wisdom

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10p is all I pay for big, colourful children’s books, withdrawn from library stock.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

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.

Black Power – Revolutionary Art

| Sheree

I got out earlier than expected from my gig today. So I used the time to get to the library and pick up a book I’d spied

Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas.

I’ve seen the posters created by Emory Douglas as part of exhibitions such as in the Soul of the Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (2017), but never before have I seen his extensive artwork all together.

This monograph edited and introduced by Sam Durant is a gem.

Along with my exploration of Paul Amos Kennedy Jr. last year (and continuing into this year too) and this dive into the artworks of Douglas gets me thinking that I might be feeling the need to create some social justice/ black power artworks myself.

Who knows. My interest has been caught and this book is feeding me with inspiration to the max.

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!

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 …

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.

Challenge completion, continue

| Sheree

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.

The Sinners Series – 005

| Sheree

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.

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.