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A 50 day streak

| Sheree

Yesterday marked 50 days of my creative sketchbook practice. 50 days of consistently turning up to the page to play and experiment.

What I’m learning is that I can trust myself to turn up for myself. I’m learning that my practice muscles can be strengthened. I’m learning that I love creating colour fields. It like what I create with visual journaling but different.

Here with these colour fields, there’s layers built up and then stripped back. Marked into. Scratched away to leave textures I like to see and feel. This practice is definitely expanding my palimpsest exploration and obsession.

I’m learning that I want this my creativity to be the main focus of my day and everything else is the add on, not the priority. Not the main meal. My creativity is my life source/force.

I’m practicing taking my creative sketchbook practice into my life. The attitudes, the risk-taking, the consistency, the trust in self and my art-making, these values and practices I’m carrying with me throughout my day, no matter who I come into contact with.

This creative sketchbook practice keeps me centred and focused on my feelings of joy and abundance. This practice keeps me present and checked in with myself, moment to moment.

On top of my visual journaling practice, this safe space of play and to {BE} me, is enough. Is more than enough to fill my day with bliss and connection. A practice that I’m finding opens up doors inside and outside of me, for me and others.

a morning well spent

| Sheree

Visual journaling in community is always time well spent.

Even if it’s their first rodeo, to witness the freedom, the mess, the expansion as paint meets paper meets card. Bliss. Magic. A gift.

Walking out with their own visual journals clutched close to their chests, promising to carry on the practice themselves, now they’ve got the power within their hands, hearts and soul.

A job well done any time the visual journaling practice is passed on.

I do believe it makes us better human beings. Better to each other and ourselves. Softer, caring and well-nourished.

Healing.

An Archives of Memories, Feelings and Skyr

| Sheree

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.

art-making practice

| Sheree

I develop a stronger sense of myself through my art-making practice. Be that word, image, audio, collage, stitch and projects.

I’m getting stronger in myself through my art-making practice. Be that refusing, choosing, completing, rejecting, leaving and committments.

I develop a stronger trust in myself through my art-making practice. Be that intentions, goals, visions, dreams, rest and hibernations.

I’m getting stronger in risks in myself through my art-making practice. Be that edges, boundaries, messes, mistakes, failures, and breakthroughs.

I develop a stronger sense of myself through my art-making practice.

Be that listening to my needs and wants, and acting accordingly,

leaning towards what brings me joy,

allowing myself to imagine and play,

rather than chase my worth and permission in other people’s acknowledgments and attention.

I develop a stronger self through my art-making practice. be that {BE} that.

A Creative Sketchbook, Dec 2025

| Sheree
My creative sketchbook
My creative sketchbook rules

I’m not sure how my creative sketchbook differs from my visual journal. Intention maybe.

Perhaps, I think , I’m attempting to develop my art practice within a designated space. A study maybe.

I haven’t really been in the thick of my art making practice since the preparation for my Baltic exhibition back in 2022-3.

This was quickly followed with the writings and (re)drafts of Darkling, my poetry/hybrid collection published in October 2024.

After this 2025 has been a period of extended rest and refusal.

But something has been niggling me. The desire to create with paint again. the desire to play without expectations and outcomes/ products.

I’ve just scratched the itch through scrolling through Pinterest. Adding another abstract or landscape painting to a board that I’ll probably not look at again.

But it satisfied this niggling feeling. Until it didn’t.

It was going back into the classroom. Completing a few days of supply that pushed me over the edge.

The time I gave away for money. The time I’d lost pursuing my own pursuits. And realising that I wasn’t pursuing all the pursuits I wanted to pursue in the time I had/have.

So out came a creative sketchbook, inspired by the 30 days sketchbook challenge created by Cheryl Taves over at Insight Creative.

This is as much as I’m willing to share for now about the challenge, my creative sketchbook, processes and insights.

One of my rules is that it’s just for my eyes only. I want to see how this rule changes my practice. I want to create without fear but with curiosity. I want to give myself all the freedom without worrying about what others will think or say or comment on.

It’s not like I’m hanging on other people’s responses and reactions but I have gotten into a habit of just sharing anything and everything on my blog and I’m curious to see what happens when I keep things to myself.

Just for my eyes, heart, and soul only.

So far I’m enjoying the process of the challenge and I’m reflecting and paying attention to what makes my heart sing, what’s my creative vocabulary, what pushes my energies.

Do doubt whatever I explore within my creative sketchbook will be showing up in everything that I create. In everything who I {BE}. For sure.

