Mixing It Up Down Under: Creativity Unblocked

I've always been interested in the subject of creativity and read a lot about it. I don't write much about it at all. Why is that I wonder? I think it is because I leave it up to the experts.

I am reading this post over at Pikaland about creativity blocks. Amy has put together advice from 40 artists on how they deal with the problem. In reading through I realised (again! why do I keep forgetting!?) that we are all experts on ourselves! I am an expert on me! (Actually, I'm glad it's me. I'd hate it if someone else had got the job of being an expert on me.)

I haven't got through the 40 pieces of advice yet, and I don't know if I'm just going to repeat something that is already there, but I thought I'd write about my technique I have to break through creative blocks.


When I can't begin or when I can't progress it is usually my inner perfectionist raising her ugly-but-well-maintained head. I have become too precious about the project, sometimes it is just an idea but already I see it as sooooo wonderful that I could not possibly do it justice. I become blocked. I can't do a thing. My inner procrastinator (actually, it is rarely 'inner' - it is usually my outer coating!) is remarkably skilled at getting me to the computer to spend hours looking at the work others are NOT blocked doing. Or to the bookshop where I'm sure there MUST be a book that tells me exactly what to do. (There never is.) I waste so much time that I have had to come up with a technique to un-precious-ise my idea.


My solution is volume. Instead of beginning the one perfect work, I begin 7. Or 52. Or 3 if I'm being a bit lazy. How can you be precious about 7 paintings!? Well, you can, but to a much lesser extent. I can even convince myself sometimes that it is OK to have, say 2 of those as just pure experimentation. As I progress on my array of works, some naturally slip into the 'later' basket and others I become obsessed with, working at them until they are done. Ahh. Now that is what I was after all along - a little obsession to drag me to the canvas again and again.


If this technique doesn't work I know why. Again it has to do with volume. I NEED a quantity of art materials waiting in my studio. If I'm using up my last canvases, or the 2nd last sheet of my favourite paper, I can't work. I need an abundance waiting on my shelves. This too is a preciousness. If it is the last squeeze of paint from the tube, then I must do it justice, I can't waste it by making a mistake. I find that with a draw of paint tubes I can 'waste' any quantity of paint. And of course it has not been 'wasted' but has gone into something I loved making.


So I go shopping. When I prioritise I often have trouble putting studio time up high on my list of things to do, but I don't allow myself the sabotage of stopping myself from spending money on my supplies. I know from grim experience that there will be no point in putting studio time anywhere on my list if I'm not well supplied.

Now, one of the reasons I'm mentioning this here is purely selfish. I wanted to remind myself of this. How is it I keep forgetting?

This post also appears on my personal blog.

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Mixing It Up Down Under

What is an Artist Book? - An Interview with Sara Bowen

This question was on my mind when I recently made a journey to see an exhibition of artist books at Barratt Galleries in Alstonville. I wondered how much I actually knew about artist books, even though I have made a couple myself! The question was all the more poignant as my travelling companion was Sara Bowen, printmaker, artist book maker and friend. I knew Sara’s entry for the Southern Cross Acquisitive Book Award did not physically resemble a book although it had many ‘book’ qualities. Happily that day we were able to celebrate the acquiring of her book for the university's collection, along with others’ more book-like forms.
Later I asked Sara if she would allow me to ask her this question and others about her art practice, inspiration and the meaning of the motifs and symbols in her work - her river and her bridges. Sara arrived before me and as I walked in and scanned the coffee shop for her, at first I failed to notice her. As a newish arrival to Australia and Coffs Harbour I hadn’t expected her to be the one joining in conversations with nearby tables. Ah, but I was to learn more about her networking skills as the morning progressed.

Sara arrived in Australia in 2006, having left family and friends in Bristol, UK. She told me she came around to art the long way after 15 years of working with small businesses, setting them up and running various ones herself. She is now concentrating full-time on her art; well as full-time as a mother, wife, PHD candidate and project manager for the building of the family home can be.

JA How does your small business background help your art practice?
SB It has taken away the fear of the non-art part of being an artist. I’ve done cold calling with a suitcase of samples, written my own press releases and marketing plans and, because I have confidence that I can do those things, I don’t worry about them. It doesn’t mean I’m super confident or that I’m not terrified, but it does mean that I don’t panic about it.

JA How did you get started in printmaking?
SB In an effort to avoid killing my stepchild I was encouraged to get out of the house! I’d done life drawing and painting and I thought “Oh, printmaking that sounds good.” The little cogs went around in my head and just that whole thing about working backwards came easily. Somehow it all made sense for me.

