The What Goes Around Blog

The Art and Soul of Work

I recently wrote about the fear of never feeling quite good enough, and of taking the plunge and pushing through that feeling. Yesterday I got an email telling me the video of my recent Workstock pecha kucha performance (which was what spurred me on to write that earlier post) is now ready. I thought I’d share it with you.

Delivering a pecha kucha is hard work, and despite going over this one many times beforehand, the live product is rough – and I think on this occasion the roughness, the rawness, adds something to the message. I hope you agree.

In case it helps – here are some of the notes I pulled together when ideas for the talk were forming:

Soul:

It’s about taking time to get to know one another better. Good work is not about people or work, it’s people and work. They’re inextricably linked. It’s as easy, and difficult as that.

Art:

We are all artists

We stop being artistic because we’re judged

How do we get over this feeling? Draw for the bin – not for the Royal Academy. Relax – sketch yourself into existence.

Creativity is not binary – adjust the dials to suit the prevailing culture – play with it, tease it out – don’t try to force it.

Mixed feelings – there’s hardly ever a right or wrong answer, it’s usually right and wrong – discussing uncertainty and accepting it’s part of the mix is really important.

Good work is iterative – it’s rarely right first time. Show and share your iterations with people – get feedback, share your way to the finished product.

Be adaptable – like Henri Matisse was with his cutouts. What happens when we play with the running order – add things – remove things. What is on the critical path and what isn’t?

Most work is coercive, it is done to you. The best work is coactive and cocreative, it is done with, for and by you. It is totally human to want, need and expect that our views be taken into consideration and yet we defy these wants, needs and expectations at almost every step in our working lives. Never do anything about me, without me. We need to listen more with the intent to understand, not the intent to reply.

Huge thanks to Neil Usher for coordinating Workstock and for giving me and others space to play. And thanks to Maggie, Nigel and everyone at Workplace Trends for letting us all loose at their event!

In Response to Flow

A group of us were discussing constraint as a driver for creativity at Art for Work’s Sake last week. An offer was made for people to write a haiku based on flow (one of the words suggested earlier in the evening for the desired mood of the session), and Alex Hyslop came up with this lovely poem:

Streams can gurgle slow
Rivers can thunder faster
Lakes just sit and wait

Next we drew and painted some responses to the haiku, and the evening moved on. After the session had finished, a few of us were clearing up at the end and someone handed me this sketch:

I really like this picture, I think it is a mix of paint, pen, pencil and charcoal and it’s a great partner with the haiku. A lot of my work is about bringing different people together to see what we might learn from each other and I really like how two people who hadn’t met prior to the workshop came up with these two lovely pieces of work. I put a photo of the sketch on Facebook and found out the the artist is Robert Ordever. So – here it is – the first ever piece of guest artwork on the artsensorium. Thank you Robert for agreeing to let me share this here.

Acrylic Printing

November 2014.

I facilitated an Art for Work’s Sake session recently which produced some interesting and unexpected results, including the first print ever made in one of these workshops.

Inspired by these printed works I thought I’d give the technique a try today. At first I had it in mind to try printing a skyline in acrylic onto a water colour wash. I had a few attempts, using way too much paint at first:

A couple more attempts followed – this time with less paint, producing a very different effect. The print either barely copied or splurged.

Something I observed from this session is the effect that a heavy load of acrylic paint makes when you pull the original away from the print surface. I’ll see how I can use this in future.

I found this afternoon frustrating so I scribbled some angry wax pastel and crayon onto cartridge paper before packing up for the afternoon.

I thought I felt in the mood for some art today – maybe not?

Update: Jan 2016. I reflected on writing this post and playing with using acrylic paint to make these prints – and I’ve come to really like the work. I ended up cutting out sections of the purple and white printed paper and made four small pieces of art from it. Together they are ‘The Art and Soul of Better Work’. I kept one – and I gave the other three away.

Update: Jun 2016. Several people have remarked on the skyline painting/print, saying how much they like it. I’m in the process of producing a limited edition print of the design.