patience

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10p is all I pay for big, colourful children’s books, withdrawn from library stock.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.

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

They want this heaviness to snuff our light out

| Sheree

As an artist, I feel everything. I feel what everyone else is feeling.

This heaviness is manufactured to snuff my light out. To destroy my hope.

As an artist I’m here to create hope. As an artist, I create pockets of hope. Safe spaces where we can create alternative worlds.

Safe spaces where we can be free, if only for a little while.

I’ve been forgetting my task. My service. I’ve been struggling under the heaviness of it all.

Do you feel it too? That heaviness?

I’ve been forgetting to take my medicine. That’s what artists can bring to the world. Moments of medicine.

Here feast on this image. Take a moment here, in this safe space, let down this heaviness. Breathe.

We be good, together.

Late night painting

| Sheree

First time working on canvas for about 3 years! It was good to play without pressure or to demand.

It was good to just let go and see what happened. Jumping int the unknown is getting easier with practice.

I found working on 2 canvases at once made them less precious, less important.

I suppose it’s that ‘not putting your eggs all in one basket’ mentality.

It was good to let go of control and the fear. I suppose this is the only time I chose ‘doing’ over {BEING}. When creativity is involved!

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.

At last, let’s explore time

| Sheree

When a planned work gig falls through, time can take on a precious meaning.

Instead of attempting to fill time with all the things I ‘should’ do, I’m choosing to rest and finally bury my nose in a book I’ve been itching to read all last year. But some how shit got in the way.

You know the feeling when you find a book that is probably going to speak to your soul and underline all the arguments you’ve been putting forward in the last couple of years but you procrastinate in the reading of it.

For me maybe there’s been a fear factor. That I’ll have more evidence and weapons to add to my arsenal that makes me even more ‘other’, on the edges outside the mainstreams.

And just sometimes occupying this space and moving against the grain is tiring.

It’s like when your eyes have been opened, once you’ve seen it, once you’ve seen those zeroes and ones of the system behind the surface fake-arse narrative, you can’t unsee it and you can’t continue to move and act in ways that support and perpetuate the systems of oppression and hierarchy.

Yes that kind of reading and knowledge. That kind of book. Well that’s what I feel Dismantling The Master’s Clock: on race, space and time by Rasheedah Phillips will do to/for me.

I’ll let you know how I get on!

Mood

| Sheree

Walking into North Shields to attend a useless ‘interview’, I gave thanks for the light after days of grey rain.

Walking and listening to music,and this song comes on and acts as a reminder.

I’ve been forgetting myself, forgetting who I come from.

What would my life feel like if I prioritised my creativity, always. That the risk taking I’m exploring in my creative sketchbook spread into my reality, my day to day life? What would my life feel like then?

I was thinking today …

| Sheree
Past Visual Journal Spread

While completing my visual journaling this morning, at my old wooden table moved in front of my bedroom bay window looking out onto my rainy, foggy street, I had the thought that I’ve lived most of my life already.

This year I’ll turn 55 in October and it just struck me how the majority of my life/ living is behind me.

Then it got me thinking about how many years do I have left. I played with the idea of thinking, what if I’m just reaching the mid-point of my life? What if I have another 55 years of living ahead of me?

How would I feel about that? What would I need to do now to make that happen? Do I want to live to 110 years?

It has been done. It can be done even though those ‘blue zones’ where the majority ofcentenarians live are shrinking.

I feel I’d have to change a few habits first to give it a good shot at living until 110.

I know I could have been looking after my body better up until this point. But it’s never too late right, to start using food as medicine and to stop punishing my body for being black fat and ageing.

There’s still time right? There’s still a lot of twists and turns and bumps in this road left of this journey, right?

I’m not sure as nothings certain. But what if …