All in Creativity
When creative joy feels elusive, how do you discover it again? It's a recurring challenge to keep your practice alive, vibrant and engaging. Sometimes it feels like all is lost forever, yet I’ve discovered that creativity needs activation, not through thinking but in the doing. When you let your hands lead you, your heart and mind get activated and eventually join together in joyful creating.
It’s a sobering experience knowing that a decision made during the depths of winter when light failed to reach the washing line, has meant that a tree has been condemned to die. While the arborist is at work, I paint bodies of trees inside sentinel figures, hoping to alleviate the onset of unexpected grief that has come with the death of a tree.
The creative process can be addictive and like any addiction has its highs and lows. Yet turning up for yourself in small ways eventually gives you ‘something to write home about’ even if it is only that you made something for yourself to enjoy.
Hanging onto ideas of how to draw can keep you in a strait jacket. It’s often the way we are judged as a child; if you can draw then you’ll make a good artist. If not, forget it. Leaning to scribble and muck around is a constant challenge. That’s where a drawing group can help you dare to draw. This has a flow on effect in your ability to embrace imperfection.
Art has a way of revealing larger truths. I’ve been using a technique of conceal and reveal on some new artworks which has led me to think about how this reflects the state of world matters; political, environmental and humanitarian. I’ve become an excavator, discovering what stands out amongst the busy-ness of visual stimulation.
How do you birth the future you want to see? For me it started with painting goats. Not any old goats, but my British Alpine goats we had in Victoria. They were my ticket to change my world from where I was then to where I am now. Becoming an architect of your world starts with a vision and builds from there.
Beginning a new project can feel daunting. Where to start? For me it’s what I call creative chaos time, where ideas tumble around until I can find a single thread to follow. It’s a time of experimentation, trying out materials and methods until the project begins to fall into some kind of cohesive state.
Perseverance is not necessarily a quality you would think you need when it comes to being creative. Yet finding little creative ‘hacks’ can help keep your enthusiasm buoyant and your art alive through all the messy ups and downs of the creative process.
What does it take to change public opinion? To change a government policy and advocate for protection rather than destruction. Drawing a visual representation of the hearts, hands and bodies of passionate advocates for change helps keep my hope alive. I take heart from the 1970s protest movements to stop the whaling industry. Whale watching rather than killing, forest bathing rather than old growth forest clear-felling. Change is possible.
When you’re not sure what path to take, that middle of the night insomnia can yield some ‘eureka’ moments. Such as revealing the solution to what art to create during my Art 4 Takayna residency in Tasmania over Easter.
