Soul song on three notes

Sometimes words come along with paintings, or afterwards, with looking. Feeling a need to share this poetic writing, I have begun to assemble and revise it. I am exploring whether it wants to emerge as an audio-visual work, an event, an exhibition, a book, another blog, or some combination of all those. Here's a taster.

Soul song on three notes. Acrylic on paper, Lynne Cameron, 2016.

I hum and sing my deep soul song,

sinking back into the work.

       Three notes in a minor key

This is the dark corner

            spreading its poison

and fun.

            Then the black ribbon that

connects us all.

And how we fall!

A terrible pulling down of orange,

and the blue wave lifting.

A quiet, angry path

Breathless.

things being various

Today I feel the need for this long-loved poem. It is not snowing but I need to assert the incorrigible plurality of world.

Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes–
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of your hands–
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

Louis MacNeice, 1935.

a newly finished painting

Still Undoing the Arrangement. Acrylic, collage and déchirage on canvas. Lynne Cameron, 2016.

I found the background and interpretation of the poem on these two pages insightful:

http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=14988

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/louis-macneice

A moment of seeing

I looked down from the balcony (catching the sun while it is here)

and found my building in a windscreen:

To find the sky

I drove out to Wannsee, a large lake about 30 minutes from the centre of Berlin and surrounded by forest. There is a beach, with sand, which I think is imported. But it was closed for the winter. Eventually I found a place to stand under an open sky. A little sun forced its way through grey and caught the sails.

and mistletoe on the fir tree

The fallen leaves offered some abstract images to take home:

which reminded me of how much I enjoy printmaking..

monoprints, Lynne Cameron, 2015.

What's your (sky-shaping) project?

In today's post, I share a task that I'm using with early career academics here in Berlin. It's designed to make explicit the projects that we are committed to, be that a PhD or a life in painting. I have been through such a process over and over again in my life.

What's your passion? What's your project? What's your life about?
“What are you working on just now?” (that conference networking question…)
We need to know. You need to know.

A bold collection of irises and anemones will never fail to please. From the project "Undoing the Arrangement". Collage and acrylic on canvas, Lynne Cameron, 2015.

Of course, it's always changing. Never fixed. Never complete. Of course, it's not entirely clear or knowable.

But, as the existentialists remind us, we need to choose.  We need to try to work it out. So that we make sense to ourselves. So that we can tell people when they ask - and when they forget to ask. So that we can take the next step.

I've been challenging people to ...
        ...  identify your project so that you can talk about it.

I offer some questions that may help to bring it into the light:

• Take it for a walk, and let it speak to you.
• Talk about it with yourself.
• Sing it to yourself.
• Write, write, write. Just write about it. Start “My project ....” Keep writing for three pages. Keep your pen moving. Just write.
• Write about it with your non-dominant hand.
• Stand on an imaginary stage and proclaim it.

and some checking questions about it:

• Do you love this project? If not, what changes would make you love it more?
• Does this project fit with your core values as a person? If not, what needs to change?
• Is this project big enough? For all of who you want to be? What could you add?
• Does this project feel too vast? If so, congratulations, it's probably big enough!
• How does this project provide you with life's necessities? (Food, shelter, connection....)

Keep working on the shape of your project until you love it. Speak out loud about it until you can answer the opening questions without apologising, hesitating, feeling embarrassed. Try it out on some friends.

Inhabit your project.


 

Necessary mess

I make the mess I need to make the art that wants to be made.

My mess beyond the studio seems to include getting lost in Berlin, wasting time on Netflix, spending money on clothes I don't like after buying, eating silly food and suffering after, falling over. And did I mention buying a thatched cottage and then taking 4 years to sell it? And always dropping food on best clothes when out to dinner? And breaking cups? ...

I hate mess and it's taken years to come to terms with its necessity in a lived life.

Out of the mess of multiple layers of painting, this finished itself today:

Left for the tide to take40 x 40 cm acrylic on canvas, Lynne Cameron, 2016.

Sky-shaping projects

We know 'projects', right?  We did projects in primary school: ‘Dinosaurs’, ‘People who help us’. High speed train HS2 is a UK government project. The EU was a post-war project towards peace.

There’s another way of thinking about projects that has been inspiring me lately: when we take our ideas, our plans, and visions, and use our energies and passions to make them happen, that’s a project.

This idea comes from Simone de Beauvoir, who reminds us that the noun project relates to the verb to project, as in projecting a beam of light into the sky. As metaphor, being human is about projecting ourselves beyond this ‘now’, this given world.

We are our projects.

We take control, or the illusion of control, of our own lives through the projects we choose for ourselves. We relate to other people through our projects, our passion for them, and our involvement in them. We invest our time and effort, and we create a meaning for ourselves in the world through these projects.

Our flying shapes our sky.

