Inspiration: Love

I had to study Latin at school and one of the few things I remember (apart from that I really like the design of their villas) was that they have multiple words for love.  It introduced me to the idea that there are different types of love and that it is not understood in a universal way.  After all, love is a luxury in a relationship if you just need to survive but a necessity between parents and children for the next generation to prosper.

When I was younger, I had a very idealistic, romantic view of love.  I think I assumed passion and love went together indefinitely as well.  I have been with my husband for nearly two decades and  that first flush of romance and passion has settled into something warm and deep, comfortable yet fun.  I still love romance though and it's one of my favourite genre of books.  I understand now that those first heady flushes are not sustainable, it's a transient feeling, but I would rather have what I have now than hunt for greener grass, because the hunt would never be finished.

I see us growing old together and remaining happy.  It's hard to envision life without him and tricky to remember what it was like before we met.  I suspect things would have shifted if we had had children, but we never did.  We have always been able to prioritise our relationship so we have not grown apart.  We both have our own hobbies and friends that relate to our interests.

Roses are great symbols of love and the background to my love design was designed using petals...  but not from Roses.  Roses don't blossom in February without help but Camelias do.  In Cornwall, we have an unusual climate for the UK and camelias grow well here.  They actually seem to have very similar symbology to roses and the different colours have similar meaning.

I like to take one of my photos with some nice texture and colour and blow it up, turn it in to a piece of beadwork using software and then pick bits I like and play with them to create abstract designs.  The camelia was largely red but the shadows came out more maroon.  When I came to bead it, the maroon and deep reds did not translate well at all.  I didn't like it.  I played with the colours extensively before settling on rich purples with more red than blue tones and some beads with hints of magenta.

I really adore how it turned out in the end, but its hard to photograph.  Many of the pink tints come from AB finishes and I just have not found how to get these to show well, yet.

But I like the idea of love being red, purple and pink more than I like it being red and darker red.  It feels more balanced, more representative of the wide range of feeling love includes...  well kind of, I don't think it represents some of the gentler forms of love, familial for instance.  It would need more white and yellow.  But its a Valentine's pattern really, so I guess it never needed to cover the whole range!

Inspiration: Inspire

Inspire is the first in a series of words made in collaboration with my friend, the calligrapher Inkywhispers.  I first connected with her many years ago when I began my first blog which was a journal where I wrote about anything and everything, including the things I made.  We have been friends for years now and our conversations often feed creativity, they inspire and we grow ideas between us.  I don't remember who came up with the idea for this collaboration, I don't think it really matters.

It was a problem to begin with, how to recreate the curving angled letters.  I sat with it for sometime, waiting for inspiration to strike.  It did, but not for this project.  A lady in a facebook group I belong to asked for a biohazard pattern.  I went to bed that night thinking about it and the next morning, I woke with a fully formed idea for Biohazard.  From the matte black frame to the translucent green background with neon detail and the letters that used shades of grey to blur edges and trick the eye a little in to seeing curves.  Once I had that idea, I knew I could apply it to this series of projects.

Sometimes creating is a process, applying skills and techniques to produce something, experimenting to see what happens.  You can often see artists work developing as they explore a principle.  Inspiration is that eureka moment, the breakthrough when you realise something new.  It's a great feeling.

Unfortunately, this series of collaboration is not one where inspiration strikes often.  They are hard work, balancing colours and lightening and darkening individual beads in the letters to create the correct visual effect.  The background of Inspire was developed from a photograph I took from a ship of the churning water of the bow wave.  I zoomed in and changed individual colours.  I chose citrus colours for their bright energy and white for the blank page, because you have to keep creating, keeping showing up at the blank page in order to be inspired....

I was inspired when it came to the whites though....  I had an idea to play with opacity.  Beads have a wonderful quality which allows you to play with light.  I used opaque white beads and crystal beads and I needed something inbetween and chose white lined crystal.  I love the effect this gives.  Like glass painted white where the paint has been scrapped off to varying degrees.  It's an effect I am sure I will use again and when I do, it will be less about being inspired and more about using a skill, an understanding I already have.  I think inspiration is like leveling up in a game.

Inspiration hit working on my tartans too.  I didn't want to make tartans using diamonds and I didn't want to only have a tiny part of a large pattern, in the way you would if you work it in a perpendicular fashion or even at 45 degrees.  It hit me that you could work it at an angle so that you got a larger variety of the larger pattern and the shapes would be closer to rectangular, although not perfect.  Each tartan I make uses that initial inspiration but I don't have that big flash of inspiration for each one.

I like that the word inspire also means to inhale, the opposite of expire.  It's a bringing in of breathe.  Air symbolizes the mental body.  Bringing in ideas....  It isn't just about the mind though.  There is an emotion connected to being inspired, an energy.  It feels really good!

Where do these ideas come from?  It doesn't always feel like they come from us.  People believed that the bible was inspired by God.  The Greeks believed that the Muses inspired mortals and there were nine who inspire literature, science and the arts in all their variety.  The word muse has come to mean a person that inspires someone's art and painters were famous for having muses.  Generally male artists had female muses and they were inspired by the beauty of their muse to attempt to recreate the female form.  There is a dark side to this relationship though...

Sometimes the female muses were artists in their own right but their art was never going to be as important in a male dominated world.  Some artists were married to their muses and considered their needs.  Others would have passionate relationships with a muse for a time, before moving on to the next.  Picasso was infamous for his muses, he was married twice and had four children by three different women.  He often had mistresses.  His relationships were stormy but vital to his creative process, though the women often fared less well.  His second wife and one of his mistresses committed suicide and others had nervous breakdowns.  Marie Francoise Gilot was muse, mistress and artist and following her split with Picasso, he used his influence to discourage support of her artwork and her celebrity fame far eclipsed her artistic fame.

I find the world around me hugely inspiring.  The natural world, the work of others, science, popular culture....  There is inspiration to be found everywhere....