Today has been a mixed bag. I started writing the blog this morning:
I am very tired this morning. This is not surprising as I managed to clock up 9 miles of walking yesterday. That’s quite a bit further than the other days of this holiday. But it was worth it – a lovely walk along the beach in the afternoon with my husband – Seahouses has a long stretch of sandy beach with very few stones so perfect for walking barefooted. I picked up just one shell.
In my morning walk around the lanes yesterday I was fascinated by the marks left in the fields from harvesting. When I looked up close to a flower it was wonderful to see the detail and the number of tiny butterflies or moths on it. I have also been fascinated by the way the plant dies and looks when the flowers are gone.
Today I took a photo of a tree growing in a stone wall.
I feel I want to use these as prompts for a painting, but feel intimidated. The email prompts for today were difficult to answer immediately but I gave them some thought over breakfast. Whilst waiting for photos to upload to WordPress (the internet here is so slow!) I doodled on the journal page.
Here ends the morning’s writing.
Later on I started to do a painting that I wanted to be an abstract/patterns based on the field and wall. I did NOT want to go for realism. However, the picture decided differently. I added the gate and then of course realised the lines on the yellow field were not disappearing into the vanishing point as they were done when it was just going to be patterns. I had fun with making the green marks at the top, and became frustrated with the wall. This is how far I got.
Terry and I had a lovely drive after lunch through some spectacular scenery which included hills and the River Coquet. I then did the video session. Below is what I wrote on the Facebook group page afterwards.
I have just listened to the video for Day 3 and started with a blank mind, and blank paper. I was left in tears and feeling very sad. I don’t know why. I started the picture with a line then wrote Psalm 139 as the thing that underpins my life – wherever I am, there God is. I put some colour on – then too much colour. I wanted to rip it up and throw it away. But I stuck with it and trusted my intuition to lead me. The tree had started out being a fern – but such is my artistic talent that it ended up a tree. The green marks in the centre represent ferns. I remember walking through ferns that were as tall as me when I was a child. The countryside is important to me, as well as rivers and the sea. The dark shape represents depression. For many years I suffered from depression – but no longer. The question mark represents the feeling of not knowing what lies deep within that drives my art. Why do I want to paint when I clearly have so little talent for it? Occasionally I will produce something that’s OK but that’s a fluke. Most of the time my work is rubbish. And this is what makes me feel sad. I trusted my intuition in this session and produced this.
I went for a walk to try and sort out my thoughts and emotions. Starting off along the lane, I pondered whether I should just give up doing art. I took the path through the wood not knowing where it went other than Holystone. It took me to the river and by the time I was there I was feeling much better. I had sung snippets of O Lord my God (how great thou art) whilst walking. I stopped by the river for a few minutes and let the sound of the water over the rocks calm my inner being.
On the way back I stopped momentarily by the tree growing though the wall that had caught my eye earlier. The tree grows despite the wall. I felt that my art will grow despite the obstacles. Or more likely because of the obstacles.
When I got home I noticed that the dark shape had lightened since I first wrote about it. My mood, likewise, has lightened.
Elizabeth Jones' Diary 