things are shaping up...

Ive had a busy week or so... not in the studio unfortunately... but very productive none-the-less. Things are being organised for various projects ....including tutoring at QUT, a Brisbane Uni, which starts this coming week. I'm doing some tutoring in the Architecture faculty in 'Visualisation' - a first year subject. A meeting the other day allowed me to meet others on the team. This will I'm sure be a good source of stimulation ...I'm looking forward to working with colleagues, accessing new ideas and experiences, and picking up inspiration along the way. I'm all for the potential of cross-pollination that comes with stepping into fresh scenarios.... getting to see up close how architectural thinking and visualising is shaped and directed.

My new Pinterest site I mentioned in the last post I've been finding quite engaging,,, interesting links and exchanges to be had. I noticed via Twitter last week Pinterest is forging ahead with huge global growth in the last month for some reason. It's being progressively taken up by all kinds of organisations... Museums, businesses as well as the Not-for-profit sector ... then there's the millions of individuals choosing to pin a visual map of their preoccupations.

Here are images from the Pinterest page on artists with their work:

artists with their work

Another page is of studios Ive pinned.

Dietlind Wolf

I found this image of a large studio space on Pinterest ... click on the name under the photo and it will take you to the blog of the artist and you'll see some great images of the studio and work there.

When I see space this large (or bigger!) and observe the possibilities for working straight onto walls, tacking things ups, spreading out I have to admit to some longing for larger space than is mine at the moment.

Darrell Roberts’ studio

This image of Darrell Robert's desk reminds me of mine ... a large table that fills with things the longer I work.. inks and paints everywhere... and books. Still ... I quite like the chaos of everything at ones fingertips!

This note from Pinterest is quite apt....

Image via here.

Instead of wishing for space and such things the point is of course to work with focus and imagination to bring out the best situation possible. 

Matisse

Matisse has always been a bit of a hero of mine... he certainly found a way to overcome harsh  personal limitations at this point of his life... and proceeded to make some of his best work.

Well... Ive had lot of inspiration in the last week... so best get some rest and be ready for what's in store this week!

I have more photos to load here... later!

ciao,

Sophie

ps thanks to those who pop by here... I never would've thought anyone would find my posts here so it's been lovely to find your comments!

Pinning things down... in the studio and online!

The trip to Sydney I recently took provided much stimulation and time to observe and ponder... always I find this adds to my studio musings and refreshes the process in small ways at the very least. I posted on both the visual eclectica blog here, here + here then over at the homage blog with some material I gathered on the trip.

I seem to have accumulated a lot of plans for 2012 so now I'm ready to pare back the ideas and give full energy to some that are speaking louder than others in terms of relevance or interest.

A place I always loved to go for inspiration  that I visited again when down south.

Ive been thinking through the book I will be working on quite intensely soon ... using my Facebook: Homage to the seed page to archive related links that I wish to return to whenever I need to find something I thought might be good thematic material for the book. The rest of the time I have been thinking through various 'must dos' that are high on the agenda and catching up with friends and a few networks ... enjoying good conversation which never fails to feed back into all the other thinking one does!

Ive not been visiting all the lovely bloggers as much as I'd like just lately due to being away + busy on the planning activities. Its been excellent to make time to pick up and continue working on the concertina books in the last few days since coming home... though there are no photos yet.

For quite a while Ive noticed people have been visiting my blogs from Pinterest,,, one image in particular got a massive amount of traffic. Interestingly I had reblogged it from Tumblr in the first place....then a lovely blogger found it and pinned it on Pinterest.

 I posted this here last year at Visual Eclectica found at

 come and see inside my bones - Hotel La Montaña Mágica. Huilo-Huilo, Chile

After visiting Pinterest now and then it seemed joining in with this process would be helpful for two reasons... I could connect with pinners who have visited me and also pull together the images of my work that have been floating around the Pinterest universe... very occasionally with inadequate info attached to the image.

One has to choose names for one's pin boards...  over time they might shift and change... its another dimension of gathering images and ideas from across a global community... easy to see what's fascinating about it!

this one I found here.

Ive come across a few familiar faces over here... inspiring bloggers whom I already engage with. So there is the familiar and the new in a vast web of connections.

Here's one of my boards that contains images of my artwork I found already circulating on Pinterest:

sophie munns artworks

bioluxuriance

Well,  pop over if you are curious and haven't visited Pinterest before.