These are our sky-shaping projects.

These are nothing like primary school ‘projects’ which were usually little more than a way of mixing up content and presenting it in a fun way. And high speed trains and the EU belong in another realm, of political projects that may be initiated by someone’s sky-shaping project but quickly become both more, and less, than that.

In “The Second Sex”, de Beauvoir is piercingly good on women’s projects, in particular on how women struggle to become artists and writers. She may sound old-fashioned on some things; she certainly does not make for comfortable reading; but she knew. She lived this.

It was as if she took my life experience and unrolled it like a map, pointing out the continents and oceans, showing how routes across this world of my life became inevitable. She pointed out the centuries of history and myth that led to this. She gave me new words to describe my experience.

The ferry to South Island, New Zealand. Photo, Lynne Cameron, 2016.

And energy to challenge the silences.

Our flying shapes the sky

It's a quick, quite rough, painting made with cheap poster paint. And yet, it pointed to something important and its title has been haunting me.

Our flying shapes the sky.

That sentence contains a whole philosophy. The idea of shaping our own sky speaks of the potential power we have in our lives, and of how our thinking constrains us.

The title keeps pushing to be used: for an exhibition, for a project. It remains a title in waiting. And it pervades all that I am trying to do at this point in my life.

There's this and there's that

As my practice of dynamic painting evolves, I've been looking closely at the work that I've produced, at its qualities, and its content. Today I see two different types.

The 'life paintings', or maybe 'soul paintings', speak of my life, my urgent concerns, my adventures in living. They often throw out words in the process, poetic fragments that want to be heard alongside the images

The other emergent group are what I'm calling, today at least, 'wordless mind-wanderings in colour'. They are reflective and abstract.

(and of course, there are some that cross over the groupings.)

Now that I see this distinction, I am thinking about the implications for exhibitions - what kind of hanging the two might require; how sound might be a part of a show, or not.

Writing pages

My dear friend Freda asked recently on her blog whether readers write Morning Pages and how they find the process. She knows that I do - we started together when we first found Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. Nowadays, I write as a way into painting, and I'm exploring how to combine words and painting.

Watching the flowers die.  Acrylic on paper, 43 x 61 cm. Lynne Cameron, 2015.

I've been answering Freda's question in my pages. This is what came up:

PAGES

I write my way into the day.

I write because, on paper, I make myself exist.

I write because here I find my true self, or a truer self.

I write because it leads me somewhere interesting, if I keep going.

I write because it starts the day.

I write because it wakes an inner self that may still be sleeping.

I write because it is my language for one kind of thinking.

            When I paint, I think in colour, form, and space.

            When I write, I think in slow sentences that take shape in my hand.

I write because it’s what I know how to do.

I write because I always have.

I write because it gives me solutions, visions; opens up possibilities.

I write because it makes me more truthful.

I write to meet myself on the page.

 We travel. Collaborative artwork with words, Cinepoetics, 2016.

Some days

Some days I paint - nearly every day in fact.

Other days I write about my art. Today it's time to start this month's Newsletter that will be sent out to my mailing list. People on the list get advance notice of exhibitions and events, and inside peeks into my art-making process.

If you'd like to be on the mailing list and receive my newsletter, please send the form that you can find on the Contact page

Meanwhile here are some flowers! The Garden Academy in Berlin is still full of roses, as well as the more autumnal asters.

Catching up with myself

Jet lag conquered, or at least survived. House sold. Car packed. Europe crossed. And I'm happy to be back in northern Germany by the Ostsee, that we call the Baltic. Sun shining and dew heavy on the grass in the morning. Geese fly in formation from their night time place to the sea.

They will be back later.  

I've set up a makeshift studio on the first floor of my friend's house and am working into my morning rituals: coffee, writing, dynamic painting. With the sea as a wonderful afternoon addition.

 To the edge of the land. Acrylic on canvas. Lynne Cameron 2016. Sold.

Riding the wave

I am riding the embodied wave that is my jet lag.

airport aesthetic - it adds to the exhaustion

Back in Europe after farewells, 21 hours of flying, 4 airports, and 2 Fridays, I love the sudden clarity that wakes me up at three, and today four, o'clock in the morning. By mid-afternoon I am in a pleasant daze. Later, I fall asleep within minutes of placing my head on the pillow. For a few hours before it starts again.

In the wide-awake early mornings, I drink lots of tea and eat toast. I listen to Raymond Chandler stories on the radio as the darkness shifts to grey. I make life decisions and note them down to consider when rationality returns.

These drifting days soon end but they are not so unpleasant. A nowhere-place to rest up. If I can continue to avoid the sinus infections that usually plague me after flying, I will be content.

And being back in the studio is making me happy.

