After last week's 'Begin (again)' I tried all week to start the art. I could feel myself actively avoiding it though, walking around the edges of it, poking it with my foot - and then being extremely creative with my procrastination. Cleaning is my go-to. At least it's productive, and honestly a lovely clean space really can get me in the mood to work, but I had my own number - I knew what I was doing.
So Friday, a public holiday, nothing to do except potter around the house - and no more excuses. I cleared the dining table, filled it with art materials - and began. I started gently, and feeling like doing some printing, a pulled out the shoebox labelled 'Stamps and Lino'. I filled a couple of pages with prints from existing stamps - it was good to be making marks, but it felt kind of hollow.
I knew I needed a theme, or a story to bring some juice to it, something behind the marks. To the bookshelf! Opening Julie Paterson's gorgeous 'ClothBound' book, the pages fell open to the record of her first fabric collection as Cloth - it was called Seeds. That was it.
I've listened through twice to the audiobook version of Rick Rubin's 'The Creative Act' (and I recommend the audio, his voice is so soothing and the chapters read like meditations, with a bell toned at the end of each) and he calls the first ideas or inklings of ideas, things that spark your attention and may be worthy of investigation - seeds.
The beautiful things about seeds - firstly, they already contain all the information needed to become what they need to become, and secondly they won't germinate until the environmental conditions for their spouting are met - they need to be given a signal to sleepily unfurl from their dormancy.
When the word 'seeds' lit a little spark in me, I started looking through some old work - so much of it could be described as seeds. Literal drawings of seedpods, round wonky organic shapes but also - ideas not fully explored, not fully expressed - ready to grow into what they need to bcome.
All the information is already there...I'm creating the sunshine and rain, and I'm ready to unfurl.
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