JA How did you get started making artist books?
SB I don’t think I was really conscious of the fact that I was making artists books. I think I just ended up assembling things. I had a very vague idea of what I might do and it will just sit there in the back of my mind for ages and then something will trigger me off and it will usually be something like a little piece of cardboard or a photograph and I’ll think “that looks nice.” Tidying up the studio is actually quite often where it comes from, because I come across things I’d forgotten about, like bits of wire or a rusty nail or something and I’ll start thinking what can I do with that? And it ends up being a little exploration. That’s what starts me down the path and what the end is I’m not at all quite sure until I get there.


JA What printmaking medium do you most often work in?
SA The technique I use most often is viscosity printing where you are able to layer colours on your plate instead of having separate plates for separate colours. I change the viscosity, the runniness or thickness of the ink, and the different viscosities repel each other and instead of making a brown sludge like you might think, the colours stay separate and one top of each other. I’m interested in it as a technique to get multiple colours on the plate. This gives me the subtle colours I’m after. I also use a lot of embossing in my printing.

JA Where do you get your inspiration?
SB I love moody landscapes, bleak places where I can search for beauty. I am primarily a landscape artist. My work has an emptiness. I have a reoccurring motif in my printmaking, a swirl of river. It comes from a grainy black-and-white photograph of The Great Juanbung Swamp, which is the area at the confluence of the Lachlan and Murrumbigee Rivers. It was taken by my father-in-law from a crop-spraying plane in 1960. It is mainly a metaphor for journey.


JA You have been working on bridges in your Artist Book works. Have they always been a motif? Is it because of the river?
SB No. It’s got nothing to do with the river. It’s quite odd, but it’s got everything to do with moving countries. I moved here in October 2006 and I had my PHD started at UWE which was great because it made me feel like I wasn’t leaving everything behind, there was still some kind of connection with my old life and the people I knew and my art. But then I just didn’t have any contact from anyone in my old life. The people I felt very strongly connected to in Bristol turned out to be no good whatsoever at keeping up contact. I spent a year blogging about art and moving over here, being very up front with people about how I was feeling and I didn’t get a sausage back, no emails, no phone calls, no cards, no birthday presents, nothing! I spent 2007 feeling very, very lonely and very isolated.

Eventually I decided I needed to build bridges, metaphorical bridges that linked me with people, with ideas. I initiated a project with an artist back in the UK to exchange artist books and the project was to be about bridges. I spent ages fiddling around with different things and I came up with the idea of physically making a bridge. I read this lovely little poem by Walt Whitman called “A Noiseless Patient Spider”. It does mention the word ‘bridge’ in the poem once, but it’s about how spiders fling out a thread of gossamer and the wind catches it and they have no idea where they’re going to end up, an act of faith. It was such a meaningful way of looking at how I was feeling about my life. I think that’s been my way of working. Sometimes I just have to take courage that I don’t have and do something, even though I don’t know where I’m going to end up. The poem goes on and is effectively about building ones own bridge, what one needs in life is to do that. So it’s very reflective of my own experience and how I was feeling at the time.

It got me thinking about the form of the book and I’d already decided I was going to base this series of books on children's building blocks (you can build bridges with children's building blocks). I ended up with the carved plastic text, which was such a nightmare to do. Originally it wasn’t about the light shining through it with the shadow revealing the text, but about making the text a kind of gossamer. It just happened to work in that other way and gave it supplementary meaning.

There are a few other reasons why it ended up being very meaningful for me. One is that I’m terrified of spiders! I had hypnotherapy at Bristol zoo before I came to Australia so I could deal with the Australian creepy crawlies. I ended up holding a bird-eating tarantula in my hand. I am quite fascinated by them now although I still find them really repulsive. I also wrote a very bad poem about not being able to say anything meaningful to my father about leaving and going to live on the other side of the world and it was couched in terms of spiders.

That book has a much more open meaning available to it than most of what I do. Practically everything I do has a lot of personal meaning to it. I have a bit of a problem actually expressing the meaning to other people. In the end I’m very glad of people who do manage to work out what a work means, but its not why I’m giving them the object to look at. I’m very happy for them to give their own meaning.
I find my self really fascinated by artists who can write out very personal experiences in their art and the reason is because I can’t do it. I don’t know how one would begin. I tried it and doesn’t work for me.

