I’ve been reading up about various cultural notes linked with the Clydach Gorge collaboration and in looking at a Wiki entry on how Mary Frances Frere came to write about Indian folklore, the phrase What started as an idle conversation jumped out at me. This is often how the very best things start, conversations while travelling in the car, just letting things come into the mind, almost meditatively surfacing. Hmmm. This is how a few ‘opening my world up’ things have started for me recently.
While watching my son at athletics this evening I heard a coach say to an athlete in the advanced group Run how you feel and it stuck with me all evening. While walking around the track I ended up finishing an article debating whether originality in art is overrated while walking and it reminded me of how I’d wanted to do something involving reading while doing another activity, such as expressive movement, or exercise or maybe something trickier? Still mulling that one over.
I cleaned up the hexagonal tiles and piled them on my studio table. Bears some resemblance to the Giants causeway.
I got painting more of the large canvas propped in the studio this morning, titled it Clydach (Ellie) as I’m thinking about the landscape around Clydach Gorge yet there is something about what I’m trying to do with this painting which has something in parallel with how late artist friend Ellie Tremayne-Exton painted. At least how I thought she painted…trying to get a feeling, a breath of a place. This is what I saw she did, rather than what she ever said. She painted cornwall from memory and I am painting a place a barely know at all. They are both special places, the long term loyal knowing and the excited, new getting to know a place part. They are at the opposite end of a spectrum of knowing.
