After virtually a week off, I’m back in my studio after a busy social time, family visiting here and me visiting family. Now I’m trying to get going again.
Today I am in major “can’t be bothered” mode. After working so hard for a whole series of months I am feeling a bit burnt out today. In addition I find socialising and travelling exhausting so am very low in energy.
An interesting thing happened on the train though. This has happened to me before but I thought I would document it here. I had lots of things to read but I decided to just put on my noise cancelling head phones and listen to relaxing music. After about 15 minutes my brain went into an overdrive of ideas. I made notes in my sketchbook, trying to document as much as possible. This has happened before and they are fleeting and fragmentary, almost like dreams, which if you don’t try and pin down onto the page just float in and then out again. It is a visit from my artistic muse, stimulated by being away from my studio, out of my comfort zone. It just goes a bit crazy with ideas bursting into life, leading into other ideas in quick succession. I have made a note of as many as I could and would like to explore some of them.
Here’s a funny thing though…..I thought that I could work on my zines while travelling, layouts, script, etc etc, but ALL these ideas were for making prints, abstracted shapes from architecture. It is an old interest of mine and I have images in my photo library that I could possibly revisit, so maybe this will be my next project, a refreshing palate cleanser from my graphic novel?
It is very much Octopus territory with patterns, shapes and textures, maybe time for it to lead the way for a bit?
Joan Eardley, landscape of Catterline
Another thing, I visited a small Joan Eardley exhibition, I had liked her Glasgow street children portraits and am not hugely into landscapes but I loved these.