imagination – Mixy's Art Blog

The more you look…

…the more you see.

Have you ever been on a color hunt? You can do it right now – pick a color and look around you, as soon as you choose to see, it pops up all over the place. I went looking for primaries in the everyday everythings…

You don’t need to go anywhere special, you can cast your eyes around while you sit at the traffic lights or stand in line at the shops.

Look around your town, your home, your wardrobe, your bookcase, your refrigerator…

Tune in to a color and it will appear like magic!

merging emerging

Last night I couldn’t sleep. So I painted. And I pondered.

The magic of metallic paint on cushiony soft paper, that biro marks indent and cast tiny shadow outlines.

Life is as quick as a flash, a sprint through some generations and it’s done.

And life is a slow evolution, spiralling up through understanding new layers of the game.

It’s both.

Everything & Nothing. Empty & Full.

Contrast & Confusion. Zigs & Zags.

Deep & Shallow.

Some folk like to scramble the edge, following the truths they’ve chosen to absorb, busying away their days in occupation and activity, punctuated with ritual and escapism.

Fearful of treading over the lines, getting their toes wet, or worse.

Some folk run at it fast, not leaving anything to chance, escaping the dangers by out-running and out-witting. No way is right, no way is wrong. We’re all just making it up one bit at a time.

~~~~~

I’ve been listening to Pete Holmes’ podcasts: You Made It Weird. He kept me company through the night, kept me laughing and thinking. So far I’ve really love love loved his interactions with Liz Gilbert & Deepak Chopra and been curiously riled by Noel Gallagher & Tim Minchin.

outpourings

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

Wishing you all a Wonderful Weekends X

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.

Flow

My word for 2016 is Flow. I made a pinterest board for my word when I started doing this last year, but this time I’m amping up the imagery by having these pins printed out and in one of my journals.

This way it’s something I see most days, and I guess is more Vision-Board-y like this.