uncertainty – The Consulting Artist

Rust Never Sleeps: A Renaissance

The challenges and joys of restarting

After a pause which began in February 2020, Art In The Sun restarted last night. There have been plenty of times in that pause where I thought the art would never come back – and right now, I ~~must~~ want to pay thanks to the good people at The Sun for their gentle, repeated encouragement. Thank you.

The day started with a rush of nerves, and doubt. What if I have forgotten how to do this (at no point did I stop to ponder what ‘this’ might actually be). I pottered around at home – putting off going to the studio to prepare.

I eventually headed to the studio to get ready – opting to go a little out of my way to queue for petrol – whoever thought that would be preferable to doing the work? At the studio I packed the kit, unpacked the kit, faffed about, repacked the kit, worked on a piece of art, wandered in the woods, unpacked the kit, repacked it, went home, realised I’d forgotten stuff, went back, repacked, and came home.

Early evening arrives, Carole is home from work and I confessed my nerves to her. Calmly – Carole spoke with me about those first day back at school feelings she experiences at the start of each and every term. They happen, you do the work, they pass. I headed off to work – a little reassured but honestly -still not 100% convinced.

Setting things up before people arrived – I still feel a bit scratchy, uncertain about what to do. Then guests start to appear – familiar faces and new ones. Conversation beings to flow, and from that, come pencil marks, ink, paint, rollers, mess, laughter – and we’re there. Doing the work.

Some of the results were expected, some not so. Some we liked, others, not so much. We had a good time, and in so doing, I remembered that curiosity and experimentation sit right at at the heart of Art In The Sun. Someone who hadn’t joined us previously said they did so because of the offer to try new and different things. How lovely. We parted in good spirits – looking forward to next time. Thank you to everyone who joined in.

I guess that if you are super confident, these feelings I’ve described won’t mean much to you – but I now realise they are simply (and importantly) part of the process. We took a long break and now we’re back. Doing the work enables the confidence to return. Rust never sleeps.

Letting Go

A reminder of why I do what I do

I made this sketch on the morning of Saturday 9th February 2019. The wind was blowing outside and I was listening to this engrossing TEDxTalk. The soundtrack of weather and the talk combined into this version of When The Wind Blows – painted onto a piece of lavender coloured mount board. I really enjoyed making the art and I hid it in the history section of Wallington Library later that day.

It’s now Sunday morning – and the wind has died down, but my enjoyment of the art work has not. One of the best things about the free art project, is the ongoing learning I experience about how to let go. I could have easily kept or sold this piece, I love it, but I didn’t make it for me, I made it to hide. I placed it in the local library, never to be seen by me again.

Learning to let go is one of the main reasons I started this project back in 2016. I’m still learning, and at times, it still hurts. And that’s OK. Equally I am hugely appreciative of the local community, the people who engage with the project, play the game, find the art. Without them….who knows, maybe I wouldn’t be letting go any more?

A friend has just sent me a link to this rather lovely poem titled ‘In Blackwater Woods‘, by Mary Oliver. It seems to resonate well with this art and the blog post too. Thanks Nigel.

Things Used To Be So Much Better…

I’ve just listened to an interview on the radio with Paul Lambert, a former Scottish international football player and manager. The Scotland team are on a particularly poor run of form just now, having lost six of the eight games they’ve played so far this year, and the mood of the interviewer was very downbeat.

The interviewer positioned things as ‘not good’, ‘terrible’. Lambert suggested a big part of the problem is expectation levels. ‘People go by what happened in the past, we’re not there anymore. We need to accept what we have now and support the team’. I think Lambert’s right, yet to me, this inability to shake the past feels like our need for certainty, holding us back.

Things used to be so much better then…therefore they should be just as good (if not better) now?

While there clearly are things we can learn from what’s gone before – it feels pretty pointless to me to base our performance expectations on previous versions of ourselves and others. By doing this we risk setting ourselves up for additional stress and a reluctance to deal with failure. I come across this harking back to bygone days when working with teams and organisations, and I wonder, how can we acknowledge the past, remember the good stuff, and break free from the unrealistic expectations these associations often cause?

Maybe we need some sort of ceremony, a way of putting the past to rest? Not so much a funeral, but a celebration, a recognition, and a moving on.

Our Working With Uncertainty workshop takes place tomorrow afternoon and I’m curious, tempted to ask people if they want to play with this quandary of respecting the past without hanging on to it, as part of our work.

More to follow…maybe?