Practice

| Sheree

What is one word that describes you?

“You know life is hard,” my mother once told me with resignation in her voice. She continued, “For years, I’ve been struggling. I’m just plain tired now.” I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or herself , but once again I hardly listened. I was grown, I knew everything. I was a fool. Here one day, gone the next, I never got the chance to agree with my mother; that yes, life is hard. Too damn hard sometimes and there are people, put on this earth, who take it as a personal mission/ vendetta to make it even harder for some people. But hey I’m not here to complain.

This year, I made myself the promise to practice certain things, certain ways of being.

One, to quit the complaining as it only drains my energy.

Two, to stop saying to myself and others that time is flying, that time is going so fast, what’s that all about? (But come on, admit it, time is flying. We’re past mid March already!) Yes stop this stating that time is flying malarky as it’s energy sapping.

And three, to get my arse out of bed each morning, go to my creative corner and practice my visual journalling because this shifts/ boosts/ aligns my energy.

Some days I win, some days I lose but I know just like life, like everything really, it’s a practice. It’s about turning up each day for me and not having an agenda, or any idea what I’m going to create or know down which path my attention will flow. I just know that when I practice my visual journaling, intentionally showing up at my desk each morning, I feel better. Simple.

Yes there are all those insightful and wise deductions I could make about this practice and the effects of it on my creativity, life, work, relationship with self and others. But on the most simplest of levels, it makes me feel better. It sets me up to be present for the rest of my day.

Since November 2023, I’ve been practicing this little old practice of getting into my creative corner and creating/ being. Usually in altered books, or homemade junk journals or hand sewn books. Moving my hands to smear paint across a page, adding text and images, and stickers and sometimes even crafting found poems from cut-outs, makes me happy. I can say that now because I’ve had months of this practice under my belt. And I feel better because of it.

The one word that best describes me is ‘practice’ and I get to be me, daily, each morning with my visual journal practice which makes sure I’m myself from each moment to the next for the rest of the day. And for this I am grateful because my mother might not have found the secret and passed it on but I feel as if I’ve stumbled upon what makes this life less difficult, less hard, less soul destroying. Practice.

Keep checking back for the rest of the week as I’ll be sharing a spread each day from my visual journaling practice. And eventually all will be revealed in a new portfolio page around this practice. Thanks for reading. And see you again soon 🙂

Snow

| Sheree

December is here. To keep me connected to each moment, each experience I intend to offer myself the gifts of gratitude and attention during the lead up to Christmas. Call it an advent calendar of opening doors each day to reveal an image and a reason to be grateful.

Today was all about the snow. Walking in the snow was magical. Crisp, fresh and clear air and so much beauty to relish and share.

What a wonderful gift to start the last month of the year with. Expect more photowalks this month as they are simple but oh so joyous. Thank you.

PAD/001 – A Month of Poetry

| Sheree

Happy April. Time for showers, blossom and light. Oh and poetry.

Forsythia

As I mentioned last week, I’m honouring National Poetry Month with the challenge of writing a poem a day.

I’ve set myself this task many times over the years, and I’ve always been amazed at the creations along the way. Poems have emerged onto the page that I didn’t even know were in me and needed expressing.

So today I come to the page with an open heart and a rough idea of the themes or issues I want to explore. But who knows with the creative process. Anything could happen.

Anyway day 1 – PAD/ 001

Trying to understand “the difference between poetry and rhetoric”

After Audre Lorde

The contested site of black settlement in England

is shrouded a heavy fog of amnesia. The wrong colour,

the wrong body, the wrong sound.

Read the history books, you’d think we just landed

the day before last. 400 years of being here, lost

in the mire, weighted down with size 10, Dr. Martens.

Like transplanted birds of paradise, West Indians

struggled to put down roots. Alien soil. On corners,

skylarking and limin’, jobs, homes and a little bit of peace

denied; harsh whispers on the bitterly cold wind.

The contested site of black settlement in England

is captured in stills. Images speak for themselves.

Black faces filling the frame; black blooms pressed

against hothouse glass. But still an absent presence in failed memories.

Colour is Mine

| Sheree
Van Gogh, 1959 by Althea McNish

After Althea McNish

Sunflowers

big and bold

inspired by Van Gogh’s

brandished

across a

yellow and white

striped field

black lines

outline floppy leaves

and dozing closed heads

bright colour carried to

this grey isle

not a luxury but a necessity

for survival

for blooming

another time

uprooted

sunflowers