Shaped & Influenced by Everything
I’ve got myself a little cycle circuit now. It takes me an hour to peddle it twice and I’m pretty bushed by the time I get home, but I love it. When I was half way round my country-lane route today, I was suddenly struck by the sky to the south. A heavy moodiness was definitely brewing and by the time I was careering down the home straight, past my precious oaks, rude gusts of wind were bumping at me without warning.
I felt a transition in the air; change was coming.
I started thinking about my own art work and wondered if a transition was coming there too.
After a few weeks of intense collage work based in my studio, knee deep in multi coloured paper scraps, I did a 180 degree manoeuvre this week to outdoor sketching, with my pot of ink and bamboo pen – as if I’d been fleeing from slow, focused, sedatory work, to the freedom of light’n’breezy studies, that took little time to complete.
What came first I wonder? The need to escape the intensity of the collage work for a while, or was it the pressure of the pandemic crisis and the affect of it on my inner world?
In the space of two months all our lives have been turned upside down. The unbelievable has become a reality and we are having to make peace with uncertainty on a daily basis.
I guess the truth is that everything around me is playing a part in shaping and influencing how I feel about my art, consciously and unconsciously, and influences every choice, decision or direction I take. Whatever fills my head each day, great or small, will influence the choices I make: the colours I select, the medium I reach for, the mood I inhabit and the posture I adopt in my art practice.
Wyken Vineyard in the Spring
Everything will be influencing me from,
The book I’m reading by Carla Carlisle called, A Thousand Acres – writings from Country Life.
My new found love for watching tractors ploughing the earth.
The striking new painting I couldn’t resist buying, of a Cornish landscape, by my artist friend Tim Steward, …and
The visceral experience of Hares boxing and cavorting in the fields near by.
And whether it’s bonfire smoke drifting across my lawn, the smell of freshly picked chives, singing with my granddaughter Juno, or making chocolate flapjack… I can see that it all influences the journey I’m on, wherever I’m going.
Everything – all that absorbs me, thrills me, or pulls at my heart, will inevitably shape and influence me, however gently.
I want my art to become my heart-beat, my pulse, influenced by the moving landscape around me.
My sketches this week spoke of my response to all those influences. Maybe I needed to feel more grounded in nature, to make time to marvel at light on tree bark, drink in the apple blossom, celebrate the end of a long cold winter, feel the sun on my face, hear the cuckoo and yell, “I’m alive”, “I am free” …and “Thank you”.
