Creative Block Busting

This week’s Life Book lesson was taken by Andrea Gomoll.  The thrust of the lesson was overcoming creative blocks and the crippling fear of the blank page by being playful with liquid media, collaged images, stamped text and images and stencils.  I interpreted the lesson as meaning making harmonious messes, letting happy accidents occur and just going with the flow of whatever emerged in the page without having to worry about how what is emerging on the page conforms to some preconceived notion or visualisation of an objective.

I love making splattery, liquidy messes with my art.  I use dribbling and spattering a lot.  I decided to challenge myself, however, by using matt medium pushed through a stencil to create some sort of resist on the page, something I have not experimented with before.  Ultimately it did not work well as a resist – I may not have let the medium set adequately – but the dots add an interesting texture and pattern to the page so that was one such happy accident.  Yet again I was drawn to blues, turquoises and teals so I added these pigments to a sheet of watercolour paper I had sprayed with water so that I could have very little control over placement of the watercolour paint.  I liked the way it began to blend with adjacent colours and fern out into the edges of the paper.  Once that was all dry, I added a little bit of spatter and added the text, a mixture of stamped letters – and a stamped heart – and paint brush writing in India ink.

I am pretty pleased with how it turned out and I found I actually thoroughly enjoyed the almost complete lack of control.  That’s therapy for a control freak right there!