Resulting in a new resolution: to be more selfish and spend more on myself

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The one the Creative Spaces project filmed at the Tate and my “studio” (ahem) back in December. I actually sound like a Proper Artist. Feeling pretty good about myself now

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1. Category cloud needing to be limited to 10 categories (sorted thanks to this widget)
2. Older posts/New posts nav at the bottom of each list page
3. Set title to not be “Untitled Document”
4. Made the date show up on multiple posts on the one day

Of course there are other things I want to go through and finesse, but this should be enough to show it to the world now at least. Yay! Only taken about 5 months!

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It’s been a while since I’ve talked to her and just the chatting over IM made me realise how much in my life seems to be spiralling totally out of control at the moment. Makes me wonder whether perhaps the blocks I’m experiencing aren’t a defence mechanism to keep control of something, even if it’s something that I kind of do want to be a bit out of control. Will think some more about that. Maybe if I can make myself clear the tax and overdue work out of the way, then things will feel a bit more manageable. It’s a good place to start anyway

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I know it looks like I’ve been slacking off big-time, but the truth is I’ve been being manically creative left, right and centre – drawing, walking, listening to music (my new composer/group for the month is Radiohead) and reading books. Not to mention accidentally getting myself employed again, which has been a big contributor to the silence.

So, a bit of a summary:

• Finished reading Danny Gregory’s ‘The Creative License’
• Read a surprisingly fascinating and inspiring book on creating sketchbooks for textile artists
• Have started reading a book on assorted watercolour techniques for painting landscapes (but will be useful elsewhere too, of course)
• Done a bunch of drawing, including a capsicum, a sketch of the Thames at Hammersmith and a pair of mackeral fillets, the last two of which I also coloured with my watercolour paints; the first with my coloured pencils with which I am still totally in love.
• Went for a couple of walks, covering the next section of the super-long walk across London I am gradually working my way through.

See? Not slack at all… really!

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Well, mostly “bought Moleskines” – a superabundance of ‘skines – buff cahiers for my morning pages, one of the new softcover blank small ones for a 2008 diary (cos I left it too late) and a set of the tiny new green volants which have all tear-out pages. I’m such a geek. But I bought a real book too: Danny Gregory’s The Creative Licence which I dipped into on the train and it looks good. Looking forward to reading more of it.

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I’m rereading (and partially redoing – just exercises here and there, not the whole book) The Artist’s Way again. This week’s chapter was “Recovering a Sense of Power” which is the chapter on anger and also synchronicity. I find it interesting how the right chapter often turns up at the right time – it’s been a week full of synchronicity!

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Some scary stuff cropping up since the last time I did them. It’s just really all about the fear. I identified four key fears out of about 5 pages of scribble – 1. of letting people down, 2. of not producing enough, 3. of my artistic isolation, 4. that my ideas aren’t good enough for people to take me seriously or might be old-fashioned or derivative. Sheesh! They’re some pretty heavy-duty worries, unlike last time when it all felt a bit trivial. So I’ve made a new set of affirmations which I’m working on putting into my composition journal so I’ll always have them with me, and am planning to do some solid work with them over the next few months. It may all sound like complete rubbish but it’s amazing what these things can do when you give them a chance…

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I’ve been meaning to join this Yahoo! group for a while because I like the philosophy and wanted to get the weekly challenges which seem to be updated only irregularly on flickr – now that I’m on I discover it’s a whole huge supportive community. Might need to switch to digest mode to save being drowned in floods of friendly artistic emails!

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… to get back into the swing of One Creative Thing and really focus on getting some creative stuff done

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