New paintings and regular art updates.
I wouldn’t normally post a meme here but I love this one. I think art is so important and yet life gets in the way of people becoming artists. There needs to be the freedom to create, I don’t think people can be a square peg squeezed into a round hole. They should be allowed to do art if they want to. X
Every so often I paint one of the iconic bottle ovens from Stoke-on-Trent. These were where pottery was originally fired with coal fires. The city would be covered by a pall of thick smoke, morning noon and night.
They sometimes had metal bands wrapped round them to strengthen them, and the old bricks can shine like gold when there is a lovely sunrise or set. Arthur Berry, famous artist of Stoke-on-Trent used to speak about the beauty of the potteries towns. He painted and drew abstracted views of the six towns. He’s known as the potteries Lowry.
This painting is of a derelict oven, I’ve painted clematis growing up it, rewinding the ancient landscape. The blue area represents the local canals, it’s shape mirrors the bottle oven. The flowers in it represent the abstract canal roses that are found adorning canal barges throughout Britain.
My attempt at wax resist printing that I did with the brilliant Belinda Latimer a few years ago. I enjoyed trying to do Batik in her workshop, creating layers of colour. I also did a print of a couple of fish that I called Pisces had framed in a deep wooden frame. Another example of my experimental art practice.
What could you do more of?
I have been ill and down for a while and I need to start feeling better and reclaim doing some real art. Yes I can work on my small phone screen and create small pieces of digital art, and yes, over the years I have done a lot. But I begin to need to paint again. It must be a good sign? I’ve got to stop being frightened of creating, fear of failure is holding me back. Will I ever get through being blocked? At least now I can admit I want to.
Exercise in perspective. Digitally manipulated photo of a door and window. It’s created an apparent corner where non exists. I tried rotating the image four times until I was satisfied with this picture. I used the incollage app to do it, I was previously using the old Instagram layout app.
A picture I created five years ago. Collaged from an angled view of part of the old spode factory in Stoke on Trent. I love it because it looks like it’s floating in a beautiful blue sky, with patterns of wispy clouds creating a tracery of waves like the tide coming in around the buildings. I should do more….
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
I used to be hurt when people said things to me to upset me. I would take on board what they said, and it could lead to several sleepless nights, or mistrusting my judgement or feelings.
After a few years of this I talked to a new friend who explained a way of getting through or over the uncaring words.
What they said was imagine the nasty words are poison. The words are absorbed by the victim (in this case me) and the poison works it’s way into the mind of the person they want to hurt. This affects that person’s confidence, thoughts, security.
But in the meantime the person doing the poisoning walks away scot free. With no effect on them, able to go and place poison elsewhere, spreading their cruelty and getting a rise out of others.
The trick is to realise what they are doing and train yourself to ignore their jibes. Inoculate your mind against their poison and learn to stop their tricks before they can get to you. It really does help.
On beach holidays I draw seahorses like this on the sand. I will use a stick to draw it out and sometimes use pebbles to decorate it. These drawings are ephemeral, disappearing on the high tide, tracked over by footsteps, lost in windblown sand. Seahorse is a half horse, half fish. I just draw, them for fun.
What things give you energy?
I’m trying to be honest with this post, I am honest when I blog but I don’t express my emotions here very much. What I will say is that when I’m down I get energy from love and friendship from family and friends. But what I don’t do is seek out those people when I feel sad. I guess I don’t like dragging others down with me. I hide away from them and instead of getting healing energy I feel lower moods.
But when I allow people to know what’s going on, I think I get positive energy from them. Which can lift my mood. It’s just finding a balance, it’s hard to do that.
I think I also get energy from doing art. It increases my enthusiasm to do more. It makes me feel free and able to use my imagination. I get a lot more energy from Art when family and friends enjoy what I do, in that way I know what I’m doing is possibly worthwhile. One thing I do have is imposter syndrome which means I feel like I question my validity a lot. Perhaps that’s why I blog.
So, we have equal amounts of day and night today according to this.
Days will get shorter than nights until the Winter Solstice around the 21st of December 2023, then lengthen again. In the Southern Hemisphere the days will get longer until their Summer Solstice.
I don’t like the lack of sunlight and the change from British Summer time to Greenwich Mean time also gets to me. We lose an hour of evening daylight in October, although we get lighter mornings. But studies in the 1960’s or 1970’s showed that overall there were less accidents when they kept British Summertime for three years. Sadly the change was abandoned.
Maybe we could revisit the idea? Saving an hours electricity in the winter evenings might even help the environment?
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