JA What is an artist book?
SB MY definition of an artists’ book is hardly definitive and is highly subjective and probably very woolly from an intellectual perspective. I think an artists’ book is a book made by an artist, that requires the evocation of ‘book-ness’ in order to function as a complete work. There is the question of why make a thing defined as a ‘book’ rather than as a ‘sculpture’ or as a ‘print’? What’s so important about it being associated with being somehow a book? For me, there is something about a confounding of expectation (e.g. a book that is part of a child’s building block, for example, and in the same example, a slipcase – usually an afterthought – that has as much of a role in the complete piece as the book has itself; or perhaps where the text, written in shadows, is actually OUTSIDE the book rather than inside). There is also something about physicality: the ability to pick something up, however gingerly! and to view it as a piece of art from more than one direction – a quality that book arts share with sculpture, I guess. And perhaps there’s something about a thing having an outside and an inside: even my ‘bridge’ book comes concealed and had to be unwrapped and assembled in order to be ‘read’. There’s something there for me about text and covers too. Interestingly I find myself drawn to artists’ books with little or no text but find myself putting text in, sometimes obscurely, because that is part of my ‘model’ of what a book or book-object is. How conventional of me! But I like to subvert it too; although the shadow-writing aspect of my bridge book was an accidental aside rather than an intention from the start it makes me snigger quietly that there IS text and that there ARE covers for it, but that the text isn’t IN the book but written outside it!


JA How do you promote your work?
SB You never know who’s looking so it’s important to get it out there. Moving to a new country has given me the opportunity to make new networks. I like talking to people and putting them in touch with others. I work on the premise that people are happy to talk to you about themselves. They are also happy to be put in touch with new people that they can talk to about themselves. I don’t mean that in any negative way. My business experience is in creating structures that allow things to happen. I see networking as doing much the same.

JA Any advice for others who want to promote their work?
SB Just get out there and do it!
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Jan Allsopp is a visual artist living in Coffs Harbour, Australia. Jan will be keeping us in touch with the art scene in coastal New South Wales as well sharing her exploits, as mid-career and mid-life, she decides to change art forms. View Jan's art, read her blog and browse her shop at www.janallsopp.com.au




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Mixing It Up Down Under

James Gleeson - Australia's foremost Surrealist an exhibition at Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery. I caught this exhibition on its final day which might give some indication of how much I was looking forward to seeing it. Gleeson is one of my daughters favourite artists and she had timed a visit home so she could see his paintings and mixed media drawings. I couldn't go with her that day and when she came home raving about the eloquence his work and how I would love the way he combined printed images with drawings I listened politely. I knew there would be intestines, and worse, and there was. And lots of them.

There was also other familiar Gleeson themes like the gentle waves on a calm secluded strangely familiar beach, the shells from that beach grown large and bursting with, well, maybe not intestines but something ominously internal. Naked men provide a realistic counterpoint to the wrenching disemboweled images, often sharing the same frame. Surprisingly their full frontal nudity provide the only images of genitalia. These are not latent sexual images from a sick mind.

There is beauty (somehow!) here too. It is the light and the colours the light illuminates, soft emerald greens, rosy pinks and deep magenta (where I feared there would be venous blue, membrane grey and blood red). The wrenching and tearing fails to extinguish hope, but instead seems to open the picture plane to allow entry of hope through the exquisite light. How is that possible?

At this time when I am planning to push my creative boundaries, and have actually allowed play to replace the seriousness I had allowed to creep in, the glow of Gleeson's light reminds me that the creative journey is always individual and that it really is OK to be me, warts, intestines and all. And really if it has served me no other purpose than to remind me to get back to drawing my deck of cards with alternate suits, one of which is body parts, it has served me well. I do believe I was up to the Ace of intestines...

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Jan Allsopp is a visual artist living in Coffs Harbour, Australia. Jan will be keeping us in touch with the art scene in coastal New South Wales as well sharing her exploits, as mid-career and mid-life, she decides to change art forms. View Jan's art, read her blog and browse her shop at www.janallsopp.com.au Read more!

Mixing It Up Down Under

The Sydney Biennale Part II

What does it mean when I forgo seeing the prime work of my creative hero? I went to Sydney at Biennale time to see the work of William Kentridge, specifically the exhibition Telegrams from the Nose at Annandale Galleries. While not a Biennale event in itself the exhibition had been timed to support Kentridge’s work that was the Biennale ‘highlight’ at the Cockatoo Island exhibitions. William Kentridge has enthralled me ever since I first ‘discovered’ him at the MCA several years ago. I’ve seen as much of his work as is possible here in Australia, quite some distance from his homeland, South Africa.

This visit to Annandale Galleries I saw his stationary movie - the viewer moves not the image, his stereographs - prints viewed through eyeglasses that develop amazing 3D depth, and an animation - images drawn in charcoal on paper are erased and redrawn to create movement and tell the story. I was elated.

