May 8

May 8 Stuck for Inspiration

daily artwork with stitching — Daily artwork with stitched scraps of paper collaged onto 10x10cm paper

I don’t always feel inspired. In fact I don’t feel inspired a lot of the time. But to train yourself to be unstuckable takes courage and a daily practice.

What I know is that making a cup of tea and sitting down with my piece of 10 x 10cm watercolour paper, will trigger my habit to create. Some days the little artworks turn out not very inspiring. But because I only spend 10 minutes creating them, I’m not attached to the outcome.

This is what happened to me at my new artist residency placement at the Fish Factory Creative Arts Centre in Stöðvarfjördur, Iceland this week. I was trying too hard to create something I ‘thought” I should be making for my Stone Stories project. I wasn’t happy so I tore it up and put the pieces of coloured paper to the side.

At the end of the day before I left the studio, I realised I still needed to do my daily artwork. I was tired and pretty uninspired. However, I knew that my 5-step process never fails me.

Step 1: First I made a cup of tea.

Step 2: Then I pulled out my already pre-cut squares of 10 x 10 papers.

Step 3: I grabbed some scraps of paper that I had tried to sew with the old sewing machine. The thread kept breaking and the stitches were too tight and buckled the paper. Consequently I had a small pile of reject papers with bits of cotton thread in them and tiny pulled out stitches. Perfect. No need to be precious about them.

Step 4: I tore these up and glued them down on my 10 x 10cm paper randomly.

Step 5: I got out my Derwent water soluble Inktense black pencil and drew them into rough rock type shapes, then added a bit of water to make the marks softer.

Violà! I surprised myself! A muted palette with strange looking stones.

The next day the same thing, a cup of tea and some more scrappy bits of reject paper.

This time the scraps were the result of a shape I had made with poured paper pulp which looked really awful. I tore it up and used bits of it as the cover for a little book. I still had the bright orange and green dots that were supposed to be the rock algae.

So I tore them into even smaller shapes and stuck them down on my white paper. Not bad…then I drew into the colours to accentuate the algae look, painted around the shapes with black watercolour paint and added some lines as I thought it referenced the stitching on the last one.

Not bad either. These two small daily artworks have now set the tone for the next set of artworks I make as I settle into my artist residency. I’ll add some thread perhaps, and collage the rocks

The daily practice creates the inspiration – but it takes courage to tear things up and reconfigure them. Trusting in the process is the secret to success and being unstuckable!