Project Type: Format
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Deliverance
Deliverance: Cover Deliverance: Stable Deliverance: Mists Gather Deliverance: Leaving Home Deliverance: Lake of forgetting Deliverance: Moonlight Deliverance: Into Nightmare Deliverance: Dawn light Deliverance: Valley of the Gods Deliverance: Prayer Deliverance: Judgement Deliverance: New beginnning -
River Cam
The River Cam where I walk nearly every day has been a constant theme in my work.
Sketchbook
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Everyday is a Life Experiment
Even from my comfortable armchair my personal and psychological life seems constantly ‘on the edge’. There are always so many things to keep me sitting, to avoid ‘doing’. Reflecting on guilt, inertia and life moments not grasped. With access through a large TV screen to the world, even if I am not already personally stressed, I find stresses responding to everyday events bombarding me in the news and advertising – donkeys, cats, young girls all over the world needing my help – then wars and climate disasters not to speak of Novak Jokovich’s all-important (now irrelevant) visa.
At the same time, I feel compelled to somehow remember and record this time, to slow life down as it flashes past one day merging into the next. Something to remind me in case a time comes when all I have energy left for is memory. I want to remember it as it was at the time, not just after my brain has sloshed them around to try and clean them and hung them out to dry.
Particularly during Lockdown life seemed much too short to waste getting bored.
Diaries and sketchbooks can provide a ‘safe creative fun space’ to critically examine my own ‘personal edges’ – the philosophical and political views that characterise my ‘voice’ so that these can be explicitly and strategically integrated into more ‘objective’ observational as well as subjective creative practice.
Everyday Normal Sketchbook: process april – may 2021
This Sketchbook explored what is meant by ‘Everyday Normals’. It evolved from assignments for a personal development Sketchbook course to start to develop habits and manageable ways to keep better creative track of my evolving thoughts and daily news around me to generate ongoing and well-informed inspiration for future work.
I found an A5 hardbound sketchbook/diary that I bought many years ago at a museum in London waiting for a good use. It has three sections of lined paper, small square graph paper and blank sheets and quirky photographs of daily life, people and places by Elliott Erwitt on each spread. I thought this would be an ideal balance of blank space to fill and daily prompts to respond to if I got stuck.
I started by pencilling in the dates on a corner of every other page to map out two spreads a day each day between April 10th 2021and my 67th birthday on May 9th. Then each day I pencilled in and sketched my thoughts, moods, events and discussion in the news and/or responses to the Erwitt photos. If I had time I finished the spreads that day. Other days when I had a lot of work, I just jotted notes and came back to them later. Sometimes my mood, the event or the Erwitt image reminded me of something I had done in an earlier sketchbook or a photo I had taken, so I cut and paste that.
I periodically reflected on my concept on ‘everyday normal’. I started off with a Zen approach, that every day is a potential for choice and creativity. Life is much too short to be boring, even in Lockdown. And I was always cheered up by the Erwitt photos. On a personal level the very process of keeping a daily diary routine is to intensify that experience of living – potential for getting lost down depressive rabbit-holes and mood swings as well as creative appreciation of seasonal changes in my garden and daily walks – in the this case Spring. Then the everyday bombardment of information and news – sometimes really interesting, sometimes upsetting and making me very angry, often repetitive and cyclical as not everyone is a news junkie watching several times a day.
I became very interested in the effect on my sense of time, the merging and interlinkages between the present with flashbacks to the past, and also thoughts about ‘future normals’. Sometimes fearful of climate change and further waves of COVID affecting other countries I have worked in even if things are OK here. Sometimes hopeful and inspired at the thought that the disruptions of COVID may force a more fundamental rethink of ‘normal’ and our everyday activities and responsibilities to the planet and to each other.
The Sketchbook so far is still very much a work in progress.
I intended to revisit the sketchbook in April/May 2022.
But other interesting things in life intervened. There is a reason why I have always had difficulty keeping a regular diary – life has always been so busy being lived. Like the quantum uncertainty principle (proper ref here) measuring and recording thoughts alters and changes them. Even in quiet periods it is difficult to reflect and live at the same time. Every ‘now thought’ flashes to the past and a new thought comes before the last one was fully grasped. Never mind recorded and put on paper.
Maybe I look again in 2031 – after a further decade of life.
