Week 01 : Recovering a Sense of Safety

Join me for a new series of The Artist Way!

Et Eärello Endorenna utúlien, Sinome maruvan are Hildinyar, Tenn’ Ambar-metta, I hum to myself while walking upstairs.

The pleasure, the physical and emotional satisfaction of playing, testing, doing, making, breaking, and then doing it again.

I want to dress like a combination of Lara Croft, Indiana Jones and Dr Hodgins (satchel and all), be adventurous...

And then, one day, I had a tutor mentioning me to have a look at FLUXUS… and my world just opened up and new ideas came rushing in and flew out, running after each other, and dancing in the rain in the middle of a street in a cacophony of music and sounds and deafening silence: I found a way which justified and validated my Self. I didn’t feel poor man’s Matilde anymore, misunderstood and mocked for her ideas, but I felt invested and complete. My first thoughts were to find t

On Sat 22 and Sun 23 September, I have tagged along “others” for the Lancashire Encounter Festival. But it was way more than that. Jamie Holman, (artist, writer, and lecturer at Blackburn University and College) has been co-commissioned a piece titled Live the Dream with Fabrications, British Textile Biennial and Super Slow Way: a beautiful banner representing disused mills, past and present, acid house, JOY and HOPE. On Sat the performance piece was executed twice within the

This session, for me, has been like the very first time you cycle with no stabilisers, help nor support: elation, freedom, discovery, courage, initiation. It was finding Home. Don’t get me wrong: I haven’t discovered I am Michelangelo albeit in skirt and high heels. I have discovered the act of creating, the making of stuff and things and object, the concretisation of ideas and dreams and thoughts. I have discovered that I can be my own personal and very free Inner God: think

I so enjoyed this session! We spent two hours just playing, really playing, and still, I have learned so so so much! Following you will be able to see some sketches we did while trying various techniques, including: drawing with eyes closed experimenting with different sizes drawing in continuous line experimenting using the non-dominant hand experimenting holding the pen / pencil right at the very top, etc I would have never thought that using simple techniques such as those

I know I am at college to learn techniques, skills, methodologies, and theory. Still, when I can let go of all the paraphernalia surrounding art and all the talking and all the conditioning, [Me] as in the Real Me is allowed to come out and play. At that point, I know that the lessons learned *in my other profession* surface, and then I can really allow [Me] to simply be. I have shown the one following to various people, from different walks of life, and most of them understo

Off we go trying something else: we actually draw / painted / scratched a film, with permanent markers, and then we watched the final project. All in one day. We were all sitting together along the film, all doing our own bit, and then merging the parts together, finding similitudes in colours or shapes. I have decided to use the Orphism project ideas (here) and turn that into Morphism, using letters and colours. Of course, I had to remember that 24 frames were just 1 second!

This must be what I felt when I was asked to choose a painting to explore: as Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian military hero of the Risorgimento, who cried ‘Roma o Morte’ (‘Rome or Death’). It must be, otherwise I cannot explain why I have chosen this one. My eyes caught other two paintings I found intriguing, but they were hanging so high above a door, I thought I better stick with what I can really see. This is the painting titled “Diana or Christ”, by Edwin Long (described

This is it: thrown to the deep end. Exciting! The movement that we are going to explore, in our group, is Orphism. “Orphism or Orphic Cubism, a term coined by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire in 1912, was an offshoot of Cubism that focused on pure abstraction and bright colours (…) This movement, perceived as key in the transition from Cubism to Abstract art, was pioneered by František Kupka, Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay, who relaunched the use of colour during the