Category Archives: 30 Day Challenge

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…

Apple rainbow, soup man and fabulous friends

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I am a little late posting tonight. I will miss my midnight deadline and missed posting yesterday as well. I am learning not to worry about the little things. I will do what I can when I can on this 30DC journey and remember why I embarked on the challenge in the first place… to bring the JOY of creativity back into my life. So… if it becomes anything less than a pleasure, I must stop.

Yesterday evening I had a good hour or so to focus on my art, but nothing was flowing, nothing became real. It was still fun, though slightly frustrating, so I just continued to play with no results to show, just a pile of images, arranged, rearranged and abandoned… put aside for the moment, to return to (or not) another day.

I no longer worry if I do not produce a finished piece at the end of each day, as long as I have made an effort to do something. This morning, smallest boy’s mind was thinking creatively as he sat with his healthy breakfast laid out on a plate in front of him. “Look Mum, it’s a rainbow,” he told me, looking at the way he had arranged the fruit in an arc on the edge of his plate.
The other food-related observation of the day came at lunch time when some of small son’s soup splattered onto the table. “Look Mum, it is a man and he has a bit of his arm missing.” I saw what he meant immediately. He is three. It made me smile and will be entered into my book of things my small son has done that made me smile“. I have such a book for my big son as well.
In downloading the photographs from my camera, I noticed that he had taken a sneaky photograph of me whilst I sat at the top of the stairs giving a friend advice on the phone about which art materials to buy for her son’s 8th Birthday, at the same time cooking up plans for future workshops in my head, the ideas flowing as we talked about easels and art boxes, brushes and paints.
I do love it when the boys pick up my camera and start snapping as I used to love doing with my own little camera as a kid. I love seeing things through their eyes, looking at the world from a different (usually lower) angle. I liked this picture as it captures the slightly chaotic, informal feel of our little home. I was pleased to see that he had taken a few pictures of his brother as well and tried his hand, once again, at self-portraiture.

This evening, three of my fabulous friends came over. We all have children of the same age, are all creative in our own separate ways, and once in a while find that getting together for a drink and a chat and a spot of making is just what we need. So tonight, the tea was flowing, the honey sweets and chocolates were consumed, the news was shared and the evening passed with each of us working on our own individual projects, inspiring each other to create and sharing life’s latest trials and triumphs. For me, this is one of the very best ways to spend an evening. Every artistic Mum should gather together a group of friends to share and create with… at least once a month. It is good for the art, good for the soul. There is no pressure. Sometimes one of us will make more tea than art or pass an hour of the evening flicking through a fascinating new craft magazine, but it does not matter… it is about being creative friends together, supporting and encouraging each other to do the things we love.

I was not sure what to do, so chose to play. Setting out with no outcome in mind seems to work better for me on some days than others. At times, when I have an idea in mind, know what I would like a piece to look like when completed, I feel disappointed by the result. The opposite can also be true… I can start out with no idea where I am going and end up producing something I had never envisaged and be pleased with the result.

Tonight, I played with cotton buds dipped in white ink, dancing them over black paper. After a couple of smaller patterned pieces, I worked on an A5 sheet, again drawing with white ink on a cotton bud, cutting wiggly lines from an old book, sticking them down, then drawing on top with a black wax crayon and adding some more wiggly lines of tissue paper to the piece. I was both surprised and happy with the result. It was like nothing I had ever created before, but I may one day attempt to make something similar again.

Pass that good feeling on

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A productive day at home today. All action and progress. It feels good.

As a mother of two young boys, life is sometimes hectic, often challenging, usually fun. Time away from the boys comes with a variety of emotions: relief at not being woken in the very early morning, blind opened by a little hand to reveal daylight to the cries of small boy announcing “It’s wake up time Mum!”; I feel guilt (for a whole host of reasons, try finding a Mum who doesn’t); a feeling of urgency to get a million and one things done in a relatively small window of time; then confusion about what is important, what is not and whether I should be doing chores, chilling out or having fun (probably all of the above, each in moderation, but the confusion combined with the urgency regularly leads an overdoing of one and neglecting another); and excitement at what can be achieved on my own when I put my mind to it. But really, when all is quiet here, without the little fellas running riot, I do miss them and usually have the radio on, talking in the background, keeping me company.

