Creativity

When my creativity is low (as it is at the moment) I realise I am trying to run my art separate from my life and it just doesn't work. I've been in the zone sometimes when life and art flow with no boundaries and it is exhilarating and very productive. Lynton Lamb has a great analogy below..



“For serious artists, painting is a permanent attitude of mind. It is a scheme into which the general run of experience fits. However difficult it may be to reconcile work and life there remains a sense in which, as Saint Paul said, “all things work together.”If painting is a relaxation quite separate from his ordinary living, it will not be strengthened by daily experience, it will be weakened by its contrary direction.It will become something outside itself, to be maintained by visits: like a distant allotment garden into which he occasionally inserts an artificial flower.Preparation for Painting, Lynton Lamb, 1954

Procreation

Man it's a wonder those gannets procreate at all! They out front at the moment in the sun of a beautiful morning diving headlong into the sea from a great height. It must be headache material when they go home from work. Sorry mum.

In case I fail

In case I fail. Fail to scale the granite cliffs of success where I think I will find peace of mind, where all my accomplishments end. Other people expect it of me - why? - Why do they think my mind is different when all it craves is a cemetry full of flowers - dahlias, daisies and dead dandelions that float off to a Shang-ri-la carrying all that matters as lightly as an angels fingertips until I can lie in peace and dissolve in the hell that is solitude. The people, those uncountable multitudes that we belong, and use, and are used, set barriers here, false trails, booby traps, blind alleys, and yet are only imagination turned back on itself and eating it's tail until the head is regurgitated and purged like a new skin snake. Each an individual themselves misguided like a half feathered arrow never reaching the target set so high but pretending all the same they wanted to quiver in the mud and slime of times vomited past.
To be raw young and twenty with a heart full of change and pockets empty, to stand and believe you are counted and will be numbered along with those that know it only takes a single breath to live or die, be right or wrong, sane or insane. And yet the insanity of age tempers and distorts until with platitudes and condescending smiles we look at youth and say - dreams? - you cannot eat dreams - ideals? - you'll see the snakepit is really a bed of nails and when you lie upon it the silver bubble will burst and the muck and slush will petrify the green countyside hopes of any village idiot. It is with so-called progress we nullify the hopes of the young, spreading thick marmite on fresh new bread so the yardstick which used to be freedom, happiness and above all change can only be measured with success, money and a new car, never mind the bile like taste making the gut turn over, we close our eyes and wash it down with great drafts of ale-brown regret.