art journal – Page 12 – Mixy's Art Blog

unruliness

Last month I declared my intent for a new phase of being me.

The new rules? there are no rules. This is my age of unruliness!

So to start off I’m simplifying; I’m streamlining.

I’m de-cluttering my life both literally and figuratively. Honestly, permanently and fundamentally. It’s proving a wrench to begin, if I’m honest about it, but I do believe once I build up a bit of momentum there’ll be nothing to stop me.

I’ve heard good things about Marie Kondo’s book “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up”, so I’m watching this as a substitute for reading it. I can’t add to the pile of to-read-next books that’s remained untouched for an uncomfortably long time now. And I love irony. I still can’t.

Through the first 45 years of this life I gathered and collected. I took things on and things built up – actual things and symbolic things – I inherited these traits along with a lot of accumulated junk and an assortment of mismatched thought patterns and beliefs.

And the conclusion I’ve drawn from looking into this? it’s exhausting, confusing and not something I’m prepared to pursue any further.

I’m really going to shake this whole bag of nonsense up and see what sticks and what falls off. If it falls off it’s not mine to care about any more.

Climbing out of that old existence. This time is my time.

I plan to free up enough space that I can stretch out both arms and touch the outer edges of my imagination. I think that this colourful outpouring is part of that process and all these troubled tense scribbles are an outlet. As are the hectic dreams of monsters and gremlins that bite my arms and chew on my feet in my sleep.

I want to be free to explore the dreams I always knew would find their time.

Their time is now.

stream of consciousness

I’m so enjoying this book, it’s a book without rules or boundaries.

Previous art journals have always had a Reason

Or arbitrary parameters to guide the content.

Often it was based around a time frame: a page a day , a colour a month, a spread a week

But this book is finding its own natural rhythm.

It started a few weeks ago and seems to be averaging a page every 2-3 days.

I date them, but that’s really just for me-in-the-future to look back and reflect on if she so wishes.

Only things going on here are a bit of a brain bump, whatever colours, media and materials that are to hand, some words I hear, some images I find.

It’s all a stream of consciousness.

A questioning mind…

You know me – you know how I love to puzzle something out. I was wondering about my current art journal recently. Join me over on Dirty Footprints Studio for my monthly guest post where I unscramble these thoughts about just this.

PG_questioning_FEATURE

outpourings

(today I’ll let the images speak for themselves)

Wishing you all a Wonderful Weekends X

imaginary animals

Some of the characters I collected in my camera at the V&A last week, having filtered through my imagination, turned up in my art journal.

As they evolved along the way,

some got a little lost under the layers.

faces merge animals and human,

some characters from other projects join them.

As the weekend wore on,

the colours developed

The doodles built up

The tribe became established on the page

I can’t think of any meditation I enjoy more than getting lost in patterns and colours.

the ‘because’ of art journaling

I’ve got old journals – the ‘dear diary’ variety – dating back over decades. Of no interest to anyone but occasionally me, I see what me-in-the-past was up to on this day however-many years ago.

At art school I began to keep sketchbooks, filled it with thoughts and plans, doodles and scraps. Mainly visual references and test grounds for techniques and materials. And they’re as rich in memories to me as the purely wordy versions that preceded them.

Last year I experimented with Julia Cameron’s morning pages in an on-again/off-again fashion. Not every morning has the space to accommodate all those words, but a bigger block is that part of me resented the paper it required for long, one-way streams of consciousness that I shouldn’t want to revisit. And the thought of scrawling longhand every last niggle and fuss didn’t sit comfortably either. I get the ‘better out than in’ motive. But I didn’t want to hold volumes of this in my life thought; that seemed to be merely displacing it from my head to another place of permanence.

Three things about things I do in books.
Without much connection beyond my voracious consumption of stationery.

Until I read this blog post by Deanna Jinjoe where she speaks of the power of transformation in burying words, thoughts, sentiments into the soul of our art we can transform them into a new beauty.

So the art journal I’m working through now is starting to embody this essence. With traces of the therapeutic brain dumps that keep my mind clear, intertwined with the doodles and splatterings of colour that keep my spirit buoyant.

on a quiet day

Just a couple of weeks ago I found myself cutting out shapes from magazine pages and scrap paper.