The question I am sometimes asked is "Does it pay to be involved in these various layers of connection?"

Well ... it seems by necessity to go in waves... there are times when a painting deadline might be closing in... or presentations or other tasks require huge energy. Last year it was the preparations and fund raising engagements for the UK research trip and residency that consumed huge amounts of time, energy and focus. Of course online networks can't be sustained at the same rate all the time.

However ...what I am noticing from the connections I've gradually built over the past 3 years is that my capacity has not simply grown in terms of getting around more sites and  knowing whats what... its the ability to think laterally and multi-dimensionally that has had the most incredible boost from the scaffolding each site uniquely offers. Each place I've pent time enables different ideas, possibilities, even strengths to emerge... I think  my thinking is far more cohesive than it was pre-blogging, my vision and direction far more developed and workshopped and fed by feedback and learning from so many others who I have come to respect and admire. And what I paint is also more considered. 

4 years ago I bought a Mac and found I was going ahead finally after being a very late starter with computers. The rewards of blogging prompted progress because it was enjoyable learning in an area I'd lacked interest. Once and avid keeper of journals... visual and written... I began to redirect my thinking into online formats. This was a revelation... an essentially private realm that lived in those journals going back 30 years had the opportunity to interact and be seen and then of course to develop further and grow deeper roots in places I'd not seen ways to do so previously.

These images are locked in at this size... not sure why...but
I did take them off another site rather than from the computer!

These two works were part of the exhibition held in Noosa in April 2010 when doing the year long residency at the Botanic Gardens. They were sold and I'd almost forgotten about them till I put them on Tumblr and people started to reblog these ones and show interest.

That's exactly the kind of response that makes you go back and look again at the work ... invaluable feedback in a very simple way. Sometimes one doesn't appreciate when something is working or not... we can easily assume things. Online response can at times indicate you've not noticed something...
so this last few years has been a more expansive time for my artwork consequently than before when I actually spent a lot more time painting... with little distraction... but far less conversation and feedback.

These two paintings offered me a reminder of how I was building up layers at that point... its so easy to forget. There was a lot of texture and a luminous quality to the layers despite the colour which could  have simply been drab.

I will close now...but before I do link you to something interesting that Pinterest does I really like! Each time someone pins an item that I have added to any one of my blogs or tumblr or website it categorises the work into the site's label.

So I can view this page on Pinterest and see all the pins that have ever come via my tumblr seed capsules... no matter who has pinned what! This means that I am getting a visual response I can trawl through to what others like from that site... it keeps enabling me to see what I am seeing.

I find that immensely interesting and useful.

Time to go,
Have a good week won't you!
Sophie

ps. I've added these photos taken by a lovely person who came to my Art Weekend last September and purchased these works on paper that she's since had framed.

workshopping on holidays

I wrote a post at the visual eclectica blog recently about my trip south to Newcastle and Sydney... I found time to read, muse, take photos, visit art galleries and even have meetings re possible work projects... but the one thing there was little time for was creating on paper whilst was on the move.

All except for the first whole day of my trip, a cool wet day when I was comfortably ensconced in domestic life with lovely friends beside the coast in Newcastle. We decided to have a workshop with all the art materials and paper we could find that morning and started by taking a walk to the nearby community garden for materials to draw.

Various seed pods and natural items were gathered on our walk and then provided the stimulus for our work. I love the banks pods particularly but we found an interesting use for the casuarina seedpods that made us think differently about them.

banksia drawings - experimenting with not looking at paper or using left hand.

drawing with the twig dipped in ink was very appealing for the children.

It was good to see the various approaches to working each person took.

I didn't take photos of my own work from this session but I did put down
quite a few ideas and pages of layered colour for later drawing surfaces.

I look forward to getting going in the studio again... I brought home some new ink and more paints, some canvas and two small concertina books... much to do in coming weeks... theres all kinds of tasks and things to tackle. However the time away was excellent for refreshing my plans and rethinking things.

Late night ponderings II

Curious things happen in the middle of the night sometimes... the last post I just finished writing didn't  register as published... so lets see whats happening with this one!

Late night ponderings

Visit the Visual Eclectica blog and you can read the post Ive just added where I mentioned the slideshow presentation I gave last night in Brisbane to a wonderful community group which I'd like to write up about at my Homage blog as they're involved in critical local conservation work.

There were images also of home interior painting I did over the holidays... and mention of the fact I'm setting off on a trip tomorrow that will keep me away almost two weeks.

