A brief reconnecting

Last weekend I made a short trip back to the UK. I needed to re-connect. I enjoyed wonderful conversations with friends and family, and it was a treat to go back to the Royal Opera House to experience the incredible dancing and beautiful music of the ballet 'Woolf Works'.

Several years back, I spent time drawing and painting ballet dancers - those stretched muscles and finely-honed bodies are demanding to draw, and the costumes are fascinating objects in their own right.

The most fun and most difficult was drawing live, as the dancers moved to music.

Although difficult to do, these drawings capture something of the truth of dance and its energy. The energy of dance, and of excited talk about art and poetry, is an essential aspect of life that Ineed to connect with on a regular basis.

The end of the exhibition

We organised a Finissage event on the final weekend of my exhibition at Berlin's Under the Mango Tree gallery..

A colleague of mine from Cinepoetics, Eileen Rositzka, played and sang her 'soul songs', and I talked about the different sets of work, how they originated, and what can be seen in the paintings.

Paintings were looked at, which always pleases this artist's heart. And paintings were sold, which pleases the accountant.

Soul song on three notesacrylic on paper, Lynne Cameron, 2016. SOLD

Inspired by Roses

Once I could smell roses. Now, only sometimes. I love the way they bloom in tumbles.

Oxford Botanic Garden

And how they appear in my paintings

Today, in need of heroes, I remembered two Roses: Rose Wylie and Rose Hilton. Both over 80, both still painting and seeing the world afresh, both finding new success. Click on their names to see inspiring videos of them at work.

Thank you, John Berger

I love his writing and admire his life. He was a hero of mine and a role model in living passionately and with integrity, in its senses of both wholeness and honesty. His work was always compassionate, political, and poetic, informed by his artist's eye.

In 2012, I wrote him this letter. I don't know if it ever reached him but I am glad that I tried.

--------------------------------

Dear John Berger

Over the last 20 years I have been reading your books, following your adventures, thinking about the choices you have made in living your life. I am writing to thank you from my heart for the huge inspiration you have offered by being the person you are.

I am in the process of making a big shift to the ‘poetic life’ I have longed for – leaving the countryside to move into central London, finding a studio, committing to painting towards an exhibition. I came late to art, practising alongside an academic job until the need for painting and a poetic life became non-negotiable. Asked who my role model or ideal mentor might be, it was your name that sprang straight to my lips.

So, thank you!

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Here's a favourite extract of mine from the book and our faces, my heart, brief as photos, John Berger 1984.

(see also the blog post on Feb 16th 2016).

and re-braiding

The braiding, woven into a sheet of cardboard, sat in the lounge for a couple of weeks. We grew less fond of it. Some people disliked it intensely. It emerged that some of the artists had not been happy with the last step of our previous work, which had involved writing TOUCH in different colours on the card. This was a reversal of the PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH we see in galleries. It became more uncomfortably ambiguous as time went by.

first version

The work came back to the studio today. We voiced our concerns and looked intensively at what we had. Everyone offered suggestions to change it. We tried to find a guiding concept, and did not. We experimented with the colours and textures, and the composition. Writing was partially erased; the board was cut smaller, changing the position of the braid; the board was painted white and the paint emphasised the corrugated texture of the board.

We ended with a coherent artwork in which textures and colours echoed around, and created movement. Each decision and adjustment was deliberately and carefully made. The work refersto key ideas in contemporary art of serial repetition and the grid, and speaks to our starting points of braiding, remindings, and connections. I feel proud of the Studio Interlude group's development this year.

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Collaborative braiding

In our latest Studio Interlude, we braided my collection of ribbons and strings. Like me, the women had learnt to braid when around 8 or 9 years old (thank you, Brownies). Some of the men had to be shown how to do it and quickly worked out how to keep the tension to make an even braid. 

Then we made a collaborative braid, by braiding the braids and extending with new ribbons. Somehow the idea came up to thread the collaborative braid through a piece of cardboard. 

It looked quietly beautiful.  

In England, we called it 'plaiting'. In Scotland, it was 'pleating'.  

There was an Opening and a Conversation

My exhibition 'Yearning to be Elsewhere' opened at Under the Mango Tree gallery in Schöneberg, Berlin on 18 November.

And on the Saturday afternoon, we held an artist talk event. My colleague and friend ProfCornelia Müller asked the questions. I talked.

The exhibition continues until 18 January 2017.

A sneak peek

We've been very busy putting the exhibition together. Works on canvas have been varnished and framed - and look gorgeous under the gallery lights. Yesterday was spent hanging - lots of calculating, measuring and hammering.

Today I've been preparing my short talk for the Vernissage (that's the German - French word for Private View) which is tomorrow from 18:30 to 21:00. Do come along if you are in Berlin!

Here's a sneak preview of work in progress to tempt you - it will be a veritable colour bath in this grey weather!

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.