Making the most of space

In art and life

The most dreaded question someone can ask me is What do you do? A question that can feel completely natural to someone else can strike fear into me. I often answer that I’m an illustrator because artist can sound a bit surprising and obscure, like I’ve just said Space cowboy. I don’t know how to answer the series of supplementary questions like “Oh! what kind of art?'“ I suddenly feel completely exposed, like I’m standing naked in front of them and everyone is looking and pointing.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what I do. I read a post the other day on having a year of saying no and after my initial eye-roll, I realised it’s not at all unlike my year of sitting still. What really struck a chord with me is that by saying no to things, you suddenly have lots of space to say yes to things you never had time for before. It’s made me wonder if there’s something I could add.

I imagine I’ll always be creating every day, fending off cats and ladybirds (where are they coming from?), but I’ve got the time to wonder Is there more? And even Should I go back to school? What would I study?

If I showed you my list of things I’m interested in studying, it would look a bit like this…

Absolutely no cohesion whatsoever. It's my age I'm told. 

So I’ll sit still on that for a bit too and maybe just enjoy the empty space.

What I have had time for recently is some new collage work, and what I've found is that their progression really resonates with how I've been feeling lately. 

They started as a simple tessellation idea, confined within a square frame in a very limited colour palette. I enjoyed shifting the shapes around like one of those sliding tile puzzles that used to drive me crazy as a child. But after a while they began to feel too boxed in. I always like a lot of white space around my collages so I started loosening them, giving them space to breathe, adding different shapes with curved edges instead of just rigid lines, slowly a bit more colour and texture. 

I added tissue papers, which I often use in my paper collage. I love the translucency and delicacy of it, the shadows it casts, and I started to see what they might become.

Here’s a kind of how it started > how it’s going scenario.

So I’ve decided for now not to fill every spare moment I have and just play, adding a little colour and texture here and there. Time and space to play is such a gift.

Thanks for reading :-)

p.s. I wish I hadn’t drawn those ladybirds, they are giving me the heebie-jeebies.