Category Archives: Screw Work Let’s Play

Setting intentions and doing what makes you come alive

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My play map

As I work my way through the Screw Work Let’s Play Ignition programme, I find myself diving into Play Mapping. With additional coaching from Selina Barker, I am getting clearer on how I would like my working life to be and taking a step closer to that every day. I am fairly happy with my life as it is, but hey, there is always room for improvement and I could do with more work and income when small boy starts school in just 12 weeks time… I want to be sure that I love what I am doing and getting paid to play. Play Mapping involves dreaming big. It means creating a vision of what you really, really want and this involves getting to the very heart of the experiences you desire in your life. So, I have been dreaming big, but also getting very practical about the little steps I can take right now to get closer to that dream life on a day to day basis.

To the sea

As expressed in my play map, I felt the need for wide open skies and sea air this weekend, so I took my best friend Laura, her youngest daughter and my boys on a day trip to Hastings. We had fish & chips, rode the rollercoaster (not in that order) and played hide and seek amongst the gorse bushes in Hastings Country Park. These are the things that make me come alive. I returned home with salty, tangled hair and a good feeling about things to come. The restorative effects of this day of play are still with me and the trip got Laura sketching again.

One of the most important things to me is sharing and connecting with like minded people. I have long known that in order to create a successful, sustainable business, it is necessary to grow my tribe, but this week I acknowledged that fact and started to take steps towards the goal of reaching out and connecting with more people. On Wednesday, I set the intention of finding a blog for which I could provide a guest post. I mentioned this to a few people and sent this desire out into the universe. Within 24 hours, my call was answered from the most unexpected of directions. I stumbled upon Paula, a like-minded blogger in Buenos Aires who was seeking guest posts and, as luck would have it, someone had dropped out leaving a spot for me right away. As Paula so sweetly put it, “The Universe was playing mix and match with us”. By Friday… less than 48 hours after setting my intention, my first guest blog post was up! You can read it here.

On Monday, I was Paula’s guest illustrator of the week and another of my images was being shared. Whilst I have been letting go of outcome in my art, the power of setting small, but clear intentions with a bigger goal in mind has been such a great lesson for me this week. My desire to connect led to another contact closer to home… the delightful Hatti of Parent Tribe. Parent Tribe is a new online magazine and website which aims to inspire and support parents to find ways to be together with their children more, living creative, holistic and fulfilling lives. I am so thrilled that some of my photographs will be used in the next issue and I am looking forward to connecting with other creative parents online.

And so, as the week progresses, I will be doing more of what makes me come alive. I will be going back to my play map and fitting more of these things into my daily life. I will be setting more intentions as well. Starting with the bigger dream, I will consider the next step I need to take in order to get closer to that bigger dream… I will set my intention and take the leap.

Have you tried Play Mapping?

How have you used the power of intentions to get closer to your big dream?

 

Working through emotions

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Dissolving emotions from Be Creative Daily on Vimeo.

After making the last film which expressed all that I was going through over the weekend, I felt cleansed, I felt stronger.

It was a very vulnerable experience sharing such raw emotions, but the responses I received confirmed that I was doing the right thing in sharing… opening doors for others to express how they feel.

This morning I felt compelled to experiment further with the film, cut it, reverse it, speed it up, to express the fact that sharing the emotions had been a healing experience and had enabled me to confront them, make friends with them, conquer them and move on. (This new film can be seen above.)

It is a long and winding path we travel, but if we acknowledge our feelings and allow ourselves to feel them deeply, we can learn from them also and in doing this, we enable ourselves to feel JOY more deeply too.

This morning, I created a piece of art (see below) which, I hope, illustrates the transformation we make when we embrace our darker, more difficult emotions, work through them and come out the other side shining.

I would love to hear of your own experiences if you feel like sharing.
With love,
Julia x

To be Lonely / To be Loved

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I embarked on the 30 Day Challenge on March 1. My mission was to Share JOY through ART. As often happens, the path took unexpected twists and turns. I had not expected this so soon. All sorts of deep-seated feelings and emotions have been unearthed. I am learning to embrace them, feel them, learn from them. 

It seems so strange to be sharing these emotions and feelings when my challenge was to share JOY, but this is part of the process and I firmly believe it will come full circle as I do here. Already, having explored those feelings, I am stronger, they have less power.

In my attempts to share JOY, I have also been reconsidering how important it is to examine the way in which we experience other, darker emotions and rather than hide them, just be with them and let them do their work.

Today, I was moved by the work of Marina Abramovic. I feel am in a very important period of transition and transformation. Discovering her performance art inspired me to make this video.