If you noticed the new header its part of the series Ive just added to flickr which you can view at the moment by clicking on the image at the top of the right sidebar or, more permanently, find here.

Some of those images also at flickr, I'll add here.

Well ... this is another way for you to view them.... click on one and it should open.

You'd be right in thinking I was completely absorbed in this process... begun at the Millennium Seedbank on residency back in October last. The concertina book I had dragged around for ages I took to the UK and decided to get out one day when taking break from concentrated, representational drawing of seeds and pods. This format got me playing around, not needing to have a fixed idea.

Over the next few months I picked it up here and there, painted over some of it, added and subtracted some more until the enthusiasm for the possibilities really lit up and transported me to try another book and another. I'd bought a wonderful long narrow concertina book in Paris, two Moleskin concertina books on special in London, and then in Seoul, Korea found another compact one intended for calligraphy.... so with five concertina books to work on and a few smallish journals thrown in, Ive been cultivating fresh ideas as I continued... observing what was working and what perhaps wasn't.

This concentration on paper, pages, in journals and such, is a way of working that I particularly relish at the start of each year. Some of my most intense journal work over years has come about when starting the new year ... it seems to be when I sow seeds or happen on something through informal but dogged process work which later proves to be rich fodder for more considered exploration.

Last year I posted images at this blog from a concertina book I produced in 2000... a time when my art practice was suddenly disrupted late one night, midyear, in a house fire that left me homeless and needing to relocate. 6 weeks later I was settling into a new life in another state and it was quite some time before I was able to pick up where i'd left off. Last year I poured over this concertina book from 2000, considering the ways it might offer an interesting point of departure for current visual explorations.

The night I was returning to Australia via Seoul last November after the 7 week stint in the UK, I started writing in a small journal with an ink pen. Overtired but not able to sleep I rambled through pages in a small journal in ink... writing up aspects of the trip. Recently I took another look at it and decided the text  not to be worth saving... and that I would work directly onto those pages, leaving text somewhat visible, which immediately brought back the strongest of feelings...  this extraordinary trip coming to an end... my anticipation of being home and desire to have my own space again, and of all the various experiences from my time away... how poignant  and unrepeatable much of it was.

The particular way I photographed these pages is not random...books have this way of inviting you between the pages to discover a world ...and this text intrigues me, as I try to remember what I was writing. Somehow the idea of books is amplified... the pages of an E-book will never work like this... I'm reminded the immediacy of the actual opened book which you can touch and peer into is something special.

I'm fascinated how this blog, commenced almost 3 years ago, so tentative for ages, now serves a most useful purpose as a space to muse on things that affect and shape my art practice. Only a few months back I switched on comments for the first time... before that it was little visited site, by myself or others.

That quite well known text from Ecclesiastes ... 'to everything there is a season' suddenly comes to mind when thinking about this blog. Sometimes one's art practice tips one way and then it shifts and turns to pursue another line of thought... to explore another aspect of art-making. The focus can shift from materials and processes to composition and direction, to philosophical questions and subsequent development of visual ideas.

Sometimes one rattles around all those rooms at once more or less ... and at other times something emerges as the dominant idea for a time and everything else is put into the service of that one thing.

2011 was concentrated on thinking and reflecting, taking my project, which had slowly formed in 2009, further on the thinking plane. The focus on the residency and research in the UK drove that as I was stepping more seriously into the realm of science in pursuing this UK experience. In 2010 during my year-long residency  at the Botanic Gardens in Brisbane I'd exhibited 3 times and during each phase leading up to a show had produced some new ideas, some significant which needed brooding on amidst other less interesting. Its now, in 2012, that I am feeling really motivated to pick up and work more with visual ideas from 2010. Its as if they've had enough time to be what they are...  to make their presence felt or not.

I very much like this element of processing things over time ... the way something can slowly show itself to be lightweight or alternatively of certain resonance or worth. Years ago I was naturally less concerned to discriminate in quite this way as I searched for a visual language of resonance, for that which I might begin to define as approaching something authentic.

And so 2012 has afforded me this more expansive sense of the visual once more...for the moment anyway... as if all the politics and science of seeds has settled somewhere in my psyche for the moment, its noise not dominating the call of the muses... the poetic fro now has space to live and the alchemy of time and stimulus, limitation and necessity, freedom and openness makes its curious way through this inner landscape of ideas and images.

And so, to bed!