art

Taking the time to play

| Sheree

I’ve always loved drawing.

At different times of my life, I was either really into drawing or gone off the boil from drawing.

Basically, if I allowed my drawings to come into contact with other people, that’s when my drawing would go off the boil. I wouldn’t do it, I’d let the practice slide because someone or other had said my drawing wasn’t very/any good.

Or they’d looked at what I’d shared and start giving me pointers on how to improve it. How to shade ‘properly’ or how to get things into ‘proportion’. Basically saying that what I was doing, instinctively and true to me, was wrong.

For large stretches of time, I didn’t allow myself to draw, to play because in comparison to others, my work just didn’t match up. Didn’t look like theirs.

And then one time, while feeling less than, while feeling the odd one out, not accepted or appreciated, I picked up a pen and started drawing again. I found solace and safety in the lines I drew.

Faces, I love drawing faces. Usually of black women. Seeing myself reflected.

I completed a 100 days of black women one time, a few years ago now and I loved where this challenge took me. It took me to a place and peace of accepting my drawings. My style, my subjects and themes, my shading and perspectives.

Fuck man, we’re all individuals, unique and no way are we supposed to or should be drawing all alike, to a certain standard or brief.

My drawings are an expression of me, and how I see/ move through this world.

I’m dealing with it. I’m embracing it. And fuck everyone else!

Firelei Báez

| Sheree

My works are propositions, meant to create alternate pasts and potential futures, questioning history and culture in order to provide a space for reassessing the present. – Firelei Báez

March into Spring

| Sheree

This weekend we’ve had the light. Having the light with a bit of warmth makes a difference. To the mood. To the outlook.

This March I’m seizing the light and going to work behind the scenes on a project I’ve been putting off but one which is close to my heart.

I’ve been divorcing myself from big tech, rich oligarch run social media and platforms. I’ve been going more analogue than digital. And I’ve definitely been refusing AI.

This month I’m working on my archives. The archives of this website. These blogposts. So that my legacy, this work and practice lives on beyond WordPress, beyond myself. Beyond the internet.

I’m taking ownership of my creativity and taking records. Backing things up, creating a trace of my presence here which isn’t dependant on technology.

This is gonna take some time, so I’ve taking the time away from posting here to archives there.

I’ll be back though. Soon come.

Playful Palimpsests

| Sheree

I go to my local probably about once a week if not more. I was brought up next to a library, in Bradford and in Newburn. They were places I could go to for some sense of freedom and adventure.

The librarians knew me and would recommend books to me and events. They wouldn’t rush me, I was welcome to stay as long as I wanted.

Today, I love to pop in to see the book sales at my local libraries. As I have a few on my doorstep now. I flit between them, collecting worn and torn books that I repurpose.

I was brought up to know it was ‘wrong’ to write in books. They were sacred in our home. Probably because we were poor and if we bought books, usually from the indoor market in town, we knew it was money we couldn’t afford to spend on books. But my parents spent it anyway, as they valued books, learning and education. It was our way out of poverty.

I wonder what they would say now, if they saw what I did to books?

10p is all I pay for big, colourful children’s books, withdrawn from library stock. I have to feel the paper first though before I buy them. Even if only 10p, too shiny the page and the paint won’t grip it as well. The paint just swirls around and doesn’t stick.

I like my pages rough and matt finished. Ready to absorb whatever I put down on it.

This sketchbook was my side hustle for the last month. Side hustle to my main creative sketchbook. Here I just lay down colour and see what happens.

I like when what’s underneath the paint bleeds through. I like when the different layers of paint and pencil and pen bleeds through to the surface too.

It’s like a palimpsest. The marks beneath is the feeling I’m after. The haunting, the trace, the evidence of time and the passage of time. The archive is present now.

Playing with my stabilo woodies!

| Sheree

I went straight into the fun today in one of my creative sketchbooks.

And it all came from a colour. A colour I created when prepping my pages for my visual journaling practice this morning.

Lemon yellow and sap green came together on the page to create a golden green colour that I wanted to explore more.

So I smeared it into my creative sketchbook and went from there. I’d seen Enas Satir’s Daloka- Girls’- songs pottery series and they made me smile.

Their facial expressions and just the black and white starkness of them.

So I took a smile and nose from there to create this piece which when I look at it, makes me smile.

Hey I’m all for sharing smiles, with those who see me and smile back!

just mercy

| Sheree

I love me a great film.

A film where black people are centred.

A film where injustice is tackled head on and over time is recognise and overturned.

Just Mercy, a film starring Michael B Jordan and Jamie Foxx, co-written and directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, is one such film.

I return to this film , which is a true story about the wrongful incarceration of Walter McMillan and how Bryan Stevenson worked tirelessly for his release, a lot when I want to feel hope. When I want to feel that all is not lost and that there is another way, or option. There’s always something else/other/more we can do/say{BE}.

The point is, not to give up. To not lose hope. To not lose love.

This extract from the script is a prison scene when Jamie Foxx playing Walter McMillan, on death row for a murder he didn’t commit, is trying to calm down his friend Herbert Richardson played by Rob Morgan whose execution is the very next day.

“Look at them pine trees that been growin’ since way before we was born, and gonna keep on growin’ way after we gone. They been through all the same shit we been through and more, but they still dancing in the breeze.”

This part stays with me. This right here is what sticks to my bones. That wisdom from nature. That guidance from nature.

Even while going through shit, and going through shit from time, they still be dancing.

Yes, to this. Yes to still living through it all on our own terms, in our own ways. and experiencing/ creating/holding on to the joy.

Come won’t you dance with me x