt Government and Corporate Powers Overnight

Out David and Goliath moment is approaching. We CAN DO this.

Jamie's Blog

OK, I’ve never been political but here are a few things that I’m sure we can collectively agree on:

1. The current Power and Money system doesn’t work. It’s almost banal to say ‘it’s destroying the planet’ because it’s just stating the obvious. Even if we accept that some people are going to be financially richer than others, the current gap between rich and poor, and the amount of money and resources held by a tiny amount of companies and individuals is OUT OF CONTROL. When you add to that the biggest companies wield so much control over governments by leveraging the economy that they can avoid contributing anything like their fair share of taxes, and that the fixation on making more and more money has resulted in nearly all current wars, dispossessed cultures, no regulations on hurting creatures or the environment, and while there are billions and billions of…

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Note to Self: 17/52

Sometimes I’ll hear or read something I like, I have to write it down. Write it down quick before it escapes. Trap it. The weekly art journal is often to hand, and when the current week is getting full, I’ll drop in these new words somewhere in the future pages. Then when that week rolls around it’s there to remind me. This week remembered to me of this truth:

“Everything I need is already within me.”

I took this photo for fear of the words getting buried. I wanted to show them to you. I love the simple truth of it. We’re so much more resourceful that we think, much of the time.