This blog is a completely new venture for me as until now I have only had a blog to display photographs of my students’ work from my glass fusing courses.
For a while now I have been curiously watching students, who say that they are not creative, play with the glass then make the most fabulous pieces. One thing I have noticed is that the people that have fun and play with the materials seemed to be the happiest with their work so I came up with a prompt sheet for those that were struggling for ideas or having a problem getting started. Ironically the person who probably got the biggest buzz out of this sheet was me I got really excited thinking up strategies to bring out creativity. Shortly after writing the sheet I glanced around at my heaving bookshelves one night and realised just how many books that I have collected on aspects of creativity (a habit I am trying to break (please Amazon stop sending me tempting descriptions of new books), anyway that generated thoughts of starting a blog on the visual creativity journey
I am really hoping this will be a place where I can transfer the thoughts on creativity that keep circling in my mind to a virtual space and most importantly to create a supportive community of likeminded people who are on that same creative pathway. Recently I took an online journaling course with the fantastic Susannah Conway (http://www.susannahconway.com) and that really opened up a different way of being creative – for me I struggle a lot more to begin writing than painting or making with glass. The great thing about the course was the Facebook group of other students and how they were negotiating and finding the prompts. We did the course over a 6 week period so it was reasonably easy to keep up the energy as a short sharp burst. The community part is probably harder to build with an ongoing blog but it would be so exciting to do it here and I really hope that you will come on board and join me.
My early thoughts are that although I make my living from art I struggle with many of the same issues as my students so through this blog I am hoping to share prompts of how to start being creative and keep going. The other area that I am keen to explore is how to make art meaningful, maybe even with a conceptual part ( my biggest bugbear), whilst balancing that with an aesthetic element – something that I am working on. I really hope that you, the readers, will feel comfortable enough to respond and critique my work (just wanted to put that option out there) and maybe even show your own work, so together we can discover and link with other artists negotiating similar journeys.
I am already aware this may be too long for a blog post (L plates are on back and front) but just to tip you off that ideas for future postings include ways to collect ideas for visual work, how to judge when a piece is finished and my favourite, something keeps coming up this week – what to do when your painting looks ugly….