With Winter arriving and Autumn passing, the colours are changing. We have a beautiful sunny crisp day today after some snow yesterday. It was so cold, but I love how the landscape is transformed by snow. Everything looks so black and white when there is a grey sky and it unifies everything. Then the colour returns with a blue sky contrasted against the monotone. As it's only mid November there are still some leaves on the trees, and this made for a wonderful contrast, giving splashes of colour in an otherwise monotone scene when the sky was grey.

This photo is from a few days ago. I was standing at the bus stop and noticing the amazing colours of the leaves against the wet pavement at my feet. The leaves gave such a great bright colourful contrast in yellow and green to the dark red pavement. I love the way the bus stop pavement writing still shows despite the paint having worn away, a ghost of past letters.  A moment of visual inspiration on a dull damp day. 

In an effort to work through my creative blocks, I have joined Ellie Hipkin for her Flourish textile course. I took part in a class with her at Made and Making in Hassocks last year. Creating collage, monoprints with machine embroidery. It was a great day and for a while, I felt really inspired, but then it slipped away from me again.

I recently have been giving myself permission to make work to play with ideas intuitively and to follow gently my creative leanings. I have been re-reading parts of  'Mindfulness and the art of drawing' by Wendy Ann Greenhalgh. She has some really useful tips on how to become more creative and to get over blocks. It's a beautiful book to look at as well and I find if I let it fall open somewhere I read those pages and see what they bring me.

I wonder if part of my problem has been trying to go back to how I worked pre-pandemic, it may be that I've moved on from there now. During the pandemic I made loads of portraits and experimental colour work, which I really loved but it was without any pressure to show anyone at all. Once 'normal' life returned the block came over me with avengance - I felt like I didn't know what getting back to normal meant as everything had changed - my classes had mainly stopped, my print studio had had to close and I had been very unwell. Certainly, the pandemic, the lockdowns and long-covid have really changed the person I am and also the artist within me. Trying to find what way to go now is proving to be a surprisingly hard challenge.

I am trying out new ways of working and different ways of approaching things. Updating my website is also helping as it means looking through all my old work and collecting things together in one public place. I also, this week, have moved into a studio share with Bella Franks and four other wonderful artists. I think feeling part of an art community again will really help. I have my home studio set up in my garage but there is something about leaving the house and going to work that is very positive. I see people and have conversations about art and work which all help to rebuild a sense of identity.

Despite some reluctance, I know that the only way I'll really get into a good working flow again is by working. Simply showing up and sitting with some materials leads me somewhere. If I simply avoid it and wait for inspiration it will never come. I am working on being more disciplined with my own practice and making something even if absolutely not in the mood. I'm then much more likely to return to the piece to work on it more. As a result, I have some projects developing that have piqued my interest so that when I get up I want to go and see how they are looking. This is a really good change. However, I haven't formed a new habit yet so I need to continue to work at it.

I've shared a few images here of what I'm currently working on. It's been a combination of dropping paint onto fabric, mono-printing, machine embroidery and painting. I'm still finding my inspiration in nature and landscape.  I'm definitely getting my hands dirty and feeling my way and creating some things that I like and pointing to some new directions.

There is no doubt that we all suffer from creative blocks sometimes. For me I've had one for a long time. It's connected with grief, loss, illness and the covid lockdowns amongst other things. I think it's root is something buried in my sub-conscious. Possibly my inner critic has been getting busy and is also stopping me!

Things that are so far helping are to make a change to my internal thinking about it. Changing from  "I can't" to "I can try" and "I will try, even though it's hard". I've also been making myself do tiny amounts of painting, just a few minutes at a time. I know it bucks against the idea of waiting for inspiration but I think inspiration often comes through the process of making work. If I wait for it to come I may never overcome the block.

When I paint, it feels so hard, my hands hurt and it feels exhausting and the concentration needed feels impossible. I think that if I make a start though and do some painting, and it doesn't really matter what, as long as it's something to do with the work I'm blocked about. It almost feels like I've forgotten how to paint, however when I teach people and help them it flows effortlessly so it's still there but locked away. Hopefully I can find the key. Making this website helps as well as I am going through my work and seeing what I have made in the past. This reminds me of the person I was before.

I'm now working on a tiny painting. I chose to take an old painting that I originally painted en plein air, at the foot of Devil's Dyke at sunset. The painting was on board, in a frame but is  unresolved so I decided to re-use it panel to make a new painting of the same location but from the top of the hill. It is progressing slowly and I did go into the studio and got my paints out and sat down to look at my reference images and previous paintings. That's a start. Perhaps I'll take it up to the location and carry on working on it in location. It's a start and that's all I asked for as a first step.

So where did the block come from? Something started to happen to my outdoor practise at lockdown when we weren't allowed to go out. I followed the rules to the letter and stayed home. It would have been a great opportunity to get out and paint but I couldn't do it in the context of what we were being told. I also contracted Covid and long covid which also made it incredibly hard to concentrate on anything. However this hiatus has stuck with me and although I'm much better now, painting landscape has still been hard. It's strange. I've been able to make portraits and more experimental work but I've not been able to fully reengage with my landscape work and that's what my identity as an artist was before and it was going quite well. So I am trying to reconnect with the artist I was at that time and we will hopefully see some progress and it may get easier.