IN THE MEANTIME - POSTCARDS  

Date: Wednesday, 10 March 2010 @ 7:19PM

I have been rather slack with my art plans. I think about it from time to time... gathering materials to make some wire birds nests and and seeing what comes of it all... but I haven't gotten to the point of making yet. Life has been really busy and art has fallen by the way-side. As an interim I decided to rearrange the postcards in my room. I have been collecting postcards for years - I like that they're free wall art. I like the stories behind each, the trill of finding a beautiful one in a coffee shop.




When I live in the city again, or at least when I go back to Uni, I'll be able to continue collecting them. :)

I'M AN ARTIST?  

Date: Thursday, 14 January 2010 @ 9:19PM

My boyfriend is an artist. I always kind of overlooked that fact and when I did pay attention to it, I'd pick on his work, "Come off it, you want to do what with black paint?!" But for some reason, I've seen the light. I don't know why it look me so long considering I've loved art since I was little. I was initially challenged by the fact that his work is largely performance based - but now I see that as a strength, a broadening of possibilities. I'm pretty much enraptured by the idea of being involved and engaged in the art world.

I'm a really creative person. I love problem solving. I love challenges and doing new things and I love colour, design, and composition. I miss that stuff. Work gives me opportunities to use those interests and skills but often it's in a rushed sort of way. I put up this artwork on the wall, or I present this kind of experience to the children (though occasionally we are standout awesome - e.g. making Jackson Pollack styled paintings last year! flick painting is FUN and quite messy! :D). So this art world, where you can sit back and really work through ideas and focus on the details until you're satisfied? Awesome. And awesome to be in on it with Tom. Creative thinking, making stuff, painting, drawing, poetry... it all makes me dance inside. I love it. I love how ideas build and become enriched with the thoughts and ideas of others. :D Art as collaboration? Win!


So I have had ideas in the past and I now look at them as being single dimentional. I wanted to explore an idea of how we build cities for ourselves and expect the natural world to just fit in and if it can't, to go away. We don't welcome nature into our cities very often and if we do, we're tokenistic, we're selective. We want birds in parks but not on rooftops. We want water features and fountains but without the inconveniences of fish, frogs, mosquitos... But the ideas I had were of redesigning/painting a city that welcomed these animals. What would a bird/frog/bat city look like?

Tom's work is often not literal. I have been trapped in literal for years. Literal hurts when I'm painting because it makes me feel I'm doing it wrong if what I wanted to paint doesn't look real enough. Now colours have meaning and shapes have meaning and these meanings may be deeper and even more valid than a picture of a landscape or object. At the very least, it gives me something else to consider. When I open myself even to the possibility of it, I can feel a world opening up to me. It's like when I was reading Plath and Coleridge in high school and my poetry became much more comfortable in free verse. I used to require all my poetry to rhyme in AABB or ABAB form but my best works are not structured.


I'm keen to see some of Tom's pending works made. I'm also wondering what I can make... for myself. I don't feel pressured by time. I just wonder what I'm capable of. It's like a gentle dawn and the anticipation of a bright sunny day. It's the amazing way that my thoughts are almost always accompanied by images and colours, which makes thinking creatively more engaging and rich. My love is teaching me to trust and I'm slowly letting things go enough to explore who I am. I wonder what kind of art I can make from that? haha