By taking time to acknowledge ourselves for what we have done, we recognize that we’re more capable than we thought, we’re doing more than we were aware of, and we’re making incremental progress in our skill building. When we allow a space for positive thoughts and feelings, we find we feel more encouraged and forward
movement is inevitable from that place. Some days showing up for your creative work is all that you can do, and that is enough and worth acknowledging.
A couple of days ago, I completed the 30 day sketchbook challenge, successfully. Not a day missed.
I’m really proud of this achievement as it proves to myself that I can turn up for my art-making consistently. That I can use my sketchbook as a place of play and wonder. A place to take risks, safely.
The importance I place on the creative sketchbook practice is immense but not to the point of paralysing myself and then not creating out of fear of failure.
The plan is to continue the practice. And I have been turning up each day since. I’ve been using my own prompts, following my curiosity, leaning into my own style. Listening to my voice.
The original course came with an additional 30 prompts. So I’ll start them when I run out of my own ideas. Then I can also restart the original course again and then explore a comparison between the creations and reflections of the first round with the second.
This is definitely, at the point, turning into an 100 days project, an just saying that as another milestone to meet and to keep myself accountable.
And again, I’ll keep the pages for my eyes only, not ready or even wanting/needing to share the pages I create or to move onto larger, external canvas or panels.
I do not feel the need or the call to create any formal work as yet or share. I’m happy exploring within my sketchbook and following where that takes me within the pages.
I realise that has been where I’ve gone wrong in the past. Skipping the sketchbook phase which I’m thinking is simply like the drafting stage of writing. The loose, trial and error phase, where we’re just playing. I’ve been missing out this phase and going straight to the big stuff, the art put into the world. The exhibitions, the judgments and appreciations.
And what I’ve produced mainly carried little meaning for me or messages for the viewer. I feel that it’s fallen flat and felt like a void. And I think this is because I wasn’t sure of my voice, my style, my meanings and messages.
This is what I’m taking away from this sketchbook practice now. And I’m so enjoying the process and I’m open to what surfaces. But I’m also patient and loyal in terms of showing up and doing the work. I trust all will become clear and strong and full in the process.
With it being awards season and all, I felt called to watch Sinners again. This might have been my fifth or sixth time. I’m sorry, I’ve lost count. It still hasn’t lost its magic. The film just keeps on giving for me. To me.
This time, I’m struck by how many times freedom is mentioned. How to get free? How to be free? How to protect that freedom?
I think Sinners explores the price of freedom. The price of being free. There’s always a cost for attempting to live life on your own terms.
From the beginning, we might be introduced to sharecroppers, working for the white men, still on plantations. But this will be a self-sustaining community. More than bodies for working on the farms, the land they do not own. But they have each other. Each character is developed at the beginning of the film. The viewer is allowed to get to know them and see them in their element. They be vibrant and they be fixing to be free. Free from the restrictions of white supremacy culture, capitalism, patriarchy the whole shebang. And this isn’t without pain but also joy and laugher and love.
Sinners is what happens when a community, when people are living their own lives and are infiltrated by others, who want what they have. Outside threats come to ruin the day. Vampires come and covet what this community has. Sammie. Sammie has a gift, the gift of music that connects him with all ages. Griot.
Delta Slim’s says, “With this here ritual, we heal our people. And we be free.” This is the power of music and how a community can tell their stories through music. And outside forces, in this case vampires, who hear, see, realise this power, are threatened by it as well as want it. Want to control it take it away from this black community who are gain strength and sustainance through it all. And be free.
Sammie’s gift, the music, the very culture needs to be/ has to be protected from these outside threats at all costs. As culture, its very existence is threatened from being sucked dry by the devils coming tonight.
So as a people, as black people, we do whatever we can do to tell our own stories, protect and preserve our music, our culture as through this we heal. And we be free.
Yesterday after the school drop off, I braved the icy pavements ( you remember my fall last year right? year ago this weekend in fact!). Anyway walking like a duck with piles, I got down to my favourite beach and braved the icy metallic waves.
They say you never regret a sea swim. Well not so much swim, as the tide might have been going out but those waves were getting bigger coming in.
But it was worth it. This cold, freezing, numbing refreshing sea dip, skip, swear swim. Then it was back onto the icy pavement to the local coffee shop to warm up.
Got myself a seat by the radiator and enjoyed completing my visual journal spread for the day with an extra hot oat vanilla latte.
And this coffee comes courtesy of gift. I give thanks for the coffee to two people who kindly gifted me with ‘ buy me a coffee’ monthly subscriptions this week, responding to the post I put out this week asking for support, no doubt.
You know who you are and I’d like to thank you again for your generosity.
As you can see I’m putting your support to good use. I’d been sluggish all week as I get back into the school routine after the break. The sea woke me up. Fired me up and the coffee just kept the fires burning.
This is one of my favourite images from my extensive collection.
I know exactly when and where it was taken. Westfjords Residency, Iceland, Feb/March 2017.
This was my go to breakfast. Coffee, cornflakes and Skyr, Icelandic protein enriched yogurt. I love the colours, the composition. The items included. But most of all, I love the memories and feelings just looking at this image evokes.
It takes me back to that time of wonder and discovery during my second time to Iceland. A residency I gifted to myself, writing the application while teaching temporally; frustrated, longing to get out and create.
I stayed for two weeks in the shadows of the mountains, knee deep in snow most days until the thaw came with some greening of the landscape.
I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing there back then. I just knew in my body that I needed to get away, gain inspiration from the landscape and {BE}.
I might not have completed much when I was out there, but I know when I returned the experience shifted my creativity and how I saw myself as a creative.
I saw glimmers of the Northern Lights during this retreat. Pale creamy wisps and trails in a dark navy sky. It was magical and a mystery.
This makes me think about my art-making practice and how most of the time I’m working in the dark, moving out of my comfort zone into the unknown, looking and listening hoping to catch a glimpses of magic and mystery in the process.
What’s created on the page, like this photography, is an archive, a record which when looked upon brings to the surface all the memories and feelings of the process, the experience once again experienced to the full with wonder and a smile.
youtube.com/shorts/YH9J0BioGMo
Living Wild Studios 