Life
has been very busy and time for creativity severely curtailed. Some progress
does continue to be made each week, but nothing especially worthy of comment
and things have been rather silent.
After
my exhibition late last year, exploring detail in Australia's High Country, it was time to re-start, with a new theme. Although I have touched on aspects of our coastline before, I wanted to examine the intricacies of "By the Sea" in more detail, so the new theme was born.
Everyone approaches creativity differently. Some explore through interrelated works and others have one off, bright ideas. Probably because of my
Strategic Planning background and my very nature, I have a very organised
approach, which seems to have become even more organised as time passes. It
involves choosing a theme or topic and then creating a body of work based on
that theme over a period of two years and culminating in a solo exhibition.
After
two years of absorption and exploration of the detail of one aspect of nature,
I always find it hard to get started on the new theme. For me, it involves
firstly a lot of research and photograph taking, followed by a flurry of
sketching in my visual diary. Once this is done I can get a good idea of
particular things in my theme that appeal to me and which I want to pursue
further in art works as well as the medium I would choose for each. I can’t say that I
decide on every single painting, print and drawing at this stage, but it
motivates me to begin and things evolve along the way.
I’m
at that stage now. I took many photos during solitary early morning walks while
on a week’s beach holiday in January and added those to my folder of existing
“beach photo” references. There is seaweed, sand patterns, driftwood, shells
and all sorts of grasses and greenery. I have drawn and drawn in my visual
diary and now I have begun on a series of collagraph plates and made rough
drafts for a series of HB pencil drawings, which I am slowly developing up.
So “art time” is slowly returning to normal.
