Bits of teaching, marketing and sharing

 Life as a creative, as an artist, is full of all sorts of weird things that are tangential to the making, yet make for a full and arty life.

I count amongst these the work I do researching, planning, thinking and prepping for teaching. Recently I wanted to update some thoughts about how to progress work when it feels stalled; or where you think you might have got the perfect solution really quickly. I came across some of my learnings from a workshop six years ago and refreshed them, added to them and printed them. 

 

And as I so often  do - I reckon I got the its v it's thing wrong again here! Why oh why doesn't it have an apostrophe for the ownership bit??? A do-over won't hurt. Sigh.

Fixed it!

And today I got to use the cards as I taught another workshop on Building Narrative in Artists' Books. It was such a joy and delight! It's a small group - only four folk - and we get to go deep, think hard, and explore a lot.

I get to teach in Kim Herringe's beautiful space The Studio here in Maleny, with so many lovely things around us how could we not be inspired?

One of the things I teach is about how to read an artists' book and we have some lovely, lovely examples to dive into.

A few weeks ago we did a short evening workshop with Kim on Marketing and Social Media for Creatives. It's never easy for me to do the marketing thing, but Kim offered sensible and clear ideas and information about how to go about it.  And I think I can do some of it!  It was so good in fact that I started my homework the very next morning!

And to share some small good news...the State Library of Queensland recently purchased my small Grief is  Stone book-ets. In fact they bought two of the editions so that one could go in the Education Kit to share with visitors, school children and the like. I am thrilled to know they have a public home; and will also get the chance to be shared and talked about more.

So I packed them up and posted them!

An artistic life is full of this and that, and oh what fun it can be.

Thursday Thoughts...

“Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?” 

Lawrence Durrell

As I work away on my book of silences, this quote popped out as having real meaning to me this morning. 

My sense is that this is really quite a profound way of looking at and understanding our existence and our world.  It really took me aback to think of things this way.

I daresay that words have equal impact - of course they do; but perhaps he suggests that we hear those and understand them and that they are available to most of us to interpret. Of course, they can be layered and confusing and misinterpreted too!

But with this thought I think he suggests that the silences around us are ripe for misunderstanding and our ability to interpret and possibly translate silences; to fully understand the subtle messages they reverberate out into the world, is a kind of superpower. An ability that elevates our understandings.

Silence can be understood so differently between people - for one it is a pause, a moment to gather thoughts; to another it appears as rejection and disagreement.

I have been gifted so many amazing silences for this book and from within them I am discerning so many more silences than I would ever have imagined knowing for myself...

Practising calligraphic silences, 2015.