Nothing particular in mind, just another odd compulsion. But I’ve been me all these years now, I’m used to this, I don’t give it another thought.

Some good will come of it. Meanwhile, I’ve got a heap of hands and fish and butterflies and cats and things. As you do.

Then this began to evolve.

Now I’m as curious as the next person: What does this mean?

Last year I was doing this (again, no idea why).

So I carry on, still not knowing, but enjoying the bejeepers out of the process.

Perhaps that’s reason enough, right?

The words that I remember as I play join the page, they get buried in the mix.

Somewhere under and amongst these layers sit the words:

“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it.

To deprive it of oxygen.

To shame it. To mock it.

…

…

With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories.

Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe

….

…

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Remember this:

We be many and they be few.

They need us more than we need them.

…

…

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

– from Arundhati Roy, War Talk

The Stretchiness of Time

2015 was tied up in this book, in the rigidity of one page: one week, when some weeks felt empty of expression and some pages felt too small for all that was flooding out of my imagination.

By mid year it had taken on a thick, heavy persona with paint all gooey and chewy and some weeks where no amount of layers would cover up the uncomfortable truths of ugly: a parallel to the world it was illustrating. Something intangibly off. Something meh. Some things I didn’t like, didn’t like confronting, didn’t like to witness. I didn’t want to relive, repeat, or even properly acknowledge.

The book served a purpose: A lesson in being a grown up is knowing when to persevere, and when to stop. I persevered. And when the year was up I was glad the book was full. Finished. Finally time to move on. Onto what next.

What next?

…And then a really long time seemed to pass, and I rested. A really long time that went quickly, and dragged slowly and passed in a flash.
Because Time is Weird like that…

I found myself cutting out shapes from magazine pages, scrap paper and junk mail. Something was stirring, I didn’t know what…

Last week I fell into a new facebook group run by the gorgeously art journally Orly Avineri. It was the catalyst I needed to jump into this new book.

I’ve got gesso under my nails and ink on my face again.

I feel like I’ve come home!

This book is different, there are no limitations and no rules.

Free to fly in and out, land a while –

‘Take a closer look’ – the serendipity of the cut up.

– chat with my thoughts, flit off again.

It takes as long as it takes.

I’m getting more and more aware that by pouring out my unconscious I can steer myself through this life in a fashion not like anything else.

It’s a compulsion.

You get this too, right?

Everything that was feeling stale and sludgy has dropped away since just this first page.

Life feels like spring time: new pages are beginning to blossom.

with tiny sketchy folk (40/52)

There’s likely something telling about the inclusion of these tiny sketchy folks in this week

(this character looks like he’s sustained a cartoon style head injury – a dropped anvil or grand piano I expect)

as usual I can’t offer any explanation, this is just what falls out of my unconscious mind via my pen holding hand.

In her TED talk, Elizabeth Gilbert recalls how the poet Ruth Stone described her creative process:

“…she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia,she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, “run like hell.” And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn’t be fast enough, so she’d be running and running, and she wouldn’t get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it “for another poet.””

She talks at length about how ideas are entities that search out a person through which to be made manifest in her book Big Magic.

I love this for so many reasons…

These are concepts that fit my ideologies

Removing the responsibility of being the creator: we are just the catcher.
It’s more fun.

Way more fun

It was this thinking that encouraged these tiny sketch folks out through my pens this week.
To be witnessed by this week’s ubiquitous big eye

Time Hole (39/52)

I fell down another hole in time but it’s All OK Now.

I jumped. I was down there from some time, lurking
(it happens from time to time. Do you do this too?)

I’ve learned to TRUST I’ll fumble my way out eventually.
I follow my instincts and they lead me back to where I left off.

It’s a case of just ALLOWing. Letting go.
(Which reminds me – I’ve been reading this.)

There’s a lot about perspective…
Seeing the same thing from a different angle, a different approach.

What matters most…

Since I started this project back in January,
every week has entailed some sort of variation on the same theme:

There’s been doodles and scribble, lists and lyrics,
Notes to me-in-the-future, that’s to say,
to me-in-the-now from a-previous-me-in-the-past

There’s been a whole lot of mess and color.

(In that sense, no different from any other of my years, I guess)

This is the first time I’ve been disciplined to do the
same/similar thing consistently every week, for
39 consecutive weeks at this point, and still going strong