ink – Mixy's Art Blog

just lurking

Hello lovely friends of the internet, I’ve missed you, where have you been?

I haven’t posted in a little while due to an absence of images.

This is the coming together of a doodly thing I did a few weeks back

Watercolour and fountain pen, intricate and involved but in a stilted inhibited style, so I left it there

My creative mojo has dropped off temporarily, the tide’s gone out, so I’m patiently waiting it out.

Meanwhile, I wish you all a beautiful Solstice, whatever that means to you. Be well, lovely souls X

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.

Traditional journalling – the outpouring of words and thoughts and the recording of happenings, events and reactions is quite linear: these things occurred, then were recorded; these things were planned and projected, then recorded.

Art journalling is far more holistic. Even the most literal illustrations are cast in the light of the mood, defined by the view of the artist and constricted by the limitations of their style and skill.

And then there’s this whole exploration of the psyche that forms from the deluge of abstraction that some of us create.

Like many other artists who play this game, mine is largely an unplanned stream of consciousness.

As life ebbs and flows there are periods dominated by torrential outbursts of imagery.

I’m driven by a force beyond my thoughts to combine and construct these collections of objects, images and notions. They make no sense at the time and only sometimes later can I pick out an impression of context, a reflection of thought.

Meanwhile, I enjoy the colours and the nonsense. Another metaphor for life.

outpourings

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

Wishing you all a Wonderful Weekends X

Fueled by Doubt 36/52

I look at them in their lives and their worlds, they do their things and they live their days.

I can do that. Look – watch me – I’m doing my things and living my days.

And then I turn sideways, and vanish.

Where did I go? All the fear folded in on me.

It all looked too big, I left. It’s all too familiar, so I run. .I hide from being me.

How am I not like the other people? Reasons crumple under their own weight and all the ideas dissolve into dust

Who thought the simple act of being me would become such a challenge, such a confusion, so fueled by doubt.

When this happens a lot I wonder if I should stop pretending.

Pretending the other people are real, or pretending I am.

I wonder at these words and fragments, at what will come next.

Most people will understand,

But most people aren’t real. Most people don’t exist.

Parallelity 35/52

Have you used these pens? Pilot Parallel Pens. I love them.
They aren’t only beautiful to write and draw with, but there’s magic you can do if you have more than one and different colored ink. I got these years ago and they’d drifted to the back of my repertoire for a long while. It was a strong sense of no idea what to do that made me remember them again this week.

I’m not a calligrapher in the real sense, but I love to play.
Have you seen Denise Lach’s art? This is my kind of calligr-drawing-joy

…………….And so the doodling commenced.

If there was one overriding theme of this week it was sleep. I’ve never been so tired. The culmination of some health stuff, some worry-based stuff, and some ongoing insomnia-based stuff all collided and my body made the unilateral decision that the only thing it was going to properly do was sleep.

Long heavy nights of it and small naps of it in the intervening day times when circumstance permitted. The bits of the week that weren’t spent sleeping were spent in blinky incoherence.

(tbh, this week hasn’t been so different.)

So much time in sleep means more crossover than usual between the waking and the dreaming realities.

Episodes of dream can manifest the mundane, and the awake-world does something crazy and surreal.

And the two places overlap and get muddled.

It’s a big jambled thing, and although there wasn’t an intent, this illustrates it pretty much as it was.

Worlds in Parallel.

Water In Parallel (part 4)

The story so far, has lead us to this point

Now, if you know me at all, you’ll understand that I need colour like I need coffee, sleep and oxygen.

So while the peeling back process had restored some of the original brightness, it’s not enough for me. I’m getting hungry for colour and there’s only one remedy there: throw some ink at it:

Swished with water as well (yeh – Water theme – Water literally. It’s the method acting school of artistry)

Plus some black for more contrast, and some lime green and chartreuse for good measure (and for the fact they’re colours I adore)

If I were to try and define my process as a shape, it would be zig-zag: No sooner had I reinstated the brightness, I felt a call to white a load of it out. I know – don’t ask – I’ve stopped trying to second guess where I’m going, I’m just hanging on for the ride now. So I feel like wavy shapes will bring in more Water-y feeling (that I just can’t see now it’s ink drenched). I neeed more wateryness!

This is a 50-50 mix of white acrylic and matt medium for a semi-transparency. painted on and dabbed about with a cloth for a dabbled bubbly sea wave froth look.

Yeh? maybe not so, but I still like the effect. On a roll with the wave shapes, along came some more collaging from scraps that got in the path of the flying ink a few days earlier. (No paper ever goes to waste here!)

I’ll leave you here for now. Next post coming soon……….

A Sacred Space

I was pondering this thought: a sacred space doesn’t have to be a physical space.

It can be a space in my day, a number of minutes I hold back from everyday use.

A little bit of room in the day to release some thoughts into the ether.

And ask the rhetorical questions.

A few moments to flick water at a book and not care if you get ink splashes on your face.

Time to draw round the edges of that beige smeary paint. Because you like the sensation of pencil over grainy gesso. Also, just because.

These times the what and the why don’t matter. Only the doing matters. And the allowing the chance to do that matters most. This is a sacred space.

deeper into the book of wishes

Yesterday I showed you the first page of my latest project – the first one I could call finished (ish).

This is the latest page, I began playing with over the weekend.

Starting out with gesso and inks, layered up and finished with hot glue blobs

Inspired by the very lovely and talented Contadina K