Yesterpost I shared an exploration into the evolution of an abstract photo. If you liked that, you might like this too: My regular post on Dirty Footprints Studio gives a bit of insight into the process of gathering these images.
Happy idea-gathering, folks 🙂
The year is winding down and the book is getting fat.
The pages are reflecting this in a literal way,
piling on colors, darker, thicker, visually weightier.
Pencil on paint on marker on washi on paper on pen on paper on page.
Over and over; On and on.
The lines are getting tangled up.
The shapes and the words are enmeshed.
Amping up the contrast entails adding more
(collage scraps of old photos & dictionary pages)
more thick paint – more collage –
thickening up the page – and increasing the heft.
All part of this curious adventure that is, a page a week, 2015.
The year winds on, the weeks flip by, the book of weeks fills up.
I’m finding out stuff I didn’t even know was there.
You remember back to January? I set my word for the year, after much deliberation, to Focus.
It took some fathoming, and even then I wasn’t positive I’d picked the right word… or the right word had picked me.
But as I let it settle we found our connection with each other. And time and again I’ve been surprised at what has become my focus of attention.
As the year bumps along my focus shifts.
More than a few times I’ve felt myself careering down a route I didn’t plan.
(with practice this gets easier: stop trying to steer at high speed – see where you land up – it’s all part of the wild ride of life)
Racing headlong toward something I’ve avoided in the past.
For fear. For fear of…? Fear of what’s behind it all?
This sentence appeared in my world – loud and timely enough for it to become what this page is based around. Loud, Bold Lettering – which some weeks gets covered up – not this week. The organising committee in my mind had other plans, and only allowed the doodles to skirt the edges. To enhance not to obliterate. Ok….I thought….Ok. You trying to tell me something here?
Back in the real world, this particular week the final project was almost due part of an online course I’ve been taking. I was in a state of suspended procrastinatory blur: the deadline was 5 days off when I emailed the course leader to confess I was beaten, I couldn’t pull it together in time. I had to quit.
This left me with just two problems.
Problem #1 – quitting wasn’t followed by the enormous wave of relief I’d expected. Instead a slightly sorrowful shame that nearly a year’s worth of work hadn’t reached it’s completion, it had just damply fizzled out.
Problem #2 – no amount of saying ‘I just don’t know what to do’ would quieten these big bold words I was mindlessly doodling around in this weeks page. I did know what to do, I also knew I didn’t want to do it. But I did: It needed doing. It was going to be difficult, emotional, raw. I was a bit scared.
Ok. I’ll do it. This idea had been drifting around in the margins for some months now. Trying to creep into focus I nudged it away. Repeatedly. But ideas can be stubborn and this one finally flew out before I could stop it, unraveling in front of me.
I had 3 days to go and I faced my demons, I did what I know needed doing: I sat and wrote my story.
My story is my art and my art is my story. As is this book, I’m the sum of my days. Until I face up and focus for real I won’t ever see who I am behind the mirrors.
As time settles the rawness in my mind, I’ll bring bits of it over here to show you. X
I’ll let the pictures tell the story for this week.
Week 34 into the year, and this page was a struggle. Like they always do, it started out with scraps of I don’t know what.
Some scrubby paint, some leftover unwanted collage snips. Beginning at the familiar stage of: ‘Meh… but this will get buried. It will come good. See what happens’
Color usually helps…
Hmmm… more collage? … oil pastels?
What? What’s happening? It’s getting more chaotic.
White a load of this out, more collage, regroup:
The enthusiasm from that chirpy thumbs up is misplaced, and it’s psyching me out. It has to go. Smothering with color: that’s the way forward. Just follow the shapes
Looking back this would have been an adequate stopping point, but I remember thinking It just needs turquoise: that will sort it.
And then a lot of layers later…
It went on and on.
It went on and on a bit like this:
Even now I’ve declared it done I don’t love it. This is the first one that seems to have beaten me. I guess being beaten at a rate of 1 in 34 – I’m cool with that. Another new week begins tomorrow. Time for a change of strategy.
This week started out, as they invariably do, with no plan, no ideas, just some scraps and a blank(ish) page.
I began with tissue paper. I love the semi-translucent. If you get the right stuff (usually cheap craft tissue) the dye runs beautifully and makes for water-colour kinda effect as soon as it comes in contact with water or glue or hands or pretty much anything. I think this must have been something more fancy, probably saved from gift wrap. (shame)
Anyhoo, it was the usual build up of layers…
There are bits of torn all sorts of paper in there now. I keep the box of scraps for recycling under my work table. There are bits from there. What the bits are don’t matter so much, it’s more just to let some shapes begin to develop.
And then the painting…. more layers
Just playing with the shapes
And there we have it.
Reach Out and You will Shine
25/52: It’s Palindrome Week!
And it’s pushed me into a different colour zone.
I’m new here, I haven’t visited this array of bluegreens and reddypinks before
The streaks of white are new as well. The collage continues, I can’t see that ending any time soon.
Rising up, looking forward…
Something of a Tribal Phoenix
amid musical mishmash. Here we go……..
“To see patterns is to understand.”
Do you know Jason Silva?
He’s media artist, futurist, philosopher,
he’s a ball of frenetic energy and enthusiasm and with a magnificent mastery of descriptive language he spills this energy out into the internet in Shots of Awe.
I like Jason Silva a LOT.
I was listening to him talking with Tim Ferris while I made the most part of this page.
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!
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:
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.
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