To Be Lonely / To Be Loved from Be Creative Daily on Vimeo.

“In the deeper sense, it’s about hospitality. It’s that you actually open yourself to the public and show your vulnerability, your contradictions and be there in the full sense for them.”
Marina Abramovic

Tea, cake and collage

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Four of my fabulous friends just headed home after the first ever Be Creative Daily workshop with Life Collages to be proud of.

I can think of few better ways to spend an evening than drinking tea, eating cake and making art with friends. With little more than a piece of card, a pile of magazines, a pair of scissors and some glue, wonderful, inspiring and possibly life-changing art was created here at BCD HQ tonight!

The process is simple, the result powerful. Life Collage is way of exploring your likes, loves, dreams and desires, in an intuitive, feeling way… discovering images that resonate, words that inspire and putting them together to create a visual expression of the good things you would like in your life. This evening’s Life Collagers all left with a smile, having met new friends, shared lively conversation and interesting ideas whilst making very personal works of art.

I have spoken with lots of people about the creation of Life Collages. For many, they have acted as a powerful tool for change, bringing into focus what is important in their lives. I look forward to hearing what positive changes come about following the creation of these veritable dream boards here tonight.

A conclusion, but not an end… let’s play

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The 30 Day Challenge concludes today.
The journey of those 30 days is documented here.
When I look at what I have created over this period of 30 days, I see me. I see an artist. I see colour, life and joy. And that is only half of it. What I see here does not include the hearts in the woods that will, by now, have shifted shape, maybe vanished entirely, but hopefully brought a smile to the faces of passers-by. It does not include the photographs of flowers and trees, my word pictures, my first video interview, my unfinished experiments or the painting I left out in the rain to see what happened. I notice, from what I do have here, that I spent roughly half my time making tangible works of art… and the rest was play, but in a different way.

As those of you who have been following or making this journey along with me will know, this past month has been one of transformation. I have broken down some of the barriers I had put up for myself over many years… fears of making bad art, fears of not living up to my own (often unreasonable) expectations, the pressure (put on by none other than me) to produce something good, something original, something worthwhile. I have been reminded of the great joy and sense of inner peace I used to experience from simply putting pen to paper, from letting words and images flow, from looking at the little details in life and in sharing.

I feel liberated and refreshed, invigorated and inspired.

And I feel lucky.
Lucky to have had this amazing experience… to have grasped an opportunity that was offered to me and to have been part of a safe and incredibly supportive community of people, each taking small steps to make big changes in their lives, spurring each other on, offering encouragement on difficult days and celebrating successes together.

And I am grateful.
Grateful to everyone who has taken the time to read these words, look at these pictures, share their thoughts here. I am grateful to all those who have offered advice and ideas. To Selina and John for creating the space to make such change to happen. Thank you. You have all made this experience such a pleasure.

This evening, I will earn my first playcheque, for inviting people into my home to make art with me. How amazing is that? To get paid to do what I love and share that joy with others. My desire is to inspire and I hope that those who attend the workshop this evening will take pleasure in expressing themselves visually and sharing that experience with others.

Creativity has, once again, become an intuitive and joyful expression of who I am.

Creative play is, after all, only natural. It is the one of the first activities we engage in as children and at that stage, it comes without thinking, it is all in the moment, all about exploring, learning, enjoying life. Surely this is something we all need to re-capture and re-live. Today, without thinking, I found myself singing, improvising with my small son… he led, I followed. I made little films of his innocent and amusing games, photographed his funny little experiments with food on his face, then handed him the camera to document the day in his own way.

What if each one of us took every available opportunity to play…?
What if, whenever we were sad or stuck, we tried to play our way out of the situation…? What if, when faced with a difficult decision or awkward situation, we played it out… thought to ourselves, “what would be the most fun way of dealing with this?” and tried that option out…?
My guess is that it may not work in every situation, but I do believe that in many, it would.

So, as the 30 Day Challenge draws to a close, rather than being an end, this was just the beginning… a little introduction, a prelude to what’s to come… the start of a new, playful chapter in what I hope will become a long and adventurous story in which I hope you will also play a part.

 

The joy of the unexpected

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Early hours and I after a while of distracting and avoiding I finally embarked on some creative activity, believing I had little time, not sure where to start, I rushed and produced something I am not particularly pleased with, but feel content in the knowledge that I spent creative time, enjoyed the dipping of the brush, the watery paint running down brown paper taped to the wall, finding its path around the line of the oil pastel earlier applied, the time to myself, music setting the tone, birdsong rising, sky lightening, silhouettes coming into focus. This is the best time of the day… the time I usually miss… the stillness and the quiet arrival of morning.

