The Month in Mood Board - good, bad & ultra sticky ideas

May. And ideas were popping up like daisies. Or something...

Yvonne Telford talked the fragility of ideas at the Lucky Things meetup. And, yet these butterfly-delicate things can cause chaos, overturning whole industries, practically overnight.

Why is it that the simplest ideas - the kind of ones you or I have come up with but then dismissed for being too obvious - are often the best?

And, why oh why are some particularly rubbish ideas so often the stickiest? Like my hard to shake idea that drawing - something I’ve loved since I could hold a pencil - is pretty pointless...

“Why don’t you cover a big cork bulletin board in bright pink felt, banded with bamboo, and pin with coloured thumb-tacks all your various enthusiasms as your life varies from week to week?”

— Diana Vreeland

The Butterfly Effect - how one idea changed the face of porn

Imagine if one idea caused your formerly booming sector to tank. Almost overnight. Imagine if that idea meant you couldn’t get a job. Because you weren’t SEO friendly. Or because your CV has one word written all over it: Porn.

Love it or hate it porn adorned the walls of Pompeii and isn’t going away anytime soon. And Jon Ronson’s The Butterfly Effect isn’t about to have that kinda conversation. It simply follows what happened when one guy decided to start posting porn online. For. Free.

Beyond the obvious (and often deeply concerning issues) young, nubile women - previously the bread and butter of the industry - can’t find work because they’re not niche enough. Now people can search for whatever the hell they like. And people like some pretty specific shit.

The result? Custom porn. Where individuals pay for their fantasy films to be made to measure. And it’s not all Stepdaughter Cheerleader Orgy either. Think porn starring the fetishistic burning of an apparently precious, stamp collection. Think porn with a sensitive side, even. As porn gets personal...

Lucky Things Networking - “You are solid gold baby…”

Speaking of ideas Yvonne Telford, owner of the Nigerian-infused Kemi Telford fashion line, says she never shares hers. Not even with her husband.

Why? Because ideas are delicate. And people will often do their damndest to crush them - mostly to protect you from yourself, of course.

I heard Yvonne speak at my first Lucky Things meetup - a networking event created by coach and HR expert Sunita Hartley to help: “[W]omen to feel more confident about their career and wellbeing.”

This is what she had to say.

On Fabulousness: 

“Don’t wait for someone else to acknowledge yours. Embrace it yourself. When she saw a Pinterest quote claiming: “You are solid gold baby!” Yvonne did just that, for herself.”

On Crap: 

“Bad stuff is not happening to you, it’s happening FOR you.  Sharing stories is powerful, so never share personal stories you haven’t sorted yet. Attracting rubbish? Ask yourself what you’re giving off.”

On Queen: 

“Not the band. The word. Speaking of Kemi Telford’s power slogans Yvonne says it’s all about knowing your value. People will treat you differently if you change the way you think about yourself, she notes.”

Breathing New Life into Life Drawing

So, I returned to life drawing after something of a hiatus. When my mum asked me how it went she said: "I bet it was like coming home...". And, she was right. Here is what I wrote on Instagram the following day:

Ever give up on something you really enjoy because you think it’s self indulgent? An the further you get away from it the more the doubt creeps in? Because that’s how I’ve felt about life drawing for the longest time.

Drawing was my go-to mode of self-expression as a kid. I’d planned to go to art school. And, then I gave it all up. Pretty much in every way.

More recently I’ve been rediscovering my creative self through mixed media work and sketchbooking with SEVEN artists. But, I’d largely avoided drawing. Because, I know, I have big expectations. And, it takes practise. Lots of it. And, well, I haven’t put the work in.

But last night (18th May) I went along to a life drawing class facilitated by artist Kerry Doyland - also a fellow SEVEN member - and it was magical. The cobwebs have been lifted - well pulled apart for some Indiana Jones-style excavation. I feel more invigorated. Excited to do more. To explore. To see what I can actually do if I let myself just. Do. It.

I Lost My #100DayProject Groove, But...

Back in April I committed to doing a collage a day as part of the #100DayProject. It sounded doable. And I did do it. Until about day 28 that is.

At that point I went away for the weekend. And, away from my boxes of collaging tricks my aim of a collage-a-day was, well, trickier.