The day to go to Cockatoo Island dawned. Yes, it was cold and a little drizzly, but would I let that stop me? No, I let the word ‘Island’ stop me. My seasickness is legendary. I’ve been sea sick in a dugout canoe on a sea that was a flat as glass, on a boat on a river, and once on a yacht I jumped overboard and swam to shore to get away from it. I know from first hand experience why they don’t have guns on boats because on a 2 hour cruise I would have gladly chosen death over the final hour of unbearable … (I won’t use words!) I let a 30 minute ferry ride defeat me.

Currently I’m going through a period of stretching my limits both artistically and personally. Why did I choose physical comfort over William Kentridge’s best? I like to think it has something to do with being true to myself and a possible beginning of the end of my insatiable need to consume others art in desperate search for inspiration. Do I detect a settling acceptance of my own inspiration from within?

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Mixing it up Down Under: Jan Allsopp is a visual artist living in Coffs Harbour, Australia. Jan will be keeping us in touch with the art scene in coastal New South Wales as well sharing her exploits, as mid-career and mid-life, she decides to change art forms. View Jan's art and browse her shop at www.janallsopp.com.au

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MIXING IT UP DOWN UNDER

Jan Allsopp

The Sydney Biennale is full steam ahead at the moment and I travelled the 570 kms to see it. I’ve seen some past Biennales and found them largely inaccessible with only the odd beacon of light to show my brain, eyes and heart the way. I’m not sure if this years Biennale just seems better to me or if it actually is. I’ve got a few more years stored below deck and my studies are drawing maps in my thinking, but my companions on board were equally thrilled with our discoveries as we navigated the waters of several art galleries.

OK, even I think that’s enough with the maritime metaphors! What’s so watery about the Biennale anyway? Well, for the first time the best of the best of the Biennale are exhibited on Cockatoo Island, the largest island in Sydney Harbour which has been an imperial prison, industrial school, reformatory, gaol and shipyards and now a heritage site. The fact that the art works have been set up in several locations on the island adds to the idea that visiting is like an exploration expedition across the water and into the unknown.

If no man is an island, Australia certainly is. We are a long way from just about everywhere. In the past the artistic distance has been almost untraversable; three months on a ship meant only a small percentage of Australians viewed key works ‘in the flesh’. Air travel has meant many of us have now seen the real Mona Lisa but it is still 24 hours on a plane and many thousands of dollars to do so. Consequently most of my art education, and many other Aussie’s, has been primarily from books. So imagine how I felt seeing Duchamp’s first Ready-made Bicycle Wheel. It looks like he made it yesterday! Beautiful. At the Art Gallery of New South Wales I also saw works by other names I’d only read about before: Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman, Jean Tinguely and learned to love many new-to-me artists, especially Gianni Colombo and his Elastic Space. I was swimming in a sea of conceptual art ideas. I literally drowned (ok, not literally, but it seemed so) in the video work of an artist whose name I’m sorry to say I can’t recall. [Out of time. Going to Cockatoo Island tomorrow.]

[Overnight rain, cocktail party. Slow morning start.] The ferry to Cockatoo Island leaves from in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art at The Rocks which turns out to also be the venue for the Aroma Festival: Chocolate, Coffee and Spice on that day. The whole area was packed when we arrive so we retreated into the MCA first. The island could wait an hour or two.

The very first work you see as you enter is Leon Ferrari’s Western Christian Civilisation which I suspect the organisers where hoping would be controversial and drive the entrance numbers up. I was looking forward to seeing it. The thing I love most about art is its ability to communicate ideas and concepts that are either difficult to describe in words, or impossible. Ferrari’s Christ crucified on a scaled replica of a US FG 107 fighter plane had done just that to me when I viewed photos in books. Disappointingly not so when I saw it as it was hung so badly that all meaning and interest is immediately diffused. Maurizio Cattelan’s Novecento did the reverse, with its materials list “leather, rope, horse” it is strangely affecting. It is in the same room with some hanging wooden sculptures, which I actually saw some people carelessly bump their heads into as they made their way to a wall exhibit. No one could approach the horse in this manner. I saw people determined to walk under it as it dangled at a great height. Unable to do so, they tried again with their eyes tightly closed, still unable to desecrate the life force around this powerful taxidermied body. Another great pleasure was spending time (not enough time, never enough time) with two Alexander Calder mobiles, one black, one white. I could have watched the elegantly unfolding motion of the white mobile for many, many hours but Cockatoo Island called.

Outside the Aroma festival had flourished into an odorous crush. The queue for the ferry was long and the time remaining until it closed was short. [Plenty of time for Cockatoo Island tomorrow.]

To Be Continued.

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Jan Allsopp is a visual artist living in Coffs Harbour, Australia. Jan will be keeping us in touch with the art scene in coastal New South Wales as well sharing her exploits, as mid-career and mid-life, she decides to change art forms. View Jan's art and browse her shop at www.janallsopp.com.au



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