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 - creative output & moving portraits

How do you ramp up your creative output when you’ve got 101 other things to do? What’s more how do you do it your way - without getting swayed with what others a getting up to?

Because we’re almost halfway through the year and things have started to get serious. April Love - 2018’s first Susannah Conway photo-a-day challenge - has come and gone in a flurry of blossom and torrential rain.

Which means the Leigh Art Trail is fast approaching - in other words I need to finish my Estuarine-themed creative journal.

Perhaps the answer is to be more Ingrid Bergman? Or, to simply ‘launch’ ready or not, as creative coach Jen Carrington would advise...

“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?”

How Do You Find Creative Time Everyday? - #The100DayProject

Sometimes I get swept up in creative tsunamis.  Think: creative flow gone rogue. It sweeps across regular life, crushes my To Do list (in the bad way) and leaves me washed up at 2 in the morning surrounded by word whirlpools, paper debris and castoff ideas.

So often this is what stops me from starting. I mean, it doesn’t always go down like this. But it can. And who has time for that!? Cue: Procrastination.

Because there is a feeling - especially when it comes to the arts - that you have to give nothing short of body and soul to create something truly worthy.

“Why do you want to dance?”

Asks Svengali-esque ballet impresario Lermontov of soon-to-be protege Vicky Page in The Red Shoes:

“Vicky: Why do you want to live?
Lermontov: Well, I don’t know exactly why, but... I must.
Vicky: That’s my answer too.”

Which is why, #The100DayProject - established by Elle Luna and Lindsay Jean Thomson - appealed. The premise is simple: establish a creative habit through committing to producing a piece of work every day for a project of your own choosing.

It’s meant creating self-imposed boundaries and seizing small amounts of time. In short: it’s made my creative practice more doable. And, actually doing it has meant I’ve got into a kind of rhythm.

A creative rhythm stretching over days and weeks connected by regular creative dots. And it’s proved powerful. When I sit down to create I’m not having to remind myself of where I’d left off. Ideas emerge more freely, making creating easier.

Here’s to less tsunamis and more flow.

Instagram Love - less squares more shares?

The creative boundaries imposed by Instagram’s squares appealed to me from the get go. Although, at first, I used it purely for the photos. I mean my photos.

As author and columnist Laura Jane Williams says:

“Most of us use Instagram as a way to find the art in our everyday lives.”

It was simply a place to make interesting-to-me captures (often reflection photos) and an easy way to record them. Those images might well be available for all to see, but they weren’t connecting with anyone. They weren’t meant to.

But, then I got the urge to flex my creative Instagram muscle. Cue: Susannah Conway and her thrice yearly photo challenges. A prompt a day and you’re away.

At first I did it quietly - sans hashtag fanfare. Then, I began to connect with other photo challengers. People followed me. People commented in emoji hieroglyphs.

Some people wrote long explanations or ponders under their own posts. I wondered if this was just TMI. Instagram can seem an itty bitty space for infinite cosmic thoughts. And, anyway, what would I say?

But now that I have more clarity over the kind of images I love to create, and I’ve got to know a little (and sometimes a lot) about some of my fellow ‘grammers, it’s only fair to step up, right?

As Laura Jane goes on to say in her Red piece:

“Using Instagram properly means training your eye to see the story everywhere you go.”

Actress Ingrid Bergman on Authenticity in Art & Life

Authenticity and Tinsel Town don’t usually go together. But an early Hollywood screen test sees a luminous Ingrid Bergman, a board held before her reading:

“No makeup and no lip rouge.”

Bergman had a healthy self-image - something the studio dubbed “naturalism” -and she was determined to “do it” her way. In other words: unapologetically.

This documentary, Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words, lays her barer still. Telling her adventurous story through her personal letters, diaries and home movie footage.

“I was the shyest creature in the world but I had a lion inside me which wouldn’t keep quiet”

She wrote. A lion which drove her from Sweden to Hollywood, to work with the likes of Hitchcock:

“Everyday with him is pure happiness. He brings out the best in me, things I never imagined I possessed.”

Then on to Italy and an extramarital affair with director Roberto Rossellini. Before returning to Hollywood - often leaving her children behind.

Against a home-movie backdrop of glowing aqua pools, sun-kissed skin and dazzling snowscapes Bergman’s children express hurt, admiration and understanding at their mother’s ability to drop them for a more interesting creative challenge.

“I have seen so much but it is never enough.”

Bergman said.

Someone, Somewhere - storytelling at its most compelling

Diary:

“I have always written down my thoughts for as long as I can remember. If what I write survives 99 percent will be boring old rubbish, but one percent might be of interest to a few people here and there.”

Back in May 1980 22 year old Jessie Earl disappeared.

A bit like Ingrid Bergman’s doc Someone, Somewhere (2001) is a moving collage of personal diary entries, interviews with her parents, and “poetic monologues” based on Jessie’s other writings, which together (says the BBC):

“…[C]reate a moving portrait of the experience of loss and survival…”

From her flat, with its Marie-Celeste sense of a place just this minute deserted, to the notorious Beachy Head - a favourite walk of Jessie’s - the play dances through Jessie’s musings: lark song “bubbles”, gulls are “brittle as porcelain”. While she does what every self-respecting bohemian-teen dresser does, by trying to look “…[S]uitably haughty and Dracula-ish…” in a black cloak at conservative Eastbourne station.