Cue: stealth collage. Collecting bits and bobs on my journeys seemed like a cool creative challenge.

Some Southbank Centre leaflets became the basis for new work. You know what they say: necessity is the mother of invention. And, it seemed to work.

But, once I’d missed a few days in a row my collage-a-day groove was a gonna. I got further and further behind. Until. I. Stopped.

What I learned:

Setting an achievable everyday artistic habit is powerful - my collage-a-day goal got me into a real creative rhythm

Factoring in busy times is key - or, alternatively, just getting over it and getting on with it would have been a good idea…

The Month in Mood Board - inspirational listening, identity & Essex witches

So, the merry month of May came and graced us with her pole-dancing antics. The sun played peek-a-boo. And the calendar continued it’s countdown.

This month marked the run up to the long-awaited Leigh Art Trail - the first time I’d shown actual artwork I’d put some real soul into to a real live audience in eons.

But before me and my SEVEN collective cohorts revealed our creative sketchbooks this stuff happened...

“Why don’t you cover a big cork bulletin board in bright pink felt, banded with bamboo, and pin with coloured thumb-tacks all your various enthusiasms as your life varies from week to week?”

— Diana Vreeland

In 2017 - “...museums make no sense and are gone in a week …”

Danny Wallace... is a Man is a column in Shortlist magazine - one of them giveaways they do at train stations - and it always makes me chuckle. This month a visit to a pop-up museum, of dairy products no less, caused Mr Wallace to muse on the modern ‘museum’:

'Pop-up’ does not say eternal cultural significance...

he writes.

Hundreds of plastic bananas hang from the ceiling, as joyless zombies plod around, tapping blankly at their phones.

I don’t think I’m in a museum at all. I think I’m in some kind of Instagram alchemy laboratory.

He continues:

… [A]ll I can see see is little gummy bears stuck on the walls and the disembodied head of a statue …

And...

Why is that there? And are gummy bears dairy?

Charles the III - on the Beeb

I’ve worked in a museum or two, including the Imperial War Museum, London, where I once answered the phone to the late Tim Pigott-Smith - who plays Charles in this Shakespeare-inspired play. “Tim Pigg-ott?-Who?” I said. Charming.

I couldn’t identify members of Dad’s Army in the flesh either - sorry Bill Pertwee.

Speaking of identity there’s oft been a rumour that the Prince, when or if, he ever attains the throne will change his name. The first two King Charleseses were executed and deposed in that order.

What would Shakespeare make of that? Well, a Charles not-by-any-other-name would spark a constitutional crisis this play supposes.

Witchy Writer Syd Moore - did a talk at the Forum

While at the other end of the social spectrum: Syd Moore’s new novel series wonders about the witchy women of Essex’s murky past and their connection to the present day Essex Girl.

Because Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins - he of Vincent Price Hammer Horror fame - oversaw the killing of more witches in Essex than any other English county. Whether Essex was home to more marginalised people - the disfigured, disabled, old women with no legal voice - than other counties is unclear.

But Syd believes that witchy prejudice is definitely haunting the present in the form of the often derisory Essex Girl epithet.

On Being - a podcast with big questions

I also stumbled across On Being and Krista Tippett - the podcast’s effusive and eloquent host - and fell head first into a rabbit hole of ideas and discussions.

On Being opens up the animating questions at the center of human life: What does it mean to be human, and how do we want to live? We explore these questions in their richness and complexity in 21st-century lives and endeavors. We pursue wisdom and moral imagination as much as knowledge; we esteem nuance and poetry as much as fact.

Assemblage Drawings - SEVEN do some tracing

And, so it was the last ‘official’ SEVEN workshop. Each artist had taken a turn to lead the group in an idea-generating technique we’d enjoyed from our original Creative Journal course.

We approached Assemblage Drawing like this: tracing random images from magazines, before layering them one upon the other. The abstract image was then coloured or / and collaged, as desired.

Like most other things, assemblage ain’t nothing new. Apparently those Cubists began it and the Dadaists and Surrealists ran with it - post-WWI the world was also post-sense so randomising everyday objects seemed to, well, make sense. Can it do the same for a post-truth world? The answer is...