As I walk through my garden to my studio each day, I can feel the world slowly stirring into spring. Tiny shoots and “nearly there” buds peeping out of the wood, we are still clothed in dark skies and drizzle here in the Southwest, but each day is stretching out now, and I’m starting to move from planning into doing .
Tomorrow is Imbolc the Celtic festival of fire, purification and new beginnings. The word means ‘in the belly’ or ‘in the womb’ and is a reference to the imminent birth and bursting forth of life that takes place over the coming months. I love this time of year for it potential. Dreams and inspirations germinate beneath the frosty ground, waiting and planning for Spring, the coming months are a blank canvas to be painted upon.
So this week I’m easing into the creative flow by sketching and working on smaller pieces, using paint on paper to allow this year’s inspirations to reveal and ‘birth’ themselves slowly from the page. They emerge unformed but often full of an energy that can disappear from the final paintings, in much the same way that the spontaneity of childhood can get lost in the adult. Capturing the energy of these beginnings and letting it resonate in the final pieces is always a challenge, but I persist in trying…
My personal life informs my creative one, filtering into it via emotion, memory and the need to make sense of all the wonderful madness. At the moment both my parents are very elderly and disabled in various ways. They live close by and as on only child I am on 24 hour call for emergencies (and there are lots of those!). At any given moment I have to drop everything and run to help. The experience is challenging, but has given me the opportunity to re-examine my childhood and understand more deeply the elements that made me the person that I am.
The sky is flat grey here today, but the sunlight behind it causes fluctuations in the gloom. My studio is busy, drawings, everywhere, large canvases on the wall, demanding to be resolved and scattered pages of mixed media pieces fluttering each time the door opens and the winter winds blow in. This week I will create some order out of it all (probably, possibly, maybe…!)