Jessie, who was studying graphic art at Eastbourne, writes just a few weeks before her disappearance:

“[I]llustration might be the direction I wanted to take. We shall see. It’s all out there waiting for me. Everything is possible.”

But in every sunlit passage there is a shadow.

Sometimes it is our own sense of foreboding as the more informed listener. Sometimes it is Jessie's own, almost MR Jamesian, sense of a spectre following her on the beach. Sometimes it is that altogether more mundane, yet rarely really talked about, feeling of separateness:

“...I sit writing and looking across the room to the window opposite, a brilliant orange square hanging in the darkness. There is a lamp inside the room and in front of it backlit by a golden glow walks a woman, between us the indigo darkness swirls and thickens. The woman draws the curtains and her life is cut off. Now my own small square of window is like a black, blank wall. There is no world out there.”

Evocative. Beautiful. Haunting. Capturing Jessie’s essence and her parents’ anguish and memories so powerfully, this radio play has stayed with me.

Some Need to Know Podcasts & the Women Behind Them

Last month I discovered Kat Molesworth and Blogtacular. Listening to her podcast lead me to a lot of other social media-savvy and entrepreneurial women.

And, so I’ve spent the weeks since binge-listening to a plethora of people, including:

Creative coach Jen Carrington who helps:

“...big-hearted creatives make things happen in their creative work and life on their own terms, in their own way, and by their own rules... ”

Kayte Ferris of Simple & Season, a “marketer turned coach and mentor”, who takes a slow approach to business by way of easy and achievable how-tos based around simplicity and inspired by seasonality.

While award-winning, Instagram expert Sara Tasker of Me & Orla grew her six-figure business from, yes, a photo-a-day project!

Getting Artistically Inspired By a Word

As we've seen the prompt can be a powerful creative cue. Which is why last year’s SEVEN creative sketchbook exhibition for Leigh Art Trail took the sea as its starting point.

Sea is obviously a big feature of anywhere named Something-on-sea. But this year we got a little more specific. That sea? Well it’s actually an estuary. So, the word which would inspire this year’s creative endeavours was honed to: ESTUARINE.

In other words, all things related to the Estuary.

Being drawn to ideas of archetypes and pagan deities I got to imagining Estuarine personified (if Estuarine was a name you’d say it much like Christine). And being an ever-changing landscape-seascape kinda place Estuarine is multifaceted: full of contradictions and misty memories and ever evolving ideas.

Only a few weeks to go and Estuarine’s sketchbook story will be complete...

The Month in Mood Board - mothers, self-imposed limitations & Psycho

Mothers loomed large this March. From Mothering Sunday to the many multitasking mamas at International Women’s Day and Essex Book Festival events, to Psycho's macabre "Mother!".  

While I worried that not being a mother meant I had a surfeit of creative juice, the juice I do have was put to use at a couple of micro writing retreats at Metal Southend’s Pop-Up Writers House.

I wandered into those misty places where art and life merge. And, rediscovered the joys and pains of Arrested Development...

“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

On Daring to Enter the Pop-Up Writers House...

When I was a kid I used to go to Chalkwell Park and circumnavigate the seemingly empty Hall in search of the mini zoo, while speculating who would live in a house like this.

Now the zoo is pretty much a peacock. And the house? Well that’s expanded and rebranded itself as Metal Southend - an artistic hub. And, this March writers were invited in.

However I hesitate to call myself a ‘writer’. Copywriter, yes. Sometime blogger, ok. But writer? Who me? It took some real loin girding and teeth gritting, but I decided 42 was about old enough to start to take yourself a bit more seriously (or maybe less so).

And, that’s how I got to be in the Hall’s luminous attic space, sitting at a desk overlooking the everchanging estuary, reading my stream of consciousness NaNoWriMo scribblings on how my grandmother loved Boris Karloff.

Oh, to be grown up...

Blogtacular - an online home?

The key to a successful brand? Being yourself some say.

But finding that sweet spot where relatability meets relevance without being overly revealing is tough, right? And, the thought of unintentionally igniting a Twitter spat or gaining a troll, or a gaggle even, fills me with dread.

And, when I tentatively dipped a toe into bloggers Meetups I found them largely full of guys who spoke tech jargon which my brain simply did not compute.

Since then I’ve been drowning in “how to” overload. Meaning I’ve done little more than play at setting up and making my blogs look nice. The all important marketing and search engine optimising? Cue: tumbleweed.

Then, I discovered Kat Molesworth and her Blogtacular podcast.

And, guess what? Kat talks in plain English (I know!) to a variety of women (mostly), who are successful bloggers and social media influencers, yes, but also down to earth and honest.

Some don’t “do” Facebook (isn’t that sacrilege?!). Others are even older than forty-something me. While others, still, have escaped the rat race and embraced “slow” living.  