I have been reflecting on my journey over the past four weeks. Of how this little blog has developed and grown. Of how from nothing, I have created something, taught myself things I had been frightened of, and how in such a brief period, that seemed so long, I have gone from a sense of urgent activity to a calmer, more natural productivity, which is what I was originally aiming for, but lost for a while along the way. I realise too, that art was my aim, that I wanted to draw, paint, make, create, but that in becoming an artist I am finding my voice again and what has surprised me is that I often prefer to paint my pictures with words, rather than a brush. This is something I did as a teenager, freely, regularly, always carrying a notebook, doing the odd sketch here, a little drawing there, but writing, always writing. I had forgotten the importance words held for me, but am reminded now, as I find myself returning to my old ways… my patterns of napping early then waking and working into the early hours… patterns that worked well for me as a student, but may need some adjustment now, as a parent. But what is different is sharing… the words are out there, though rarely read at present, they are not tucked away in a little book in a pocket, a bag or a drawer, they are there for the world, if it wishes. There are some strange, vain and slightly uncomfortable feelings attached to this… to this sharing… and I am still not entirely comfortable with it, not yet at ease with opening my heart, making myself vulnerable, but there seems to be some need to do so… some desire to be understood. I know I am not the the only one who often feels alone, wishes to connect, to be heard, appreciated, validated.

I think also there is a desire to create as a way to understand myself, to problem solve from within, to open up a new conversation and find a fresh way forward. It is something I was resistant to at first. An open-ended beginning did not seem to be a clever way of achieving things, surely we need goals, aims, deadlines to do this. But to be open to play, to do things purely for pleasure, to give yourself permission to take off in whichever direction you choose, to explore, experiment, step off the path and down a dusty dirt track to who knows where is deeply liberating. And surprisingly, it has also been the way to finding a clearer path. Not judging, just going with the flow, playing every day, was key to this 30 Day Challenge, a programme devised by John Williams and Selina Barker to inspire creative individuals to put their passions at the forefront of their lives for one month and see where it leads. And the outcome is often not what one expects. Many of the 200 people embarking on this challenge found that around half way through the month, they wanted answers, wanted progress, a clear way forward, but then discovered that it is only when you let go of these expectations and just let things flow that the answers present themselves and something slowly becomes clear. In giving myself the freedom to express thoughts and ideas in this playful way, taking the pressure off and injecting the fun back in, I found my own way forward. My breakthrough came whilst enjoying a play day at home. Immersed in art, music on, I realised that I was so happy, doing what felt natural to me, painting, printing, making art, and that only one thing was missing… having someone there to share it with. So I decided to offer art workshops here at home. Within a three days of posting details of my first workshop on the web, it was full. That workshop will be held here tomorrow evening. I am both excited and nervous in equal measure. This, I believe is the perfect combination… the excitement being surely what one would wish to feel about any fun thing that they have chosen to do… and the nerves reminding me that this is something very important to me, something I care about, something I want it to go well.

As this 30 Day Challenge draws to a close and I near the end of this particular journey, another is beginning. I find it hard to explain the joy of watching people make things happen, change their lives, live their dreams, see them come alive, shine. It may sound pie in the sky, but for many of those who took this challenge, change is the reality, however big or small, it is always significant.

I had the pleasure of meeting some of the other challengers last Wednesday when we gathered together at the Royal Festival Hall to exchange stories face to face. One man had ridden the underground for the first time since the London bombings to be there. This stuff is changing lives. One challenger is sharing his music with the world… a small step for some, but a big leap for one who has previously thrown everything he has created away. Some are telling their stories in blogs or books and others are finding new ways of keeping old traditions alive or distributing the knowledge of their elders. New websites, businesses, destinies and passions are emerging.

I do not know my next destination… and this time, I do not wish to know. I want to enjoy the journey one step at a time, take in all the details, meet new friends along the way… revel in the joy of the unexpected.

30 Day Challenge Meet-up at the Royal Festival Hall, May 23, 2012. Photograph: Barry Pitman

The shining of things

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I am not quite sure how to begin this post.
It is all about a feeling.

Often, I find it the easiest, most natural and enjoyable thing to express myself in words… they flow, little phrases come to me as I am walking along, invade my head, have to be saved, noted, sometimes passed on. But occasionally, like now, I am stuck… with this big feeling in my chest that I want to get across somehow, but don’t know where to begin. So, I will just start. I will try to explain and see where it takes me…

Hands up… I have not done any drawing, painting, collage, printing or put anything on paper this weekend. But I have not stopped… from early morning until late night, the days have been full and they have been fun. They have been the days that memories are made of. Days that seem to contain a whole week… where you do, see, feel, experience much more that on any ordinary days of the week and where you come home exhausted, but wholly satisfied and collapse into bed, not wanting the day to end, but knowing that it will never really leave you, so you can safely to slip into sleep knowing that the memories will still be there when you wake.

