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!
floating up the beach
ruffled by a north easterly,
fine intricate bubbles of air
cluster, froth to anyone else but
reminds me of Port of Spain,
the lace-like wooden fretwork of house gables and around porches,
Boissiere House, along Queen Park West,
gingerbread style fulfilling the fairy tale romance and fantasy of being home at last.
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.
I started reading this book, hardback, a few years ago from the university library. It got recalled before I could finish it.
I was reading it after reading about how for decades the remains of two MOVE children had been kept at Penn Museum and later Princeton University illegally.
How they were using these children’s remains ( bones) in an online course for demonstration purposes as if they were nothing. Just fine specimens to illustrate a scientific point and not actually once being human and that their family was still alive and none the wiser. They thought they’d buried their children after they were bombs but piece of them were missing. And this wasn’t a mistake or oversight, the family had been lead to believe that all remains had been released to them to lay their children to rest.
I took an interest in this case along with the fascination of bone collecting/ salvaging/ pillaging to study and use as evidence of race hierarchies.
I even started a creative hybrid piece around it all as a means of trying to understand it as well as shed light in the continued extraction and exploitation of black bodies even beyond death.
I titled it:
Why are
our bones
still studied,
disputed,
displayed
and litigated?
I think I need to return to this piece.
being told, not to believe our own lying eyes
Living Wild Studios 