I feel I could have found an online home, of sorts, where people speak my language.

Psycho - the shower scene + its leading ladies

78/52, the title of this Hitchcock doc, is about as anal as it gets, referencing the 78 camera setups and 52 cuts which went into the iconic Psycho shower scene.

I’d already read Janet Leigh’s book Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller, but this doc went a little deeper, probing not just Hitch’s psyche, but also that of early 60s society at large, putting:

“...Psycho at the very tipping point of US history, a spasm of fear after the certainties and complacencies of the 1950s and postwar prosperity – but before the Kennedy assassination, civil rights and Vietnam...”

As one Independent piece says.

From turning '50s notions of “mother” as the epicentre of the American-Dream-come-true-home on its head to dethroning the pre-War movie queen - by killing off his leading lady a third of the way through - in hindsight Psycho seems to have a lot to say about a lot of things, but notably women.

As a Slant magazine reviewer writes:

“[T]he complex nature of Hitchcock’s art ... is exploitive and resentful of women yet empathetic with them, capturing their pain and imprisonment in modern society …”

Juliet Binoche Faces the Maloja Snake

Leading ladies are still suffering for their art and in their lives in The Clouds of Sils Maria.

Apparently writer / director Olivier Assayas is concerned with how “... art and reality intertwine and feed off of each other.”

Thus, one of the clouds of the title, the Maloja Snake, is both a poetic name for a real cloud phenomenon and the name of a fictitious - yet iconic - play. A play which made a young star of Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche).

Only, back then she played Sigrid, a destructive seductress. Now, the shoe is on the other foot and the middle-aged (yet luminous) Binoche is asked to step into the older, more embittered, victim role.

Where did the time go? There you were getting all established and then that now-grown-up-kid from Kick Ass - Chloë Grace Moretz - is stealing your thunder.  While off stage the ever sullen Kristen Stewart is PA Val who also runs lines with Binoche - blurring that all important line between life and art once more.

This is not an All About Eve. It’s an all about change. The kind of amorphous, almost imperceptible cloud-like transition of time snaking its way through the valley of life. I think...

Creative Boundaries or a case of Arrested Development?

I have a vague memory of watching an episode or two of Arrested Development years back, but never getting round to watching it fully. Thank you charity shop. Cos, it’s great!

But as one Telegraph piece noted Emmy Award-winning does not a success make:

“The show was never really popular – too abstract for mainstream audiences, perhaps – but … critics positively fell over themselves to praise its Simpsons-like reinvention of the sitcom.”

Introduced every episode as:

“[The] story of a wealthy family who lost everything and the one son who had no choice but to keep them all together...”

AD was also something of a reinvention for leading man Jason Bateman. A former child star - remember Little House on the Prairie? - and taking inspiration from Brit comedians, like John Cleese and Ricky Gervais, Bateman has re-made a name for himself as something of a straight man.

“I try to perform my characters inside my skill set … Which means I try to keep them close to me. [Michael Bluth] is very much an exaggerated version of one of my sides. It’s very easy for me to be him. I know my abilities; I’m not Daniel Day-Lewis, who’s able to fully morph into different people.”

Self deprecating or self aware? I guess, like the Clouds of Sils Maria, it’s an amorphous snaky line....

Kathe Burkhart - me, myself & Elizabeth Taylor 

It all started back in the ‘80s with an ad. And, for artist Kathe Burkhart the rest is history. She’s been painting with Elizabeth Taylor ever since.

When one interviewer asked:

“So what is it about Liz Taylor that merits such extensive exploration?”

Burkhart replied:

“Well, it’s a way to talk about myself without being really solipsistic, and to talk about the woman artist. She really represents a woman artist who continually played herself, so it’s completely performative, and, that’s what I pretty much do as an artist, is kind of unpack my own life through the work, but also to talk about the limited range of roles and representations of women.”

As a Forbes piece says:

“[Burkhart’s] Liz has morphed from innocent to victim, from dominatrix to AIDS activist, playing out self-chosen identities and commercial stereotypes.”

Inspired by popular culture the aim, Burkhart says, is to:  

“Suck you in with beauty, and knock you out with the truth.”

And, all that from an ad, eh? Inspiration truly is everywhere.

How One Woman Came to Put a Seagull on a Man’s Head

Of course, one of Elizabeth Taylor’s many roles was that of mother. And, mums just seem to get stuff done, don’t they?

I tend to feel bad (albeit admiring) when I see just how much women with kids accomplish. Take my mum’s tales of exactly what a woman can do in six minutes (washing, breakfast, packed lunch, just for starters). Or the now legendary tale of JK Rowling writing in a cafe with a baby at her feet.

But Harriet Paige is one mum who admits that having three kids has not improved her creative output - phew. It had taken her the best part of ten years to write Man With a Seagull On His Head she told the Forum audience this March.

What’s more Man With a Seagull came after a first, unpublished novel - all agent, no publisher. Plus, the story had rolled about in her mind and evolved over those years.

A real-life published book, it seems, is a miracle of sorts...