Yesterday was Bellingen community market day. It was a gorgeous sunny day and plenty of people were out and about. However unlike the previous market which coincided with the Bellingen Jazz Festival, this was an ordinary market day.

As it turns out, as far as art at markets goes, this seems to matter.

I have only done a small number of markets so far and it may be too early to make a definitive call on this, but so far there is a crystal clear demarcation between ordinary market days and festival or special market days.

So far, festival or special market days are ten times more successful than ordinary days.

Leading up to christmas I'll continue to test this theory, and after that I think I'll be applying it rigorously. After all, market stalls are a huge amount of effort. While fun, they leave me exhausted. They do have to be worthwhile doing.

Speaking of which, I have come to the decision that on market days it is too much to expect of myself to do a daily drawing. The day is a super early start, filled with dashing busyness and ends in a fog of exhaustion.

So no drawing from yesterday, but a photo of my stall at the market instead.

A few evenings of Star Trek and cutting up canvas offcuts from paintings.

A quiet morning laying out and uncurling the canvas cards.

While a view is not necessary to creativity, facing a blank wall or looking into a carport are not ideal either. I always prefer to have some plants around. In fact one place I worked at I acquired a pot plant jungle around me. This studio outlook is the most idyllic I've ever had.

Volunteering. 

One of the most dislocating aspects of moving to a new place is not knowing anyone. One of the best ways I've found to solve this alienation is to arrive and immediately volunteer in the community. There is nothing like throwing yourself in to helping out to help you meet people and get to know your new area. It's win win for everyone. 

This morning I've spent doing the morning shift looking after the community gallery here in my new town of Bellingen. It's been quite a pleasant learning.

The alarm on my phone goes off to tell me it's time to quit with the administrivia and get onto painting. I move over to the drying rack and cautiously test each painting in turn. Wet. Wet. Wet. Wet. Wet. Wet.

 

It's been at least two weeks since I began painting the summer installment of the art filled cookbook. There are six paintings still wet and on the drying rack. I am waiting. Eventually one of them will dry and I may proceed with it's next layer. 

In summer (it is midwinter where I am in country Victoria) the paintings go outside for a few hours on sunny days. This speeds up their drying time. Not due to the heat of the sun, but due to the UV. The 'drying' of oil paints is actually an oxidation and chemical cross linking process. Like many chemical processes it is helped by a small amount of heat, but the key ingredients are airflow and UV light. The air provides the oxygen the oil needs to combine with to oxidise and the UV acts as a catalyst.

The frustration of being stalled got me to thinking about recreating the summer conditions that enable the paintings to dry at a much faster pace. Ebay to the rescue, I am now the owner of a UV light designed to simulate rainforest sunlight for frogs in captivity. It's not the desert conditions I originally aimed for, but an experimental start that will be gentle on the paint pigments and, in theory, do away with the torture of paint never dries.

The art supply store attendant totalled up my purchases and enquired if I was a student. Students at art stores get a discount. I said no. I then asked whether the store stocks hardwood stretcher frames as I like to have a good idea of who stocks what for my infrequent and time consuming trips to Melbourne. Essentially the answer was no.

I won't go into the details of what they did stock and the rather unconvincing case put forward as to why their softwood frames are just as good as hardwood ones, but just leave it at mentioning their lack of what I was after and the eyerolling sales obsfucation that didn't work.

There was one a part of this encounter that I will elaborate on, however, as it was so subtle and strange that it had me perplexed for a full day before I figured it out.

It was this: the store attendant launched into a lecture on how (in their opinion) top quality materials are not necessary if you are 'just painting'. Students (like the lecture-giver) don't need top quality materials. The only people who do are those entering painting competitions where it definitely makes a difference.

What was so weird about this? I had already stated I was not a student. And despite the fact I was buying a load of professional quality painting materials and enquiring about further top quality materials, the idea that I might be a professional artist was obviously missed. It had been assumed that if I wasn't a student then I must be a hobbyist and professional artists don't exist. Which is super strange coming from a painting student working in an art supplies store. 

Also sad and disturbing. The idea that art is not a 'real' career is alive and well, unfortunately.

I'd like to share with you a tiny daily ritual that has made a large difference to how I feel throughout the day. It's stupendously simple.

Drink at least one litre of plain water every day.

This is plain water, very unfashionable. Not juice. Not herbal tea. Definitely not soft drink or coffee.

Consistency.
I do this throughout the day.

Downing a litre or so of water right before bed gets the daily quota met, but defeats the main purpose of smoothing out energy and concentration slumps throughout the day.

Mindfulness.
I stay aware of my energy levels. If I begin to feel sluggish, I am also usually thirsty.
I notice that I get ill within a day or two of low water intake.

Benefits.

Once upon a time I had a huge caffiene addiction. To the point where I drank so much strong coffee that my body began to have an allergic reaction. Trust me, that's boatloads of coffee. I was one of those people who simply could not function without a coffee first. A typical creative type.

After a month or so of carefully making sure I was drinking at least one litre of plain water a day, I stopped craving caffiene. I was not trying for this. It was totally unexpected.

