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.
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| 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.
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| I posted this here last year at Visual Eclectica found at
come and see inside my bones - Hotel La Montaña Mágica. Huilo-Huilo, Chile
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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!
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| this one I found here. |
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.
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| These images are locked in at this size... not sure why...but I did take them off another site rather than from the computer! |
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.
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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.