On Saturday morning, I packed up a picnic and took the train into town, buggy loaded with small boy, picnic and metal detector. Big boy chose for us to walk from Covent Garden to the South Bank, so we took a winding path down some of the quieter streets before hitting The Strand and on through Charing Cross Station, Hungerford Bridge, Queen’s Walk to Gabriel’s Wharf where we hit the beach with spades and metal detector.
No true treasure was found, but a couple of hours were spent, from low tide on, digging, playing, making friends, exploring… toes in the sand, London’s architecture laid out in front of us, boats and barges passing by on the river Thames and that fabulous feeling of Summer in the city with a background noise of happy chatter and the drifting smell of food that eventually lured us back up onto the embankment for ice cream.

We strolled back towards the Royal Festival Hall, stopping to dance a while to a big brass band playing to a large crowd outside the National Theatre and then for a few moments rest on the giant sofas covered in astroturf that have become a regular stopping place on our South Bank escapades these past few Summers.
We strode on, through the hoards of tourists, past the London Eye and up onto Westminster Bridge, past Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, along to St James’s Park where we spotted pelicans, squirrels, swans and cygnets, then on along The Mall to Buckingham Palace, where the boys were kitted out with fluorescent vests and hard hats and we were treated to a behind-the-scenes tour of the preparations for the Queen’s Jubilee (courtesy of B). Just before home time, we bumped into friends and wandered back together through Green Park before heading back, early evening, via the recently transformed Kings Cross Station.

Today (Sunday as I am writing this), we woke early (as small boy often does). I did not feel the urge to return to bed, but to make the most of the day. Up at six, I spent a little time in the garden with glorious birdsong, tending my newly-grown grass that is beginning to fill the previously patchy lawn, watering, admiring the newest flowers, paying attention to the little details. Small boy helped me make batter mix and me, he and big boy walked into the village to purchase lemons for our breakfast pancakes and morning milk. Two each. Big. Cooked in French crepe frying pan. Will double recipe next time. Small boy then helped bake banana and chocolate cake, to which we added an (off-recipe) apple, baked longer than listed and each enjoyed a still warm, moist slice before packing another picnic up and off again to meet friends in a local park for lunch and a walk in the cool woods.
After several hours of treasure-hunting, den-building, wood walking fun, we headed home and awaited Amma (Granny)’s arrival. She joined us for dinner, bronzed and refreshed from her Spanish holiday. Kisses, cuddles and catch-up made for a perfect close to the weekend and there seemed to be some resistance to sleep tonight on the boys’ part and on mine too as I now reflect on the last two days, consider what made them so special and think about how best to inject a little magic into otherwise ordinary days.

I think the weather has much to do with that good feeling… and after weeks of rain, it is a little like being well again after a particularly unpleasant illness, when you don’t just feel good, you feel fantastic… happy to be fit, well, back to normal and determined to make the most of every day… until feeling good just becomes normal again and you forget to appreciate it.

Lately… very recently… I have felt this wonderful sense of peace… an open-hearted kind of calm, that leads me to smile at strangers, talk to anyone, everyone… it happens quite often, I am happy to say, but this this weekend it was amplified. I walked, for many miles with two small boys, through some of the most popular tourist spots in London, crossed busy bridges and travelled on crowded trains, but I never felt pushed, instead taking my time to take it all in. How lucky we are to have all this on our doorstep and how important it is to make the most of what we have. The sun has a lot to do with this feeling, yes… that Summer glow, that hot, but not too hot heat that slightly stings your skin if you stay too long, but you can still breathe, walk, enjoy without feeling you may pass out if you don’t find shade immediately. But not only the sun… I think it also has to do with soaking it up… with being present, looking around, noticing the tiniest of details and not passing by the bigger stuff… opening your eyes wide… really wide and drinking it all in and doing and seeing lots, but not rushing, taking time and seeing the shining of things. That was what we noticed this weekend. The phrase kept coming back to me as big boy pointed out the fact that “Big Ben looks like it’s made of gold”, that “Stephen Wiltshire could probably draw those sparkles on the water exactly as they are”, as I looked up through the canopy of trees to the light beyond and relished the joy on my children’s faces as they themselves found endless things to devour and delight. The shining of things… that vivid vibrancy that radiates… that glorious beauty that is right in front of us, but is often overlooked… that moment of magic when your heart is touched in a way that you find hard to put into words.

