Soul food

Pinned up in my studio this week is an angry little drawing which vents a bit of angst - the marks are dark vigorous but they don't quite obliterate the paper underneath.
Peeking through the charcoal is a diagram, neat,orderly 'workcentric'and generated in Word.
It's a flow chart I suppose - or something similarly hierarchical. It documents a discussion I had with myself earlier this week about 'what happens if it's not perfect?'.
The fact that I felt compelled to sanatize my brainstorm into some readable form is not lost on me either! (what does happen when it's not perfect is an interesting and ridiculous extrapolation - ending with a closed door. It's good to see it as the crazy thinking it is, and let it go)

I've taken on a mentor as part of my winter of self improvement and she's given me 4 pages of tasks to help unblock some thinking and reroute my creativity. So far so good ...and so far out.

I've been feeling a bit hollow this winter, in the last post I wrote about making a process to think like a map maker - I had the intention of creating a journey without a known end... and then hey presto! I did what I always do and skipped to the end point. How could I do that ? By visualising what might happen, I preempted what could - typical.

So for now I'm going to work with the tasks I've been set and put the map making process to one side. They feel a bit 'therepy' to me to be honest - but I'm trying to be open minded and work with them. I know I need to loosen up - extend my mark making - leap off some known art cliffs and divorce the art from the rational self... and I know I need to feed my soul right now too. So I've begun to work on a list of things that feed the soul.

Yesterday I took the morning off to visit the Rita Angus exhibition at Te Papa

Rita Angus' hard edged,flattened style has never been one I've admired specifically, but the body of work collected here is extensive, and the diversity of her work is impressive. Looking at it yesterday it seems to me this show documents her internal struggle with herself and her art well. Not so much in a curatorial sense (which is quite restrained and minimally present) - more through the sense of sadness that emanates out of some of the works through periods of her life.

Her colours truly sing - especially the Central Otago paintings - the rounded hills bulging like heavy cotton velvet with that style she had of bleeding darker hues from the edges of objects.(I remember playing with that style with crayons when I coloured - in at school)

I was particularly attracted to her watercolour of Douglas Lilburn and also to the interior of Suzy's coffee shop (which I remember from school holiday trips to town with my mother)which was from her Wellington period. The honesty of her last self portrait is wonderful.

I'll go back after the holidays and look at the later rooms again - it's a big show and 3 hours didn't do it justice really.