My intention today was to do some domestics (tick), complete a plan for a workshop to happen here at home (tick) and do a little bit of art (tick). I woke naturally at 8am and worked in my pjs until the postman knocked. I reached an arm around the door, popped my head out, thanked him, then dashed upstairs to get dressed. I cooked up a deliciously simple stir fry (broccoli, asparagus, carrots) for breakfast, put the washing on and engaged in some online chat and cheering on of fellow 30 Day Challengers. Planning the workshop was a pleasure and the feedback from the 30DC community helped enormously with the little question marks in my mind and spurred me on to commit to the first date. So, my first Life Collage workshop will be held on Wednesday May 30, 8-10pm.

The prospect of hosting an evening workshop here at home, sharing with other people an activity which I find both relaxing and deeply rewarding, is most exciting. Now, all that is needed is participants, so if this is something that may interest you too, please come and join me.

Today’s creation is a simple Life Collage, an example of what can be done with everyday materials and a little inspiration, and to map my feelings at this point in time, almost two thirds of the way through the 30DC. What began as an experiment, a challenge, a blog, is becoming a path, a journey, a way forward. I am becoming clearer and more focused on the things I enjoy, ways of applying these to my daily life and ideas for sharing them with others in a practical, accessible way. I am finding the things that make me feel good and I want to pass that good feeling on.

Friday night

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Invisible. Floating noisily from room to room. Walking, talking. Silent. One way, you. Another. Mirrored in glass of etching’s frame. Words spoken. Beautiful face. Silent. Invisible. A word. One more nothing. Hungry. Feed off conversations overheard.
Speed away.
Don’t look back. Only black.
Restless again.
Need light. Option flight.
Tonight.
Nothing stirred. Lines read remain on walls. Unabsorbed. Butterflies kept me. Safe.
The tide. Tied.
Free. One two three. Not me.
Hands full. Eyes tired. Breathe break. Strong enough. Strong. Enough.

Practice, patience and perseverance

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There was a good feeling in the air today. I do not know if it was the promise of sunshine rather than rain, or the fact that the kids got dressed and out the door on time without too many asks, or maybe it was just heading off into town to meet people I love spending time with, knowing I would return home inspired made me smile.

My morning was spent with Sue Kreitzman at Spitalfields Market in East London. Sue is one of the most colourful, creative characters I know. She is a prolific artist and is in fact a walking work of art, always dressed up like a glorious painting, you can see heads turn to take her in. She is also one of the most supportive and generous of friends and I find her one of the most uplifting people to hang out with. When we meet, our animated conversation always revolves around art, whether it is a project we are collaborating on, an exhibition we have seen or some other thing.

Sue lives, breathes, wakes and sleeps art. Her home is crowded with a rich combination of her own paintings and sculptures mixed in with those she has collected over a long period. An obsessive collector and compulsive creator, Sue has a style which is joyfully, playfully kitsch.

I have wanted to interview artists for a long time, but for some reason, have never quite got round to making it happen, so I took the opportunity today to speak to Sue about her art. It was fascinating to hear her talking about her transformation from cookery writer to artist and how, being so abundantly creative, she finds at times that it is difficult to turn off the inspiration and just be.

There is something very powerful about being in the presence of such a strong creative force and whilst some of us are struggling to find time in the day and space in the house to draw/paint/sculpt, it is encouraging to see what really is possible given time and space and with materials close at hand.

This afternoon, I met with Lynne at the Royal Festival Hall. Lynne and I have been working on the Step Up 3 research project at Pallant House Gallery for almost a year now. We usually meet at the gallery, working in the library or studio there, but chose a change of location for our meeting today. There is something very refreshing about working in a public place, getting away from your normal workspace and immersing yourself in the life of the city whilst you work. Lynne is putting together a workshop pack on Jean Dubuffet and we discussed in detail, some of his methods as well as those of the Art Brut artists whose work he collected. We excitedly explored the possibilities of a number of ideas for practical workshops, talking about how different artists have created great works of art without using any traditional art materials and how it really is possible to create all manner of wonderful art from found objects and untraditional materials. Sue herself, makes her memory jugs from found and collected items and gives new life to old objects and Lynne was bursting with ideas to try on her upcoming visit to the Lake District, where she intends to travel without her art kit and make fresh work from the things she finds there.

So, as I pursue this mission to be creative daily, posting my first ever video interview on YouTube as my achievement today, I realise that if creativity is important to us, we can/will/must make room for it in our lives. There are no excuses for not doing something as opportunities to create and engage with our environment are all around us and no matter how small an amount of time we dedicate to our art at the moment, there will come a time, with practice, patience and perseverance, that we will do more.