Monthly Archives: March 2023

For the first time in months I have done art.

Yesterday, late afternoon to early evening I spent time doing art and I did it in a rebellious kind of way.

So tired of never having access to my art table I did a very childish thing and sat crossed-leg on my bed and risked ink stains on the bed covers to do it.

I did get a green splodge on my duvet, which looks black against the red polka dots that were originally on it.

But it wasn’t as messy as I thought it would be.  Paul moaned, of course he did – ink splodge on the bed covers, but he didn’t say as much as he usually does because he knows in a way, it was his fault this happened.  My art table has been taken over by the whole household, except me.

I made abstract conceptual art of a beauty boutique with inks, coloured pencils, biro and sharpies. 

I also made a lady and cut her out as part of a big collage I intend to do as part of a free course I signed up a week ago to – thing is, I haven’t done the project yet, because I couldn’t find a wooden palette big enough to continue.  I have everything else though – but the palette is meant to be the canvas!

I also learned today when experimenting with different music on Alexa that I’ve been a big fan of The Kinks my whole life and never knew.  Every song of theirs I was like… ooh this is my most favourite song of all time, I was like that with around ten of their songs I listened to.  But I’ve told you all before, I have the memory of a sieve.

I probably knew once, that I liked them.

As stupid as it sounds I thought quite a lot of their songs were from The Beatles, The Beach Boys or The Monkees to be honest.

So yeah, I learned I like The Kinks, typical really upon reflection.

A new short story series has entered my mind today, which I was also practising art for.  I wanted to make the art of a Goth girl, as the main character is Goth – I want to write three short stories before I do my plan.  The plan is, to post them here on my blog as a weekly thing. 

I probably won’t, but who knows.

It’s a black comedy comic strip.

Still intend to write the other projects, but my heart isn’t in something since I found out someone wanted to steal it, I am tired of idea thieves.  It really is disheartening.

So, that’s what I am up to lately.

To me, that’s huge progress.

I’ve been in a huge depression slump since September; this is my first creative foray since then.  Well on a major scale that lasted longer than thirty minutes in any case and wasn’t poetry either!

I’ve been eager to get heavily into art actually; particularly conceptual abstract in mixed media format and collages.

I’ve been trying to learn off and on for about a year now, what abstract art actually means – to try and develop respect for it, because to be honest with you, up until recently I had a very naïve and uneducated idea about abstract.

You know… anyone and their dog can do it.  Ouch.

Actually there is a lot of thought and feeling that goes into abstract work, a lot more than you realise.

You realise that in the first few minutes of abstract the artist genuinely doesn’t know what they are doing, they are just adding colour and shapes to the canvas to fill it up – then they layer it and cover up a lot of what they’ve done in order to make something special to them.

You see the thing is, abstract really is suggestive.  The artist sees something that you and I won’t, then give it a name based on what they see.

I remember an art class I did once in the last school I’ve ever been to – where I was at the frustrated sweaty end of a ranting art teacher, because he felt I was disrespecting the craft because I couldn’t grasp what abstract or even surrealism was at the time.  He wanted an abstract painting or sculpture of a musical instrument and I couldn’t do it for the life of me.

He forced me to read loads of books for that whole lesson and I realised what I was doing wrong.  I was attempting realism, because I thought that’s what he wanted from me.

I thought abstract at the time meant bold unusual colours with blocky patterns in it. 

When I finally grasped what he wanted, he was so happy he was bouncing off the walls for weeks and from being the most hated pupil he ever had, I became his biggest success in his words!

I realised what he wanted me to do was to create a musical instrument of my choice, but make sure it doesn’t look normal – that it looks contorted, sort of trapped between realities and maybe make it in a way in which if you squint and put your head in a certain position it will actually look like the guitar you meant for it to be.  Weird, but then again – it’s all thinking outside of the box.  We can all look at a picture, but do we really see it?

How deeply do we look at it, do we see details?  Do we try to see beyond splodges and shapes or do we take it for granted?

That’s the thing with abstract, a lot of people do take it for granted and pooh, pooh it.

The best way I’ve found in understanding abstract art, is to get used to looking at shapes in many forms.  Silhouettes are a good start.  Splodges on paper, but don’t just look at the splodges – look at them as silhouettes, what could they be the silhouettes of?

If you squint your eyes or tilt your head slightly or a lot does the silhouette look different?

That’s the understanding behind abstract art I’ve found.

Sometimes, yes, it’s just random stuff people throw on a canvas, but a large amount of abstract artists really do over think how they make things appear.

Another way in learning about abstract art that helped me was the idea of junk journaling and collage.  You take scrapbooking papers and you cut them into shapes and you paste them onto a paper, you have a square and a triangle, put them together and it is a house, but they are random colour and patterns the shapes – all of this helped me understand better.

So abstract is both the worlds of random paint throwing and thinking deeply about what you’re doing – this is something I’ve learned from almost every abstract artist.

They really do start off, just piling paint onto a canvas for ages until they squint in a certain way or tilt their head or just simply see beyond what they are doing – this is why they pause and focus on the picture regularly – they are trying to see what their subconscious has just made and it does give people a huge insight to the state of the artists mind.

It’s all subconscious, it’s not meant to be 3D realism. 

Today, I was concentrating on my abstract picture, without a hope in Hell knowing what I was doing, I just went back to being five years old and threw different shapes and colours and textures onto my canvas until I saw what looked to me to be a mess of clothes, boots and shoes all over a carnival style boutique, I outlined some things and I did some random scratches and texts and to me it works.

I didn’t intend to make it some flamboyant carnival style clothing boutique, I just wanted to paint and play.

But it is funny how my subconscious did that, because I haven’t had a shopping trip for six years, not where I can impulse buy more than £10 and in the past few days I’ve really missed my old haunts in London and the ability to go out for a shopping spree of £300 without battering an eye lid like I used to!

So by throwing myself into abstract art, I’ve found I am learning a lot about myself and my deep desires.

I really do miss London and I did notice along the flanks of the painting, it looked like some foggy scenes of a London high-street!

I missed doing art and todays lifted my spirits slightly.

Thanks for reading!