Nothing is finished

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1:24am and I have been drawing, painting, exploring on and off for a few hours. Nothing is finished, but I have enjoyed dipping into a variety of subjects and playing with materials. I began to re-do the portrait from the first day of the 30DC, but with colour and new words, but insufficiently inspired, I stopped. I will return to that piece at a later date. I played with another self-portrait (not my own), dancing a line across paper from the subject’s hair. Something reminded me of a murmuration of starlings, spotted some six months ago during a walk on the South Downs, so I put pen to paper, attempting to capture my memory of their movement… difficult to do, but mesmerising in its own way… a kind of meditative way of drawing, like the cloud pictures I first did from a train, London to Liverpool on May 1, 2008, and have occasionally attempted since, always enjoyable, and tried again this evening, but this time not from life.

Tired and ready for bed, I stood up from my desk to head upstairs, but spotted the roll of brown paper I had purchased yesterday to draw on, pulled the charcoal from the drawer, the mirror from the cupboard, taped the top of the paper roll to the wall, unravelled it and embarked upon what turned out to be a lopsided self-portrait, which captures to a degree, my dishevelled appearance this evening.

Satisfied and about to share, I will now stop. I have promised two young chaps a picnic and some treasure hunting on the South Bank beach in the morning with big boy’s new metal detector. Low tide at 11:51am. It is time to sleep.

Paper, scissors, paint

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There has not been a great deal of time to write these past few days. Sickness in the house has allowed little time to think with the clarity required to finish a paragraph. Big boy was quietly ill, spending most of his sick-time reclining under a blanket on the sofa before bouncing back the next day, full of beans, raring to go… just as small boy became lethargic and ill. Small feverish boy has been (and continues to be) rather vocal, poor chap, so my bursts of creativity have been punctuated by cries for cuddles (which of course I don’t refuse), and doses of medicine. I have managed to be surprisingly productive with with the art though. Perhaps these little interruptions mean that by the time I get back to the job in hand, I too am raring to go, keen to get on and create, having been dragged away and then returning by choice, rather than succumbing to the usual distractions that prevent me from focusing for long.

Whatever it is that is happening with my art, I am enjoying it. I have been trying to create whilst the boys are around, get them involved if possible, rather than waiting until they are tucked up in bed before I pick up my tools and begin. Yesterday, with big boy back at school, small boy and I did some “scissoring”, as he likes to call it. I had painted some large sheets of paper whilst he was sleeping, then cut petals from these and magazine pages of a similar colour, before forming them into paper flowers which reminded me of things my grandmother used to make as Christmas decorations. Memories of borrowing her pinking shears, a.k.a. “angry scissors”, to snip jagged lines into cloth and paper, came flooding back as I saw small boy’s pleasure at snipping alongside me. After a little while, he gave in to the fever and requested I cut a little cat from an advertisement in one of the magazines, to sit alongside him whilst he rested. He and the cat sat happily for a while, watching and chatting as I worked, the cut-out-cat on a small cushion, before disappearing temporarily, down a gap in the sofa, only to be noticed missing and retrieved some while later, slightly crumpled, but still intact. It was at this point that he went to live on the window ledge.

The flowers formed the beginning of another collage piece which is still in progress, but can be seen here in its current state.
This afternoon, I took some paints into the garden for both small boy and myself, hoping that he would paint alongside me. He found the movement of his paper in the breeze rather too frustrating, so we returned indoors and sat at the table to work on our individual projects. I had given him a selection of paints on a plate, and a handful of cotton buds to try instead of brushes. He loved dipping and dabbing, and produced a rather lovely dotty work in blue, green, yellow and pink. As he was using both ends of the cotton buds, his fingers had also become painted, so he added some finger dots, then hand-prints to the piece you can see here, below.
Meanwhile, I completed a new little self-portrait in watercolour which I had begun last night, but had put on hold to answer a call from small boy upstairs which became a cuddle and a  sleep and when I woke up, work unfinished at 5am, I was still wearing the red dress I had been painting.
I feel I am on a roll today. I would like to continue painting long into the night, but common sense is telling me not to, that sleep is more important and that little and often is good. This time, I am listening.

But first, I must seek out the gorgeous little black and gold buttons, purchased in a vide grenier in rural France several years ago, which I squirreled away somewhere, until I could find a good use for them. This afternoon, I purchased the perfect cardigan for these little gems. Now, all I have to do is locate that safe place I put them in…