After slowly gathering a little bit of steam, if only in my head, over the last few weeks, last Friday something clicked fully into place, and I was back at my desk, surrounded by all my paints (I've got so many paints) and happily putting them onto paper.
I think one of the major factors in finally getting back to making stuff again (I really want to avoid the word productivity, because it feels increasingly loaded), was disappointingly prosaic. My top tip… tidying my workspace. 🥳
Currently, my “studio” is my bedroom. It's not ideal but it's not at all bad - the light is really good, it's warm and comfortable, I have everything I need easily to hand. Or at least I do when I'm organised. I still feel I need more storage (see: so many paints) but just having a clear desk, a place for most of my materials (and those materials actually in their place!) and not being surrounded by piles of clothes lol… It makes the world of difference, and you'd like to think that’ll motivate me to keep it in order, wouldn't you? Well, we'll see.
One of the other benefits of tidying up was finding things I'd forgotten about, including an old sketchbook (sadly not the one with the vases I mentioned last week). One of the things I'm really excited about in my work at the moment is bringing together various elements that I have only ever used separately before. It's so nice to feel like I can bring together all the stuff I love in one painting, at the same time going somewhere completely new. So I've been bringing some of the shapes from my sketchbook into my new pieces, which are all in a notebook or on A5 pieces of paper at the moment.
My initial experiments have felt very free and loose, and basically just a lot of fun. I'll share in more detail on Sunday!
On the subject of revisiting elements over the course of many years, I loved reading the following, about when Matisse made by hand a grand cloak for the Emperor in a Ballets Russes production of Rossignol (cutting shapes out of gold fabric and placing them onto a length of red velvet) in the Hilary Spurling biography of him this week:
The great cloak was finished in two days. Matisse looked back with pride afterwards on this heroic feat, adapting the method for the huge wall decorations commissioned twelve years later by the Barnes Foundation in America, and reverting to it again at the end of his life for the stained-glass windows at Vence and the majestic cut-paper works that followed.
I love that this experience was evident in his work decades down the line. Matisse was reluctant to collaborate on the ballet originally, and I find it so fascinating how you just never know where, how or what things will inform your work. He didn’t want to take the time away from his canvases to do the costumes, but if he hadn't, maybe he never would have made his cutouts in later life. I want to use this as a reminder to myself to always be open to inspiration and to look back as well as forwards, not discounting the body of work that got me to this point, letting it all feed into and enrich what comes next.
As always, something beautiful and inspirational to finish.
And as a bonus (!) this is the sheet I was using to protect my desk whilst I was painting yesterday, which I genuinely might keep and frame because honestly, I love it.