I am no longer a slave to the caffiene hit. The days of the afternoon slump are gone. Being consistently creative is so much easier. Thinking is clearer.

You?
What simple habit can you share that has made a gigantic difference to you, your state of being, how much you get out of your days?

There comes the time in the creative process when all the work is done, bar the last step. Some call it 'shipping'. Most of us probably think of it as putting our creations out there to be judged.

It's pretty damn scary.

It took me a full year to make the cookbook paintings available for sale. Oh, there were reasons. Setting up a web store. Finding the best method to record the paintings. Researching costs. Learning how to successfully photograph oil paintings. You know, reasons.

What if no one likes them? What if they don't sell? What if I post them off and then the archive file is buggered? What if. What if. What if. None of that happened.

Silly billy.

The whole point of bringing some new piece of wisdom and beauty into the world is to put it out there for people. Make it available, accessible. The whole point of creating a painting is to put a spark on canvas that someone, to whom that spark speaks, can put it on their wall and be reminded every day of it's message.

So I apologise.

For letting the fear of putting my work out there get the better of me for so long. I am determined to not let that happen ever again.

We had an awful summer growing season here in Victoria with floods and an astonishing number of cold days. Autumn has been warmer and drier than summer was! Still, there comes a time when the plants from last season have to make way for the new seedlings. That time is now. Which has made for a wonderful harvest of green tomatoes. Great for jam. Mmm, green tomato jam.

This is also the end of the Winter season of the cookbook. Which means it's the halfway mark in the art vege cookbook project. Yes, all the Autumn and Winter recipes and paintings are complete.

I'm going to take a bit of a break, perhaps up to a month, on posting recipes and paintings. I won't be idle though. This time will be spent organising the printed version of the cookbook and attending to some non-artistic business projects which require my attention to complete.

In the meantime, I'd like to keep blogging and I'm curious about what you would like to hear about. I'll be experimenting with writing on myself as an artist and various creativity, art and behind the scene artist life topics. If there's something you'd be fascinated to read about, let me know in the comments.

Last weekend I participated in a bit of a crazy art competition. In the spirit of fun and setting myself a challenge I entered this year's Art Blitz, run by Kingston City Council in Melbourne.

Fun? Challenge? Indeed! With just 24 hours to create and deliver an artwork to an announced theme, it may not be everyone's idea of fun, but it's certainly a challenge!

I pick up a brush, determine which section of the painting I am to apply my attention to, and get to work. I complete element after element in highly focused concentration until the entire painting is done. I put the brush down. I am exhausted, dizzy. Yet it feels as though maybe 10, perhaps 40 minutes has elapsed. I check the clock. 4 hours.

Being in the zone. It is well known that top athletes are required to find their way into the zone as part of their occupation. The same is true of artists.

Many artists will tell you that time stops when painting. Personally I find painting to be meditative and soothing. I like these aspects of painting but I'm not so keen on discovering my entire day/evening/morning has vanished.

For me, painting is far easier and more effective than traditional meditation to stop the chatter of the mind. It's quite a zen-like experience, albeit exhausting after so many unbroken hours. It's all I can do to keep up with my minds instructions to have the image fall out of my head and onto the canvas. The bottleneck is physical. The properties of the paint itself and how fast I can move.

It was just an ordinary roadtrip over christmas to visit family. Something many people do at this time of year. A 7 1/2 drive, about the driving time from London to Edinburgh or Portland OR to Eureka CA. So 15 hours there and back, taken over three days in total on good roads in great weather. Straightforward, one would assume. Uneventful. Dull.

Not so. 

We blasted our way through hoards of locusts so thick on the ground and in the air that it was impossible not to step on them in the hourly stops to clean the windscreen and administer mercy killings to the partly splattered. A radiator screen would have been a good idea had we known what we were to encounter, but at least we weren't on motorbikes!

The landscapes were captivating. Slow down. See through an artist's eyes:

We followed the South Australian coast road down to the Victorian border, driving through an area known as the Coorong. A marshy, salty, swampy place filled with such subtley coloured grasses and low scrubby plants that it was an eerily enchanting landscape.

The pink salt lakes stopped us in our tracks. Have you ever walked on a one inch thick crust of salt? I walk out into the pink water until the salt gives beneath my weight and cracks. Underneath was silty jet black warm mud.

We stopped to gaze on in admiration, from every possible angle, at the turquoise blue lake of Mount Gambier. Yes the lake really is that blue.

We encountered Australian beaches so typically Aussie they could have been cut and pasted from a Tourism Australia brochure. What the glossies don't say is that many of these beaches have rips and undertows too strong to be safe to swim in. But the colours, oh my!

And all throughout the drive were the iconic Australian paddock trees. Stately overseers of broadacre farming, all twisted, deformed and majestic and very dry. Wonderful silhouettes.

What beauty have you been driving on past lately?

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For all you fans of the simple tree, I have uploaded an entire collection of trees for you to use as reference material. I plan to sporadically add to this collection over time. Go create!