Drifting days.  acrylic on paper, Lynne Cameron, 2016

The light here

is so bright. Even in the NZ equivalent of the end of February (2 months after the equinox), when the sun comes out, it is dazzling. For me, this makes everything more noticeable - and if you know me, you'll know that 'noticing' matters both theoretically and empirically!

yesterday at Castle Point on the Wairarapa coast (south east of North Island), looking out to the Pacific

At nine in the morning, the light sent shadows of old oak trees across the road:

and the double-glazing provided a cinematic image of the kitchen on the screen of the fence..

Meeting up again with paintings I made and left here in 2015, I notice how they too captured the light. In the title too!

Guaranteed to bring a ray of sunshine into your home. Acrylic on canvas, Lynne Cameron 2015.

Today I bring you a fence

in the bright New Zealand sunshine and the pure New Zealand air that lets the lichen flourish

around an old cemetery in the north of South Island

And a painting from earlier in the year that began with a rather similar fence ...

Scarlet walks on    acrylic on paper, Lynne Cameron 2016.

Beautiful disruption

No blog posts for a while because I have been travelling. Flying around the world to New Zealand, 23 hours on airplanes, and a day lost. And suffering the usual disruption to sleep and body patterns as a result.

The other, more beautiful, result is that I get to be with my faraway family for a while.

As for the art, it is plodding along with my disrupted self: looking, noticing, and preparing. I wandered through the botanic gardens and the cemetery next to it, finding begonias, camellias and last year's roses. This jet lag phase offers a different way to be present in a strangely distanced world.

In The French Art Shop, I was seduced by oil pastels. And when the sun comes out, it is amazingly bright, even in the depths of winter.

I am trusting this beautiful disruption.

Connecting painting with empathy and metaphor

I was interviewed recently by the online magazine Interalia and used the opportunity to think about connections between my work now as an artist and my academic research into metaphor and empathy.

My dancing mind          acrylic on paper, Lynne Cameron, 2015.

You can find the interview here:

http://www.interaliamag.org/interviews/lynne-cameron/

Here's an excerpt:

Question: Is intuition part of creativity and the intellectual process?

Intuition for me is a quiet whispering voice from deep inside, that is so easily ignored. It often suggests connections and paths of action.

We learn as academics not to call on intuition, although it insists and sometimes is the only way through. That’s why intellectuals find it helpful when working to take long walks and why the best ideas may arrive in the shower – stepping away from the desk and screen gives intuition the space to move and speak.

Although the intellectual process is often held to be rational, it is seldom entirely so. For me, it works best when intuition, imagination, and reason interact. ... As intellectuals, we may start from intuition, consider hunches about what matters and possibilities for ways forward, use our imagination to notice gaps in knowledge, and find our intuition offering solutions to intractable problems. Despite this, it is still not considered appropriate to display intuition or speak much of its role in academia.

Studio Interludes

Before leaving Berlin for a holiday, I held the last Studio Interlude of this academic year. These began as an invitation for research colleagues to come into my studio during the working week, to take an hour away from text and keyboard, and to spend it with art.

Over the months, I've talked about my thinking and making processes. We've had a go at drawing, printing and painting. I have discovered that teaching painting is not only fun but lets us experiment with a range of creative strategies. We've experienced overcoming inhibitions to make large gestures with a paint brush; pushing through a problem; finding out by trying; adding contrasts; leaving empty space; creating negative space; taking risks.

For this last Interlude, I brought small shells from a Scottish beach. I showed some works of Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham.

We looked very closely at the lines on a shell or stone, and used this looking as a starting point for painting on card.

At the end we put all the paintings in the corridor to make an impromptu, floor-level exhibition and gently critiqued the work. Then we applauded ourselves. Well deserved!

What it is not, and what it is

Painting is not how I make sense of the world.

There is not much sense to be made of it, as it turns out.

Painting is how I hold the world for a moment,

For long enough to notice,

And see it slip away.

Degrees of uncertainty                                   acrylic on paper, 51 x 60cm, Lynne Cameron 2016.

There was an exhibition

and then there was a holiday.

First, the exhibition, "Landscapes of Possibility".

It happened during the conference in Berlin of the Researching and Applying Metaphor conference. RaAM and I go back a long way - to its beginnings in fact. And it was lovely to meet up with friends and former colleagues in the exhibition room.

There were paintings on paper and on canvas. A wonderful group of students helped put up the work and organise the furniture to make the university room welcoming as an art space.

There were lots of visitors, for the artist talk on the Saturday and throughout the weekend.

I especially enjoyed meeting Robin, who has just turned 4, and who wanted to make her own picture in response to one of mine.

There was lots of deep looking, encouraged by providing guidelines and by making the space as comfortable as possible. Cushions helped.

I really hate 'museum legs' and want my visitors to feel at home with the art...

And there were sales and positive comments. All in all, a lovely experience.

Then I needed a break...