"Work is love made visible"

"Always you have been told that work is a curse and labour a misfortune. But I say to you that when you work you fulfill a part of earth's furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born. An in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life, and to love life through labour is to be intimate with life's inmost secret... Work is love made visible." Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

Well that's a thought!

I haven't written a blog post in a long time, and I feel all sorts of things I want to share on here, many I feel too embarassed to.

I have been going through many changes in the past few months, a beautiful new home and a garden studio freshly completed! It's taken a while to set-up, and on a more personal note I had a miscarriage a few weeks ago, and so it's taking a while for things to get back to "normal" so to speak...

I am at a sort of crossroads with my work you could say, I can feel that something new wants to emerge, and I don't know "how to" birth it. Or rather I think I keep on being in the way. What's in the way is much much much fear, fear of letting go of "older" ways of working, older ways of making marks, fear that the new stuff won't be as good as the old one, fear that no one will like it or buy it. Fear that anyways I'm not good enough, never have been never will be. Seeing so much stuff on Instagram and feeling overwhelmed at the amount of art there is in the world, I feel swallowed by it all, confused, wanting to go into so many directions, scared that all of what I'm seeing in seeping through me and what I make is just a mish-mash of other people's stuff. I'll never be original, will never amount to anything, will never be good enough.

I keep on finding artists on Instagram who have 100k + followers... What? How? How do I... STOP!! That's not what art and life are about, I don't think.

The other day, I expressed to my husband that I really really want to make some sculptures, I haven't done so in a very long time and it's icthing me. He said "don't make sculptures, no one buys sculptures. You can't sell those at The other Art Fair". It's so easy to fall into this, so so easy. But truth be told, right now I feel I have nothing to loose. So I got some plaster and I am gonna make some sculptures, without feeling that they have to be something to be sold, or be liked. And let them nourish me, and the rest of my works.

And to end this post, a shout out to my friend Laetitia Sfez who's lauching her new brand "The Sundown Society", she interviewed me in her blog a while ago.

From the old... The new is born

A while ago, a thought came to me that I would like to tidy-up my drawers where I stock my papers and artworks, a big chest my husband made for me... It's been a mess from day one and I can never find what I am looking for in there. But I was being so resistant, tidying-up was gonna take precious time on my work and those new pieces I want to make. But somehow, in the midst of making work, I found myself tidying those drawers without even realising. And it was a lightbulb moment: I found so many treasures in there, old works I had completely discarded, works I had started but not finished, bits and bobs, scraps etc... If there is one thing I love, is to completely forget about an artwork in progress, put it away because it isn't "good enough" and find it again months or years later, and to be able to see it in a new light, see in it a fresh new potential I hadn't seen before.

I started to cut-up, to throw paint around, glue pieces of paper together to change the scale of a work, I used a new exciting sponge tool I made to createmarks, used a big brush (as I want to make bigger works), not caring so much about the preciousness of it all. Lately, I have been very precious about paper, not wasting it, making sure it stays clean, and I have been working smaller and smaller scale wise. Nothing wrong with that but slowly it felt my world was getting much smaller. In the past two days, I have told myself "even if I think it's rubbish, I can cut-up a part of it to use it in something else, maybe in a year's time".

And it's been so liberating, I hadn't felt this excited about making work in a long time. I have dreamed about them, and have been sad to go home in the evenings and leave them all alone in the studio... Being less precious, putting the pressures of creating art "good enough to be sold straight away" to the side has been a gift, and it needs to carry on, as that's how works develop, get refined and keep being exciting, relevant. You can get very stuck and routine-like even when your job is to be an artist. And my sketchbook has been a very precious source of inspiration indeed. I have been drawing in it lots, it's been like a visual diary for me.