So we are getting closer to the end of the year and i don’t know about anyone else but this year has flown! Here in Australia we have a horse race, the Melbourne cup, and for me it acts as my gateway into Christmas and the end of the school year preparations. It also serves as a time for reflection and visions for the upcoming year.

I have many aspirations creatively, probably too many! But for the next year many creative aspiration will be intertwined with personal ones as the next year will close many chapters of my families life and open new opportunities! 

The largest is the finishing of a house that has taken two and a half years to build and another 5 years before that to plan (we moved into this house, before we knocked it down). For me when we moved into this new house 7 and a half years ago, it meant that my husband and I put many of our belongings in storage (books, my film camera, kitchen stuff which will be thrown out, unopened wedding presents… we have been married 10 years!). And since then it has felt that certain aspects of our life has been in “storage” (figuratively and literally!) on hold, waiting. It has been amazing to think that this has continued for seven years, most of one child’s life and all of the other child’s. It will be interesting to finally go through all the things I decided to store away and see what I want to resurrect and what I will say goodbye to. Will read the “Life Changing Magic of Cleaning up” by Marie Kondo! I aim to have ALL the boxes emptied by Easter and we can finally get on with life! To not have to be physically available to make decisions on the house (although my husband has been amazing) and not have these decisions cloud the mind!

However this storage period has been good for me creatively as I was able to try different genres that I was interested in and to understand what genres are in my reach (I might love fashion photography, but having children makes it really hard to organise photo shoots on a regular basis- but I gained many skills from fashion photography. Networking, photographing the clothes, styling the shoot, retouching, submitting… many things!). I worked out fine art photography allows me to be the most “selfish” with my time!

The other upheaval this year was both children starting a new school (one their first year). So there was a transition to being a “school mum” and including the kids in school activities (including 15 birthday parties to date!). The transitioned beautifully and hopefully this year this will all die down, so I will have more time to concentrate on my art.

So with this all in mind my goals for 2019 is:

- To experiment with social media to get more customers into my husbands business.

- Finalise pricing and to have fine art prints set up on Etsy and on my website. Also to create a workflow that allows access to the pictures seamless. It is created, now need to do the initial set up!

- Have a portfolio ready to submit to Archangel and Trevillion. I have decided to start a lot of this from scratch to get more appropriate pictures for this format and to be more organised in having releases readily accessible.

- Progress in my fine art painting. This was one aspect of my life that I did pack away 7 years ago and a regretted. I finally had enough this year and I started again… it will take a while to get back where I liked, but will be fun! 

- Progress on my fine art series on Deities and continually showing women as strong sensual beings, transcending gender norms that surrounds us in todays society. Also combining painting and photography and different ways! Hopefully beginning to look for galleries that can show this! 

So a question from an amazing Facebook group was posed to it members as a way to inspire them to communicate with their audience…. and it was “What inspires you to create your art?”…. and i thought why have not done a post like this earlier…. and then I realised it would be become a therapy session very quickly!!

………

And that is the last thing I would ever ask of you. I want to create beauty from places that are not necessarily beautiful. To turn all experiences in life, the good and the bad and create beauty from it. 

I think that is the reason most people create art; to use their medium of choice to make sense of the experiences they have collected so far. It is the reason that, for every artist, their art evolves (even if you don’t think so)- as you gain more experiences and insight and you put them into your art, your art then evolves with you.

At this point I haven’t even spoken about technique! As you work with a medium over time you begin to learn the medium and it nuances. You learn the rules of the medium and as you begin to “master” it (apparently it takes about 10,000 hours) you can learn to bend or break the rules!

Experimentation is a cornerstone of becoming a great artist, playing around seeing what works, and what doesn’t. What are your strengths, and in turn your weaknesses. I dabble in painting on occasion as painting allows my mind to stop to only focus what is in front of me, getting as close to a meditative state as I can manage! I took a painting workshop and I found it helps me really see what is in front of me, to see shadows and light, to see how the colours play with each other. The most surprising outcome from the workshop was to see the same subject, depicted by 6 students, seen so differently (seen below)

And if that can show nothing else it is this: be authentic to yourself and you will always create art that is original to you! Also I want to do a big shout out to my teacher Justin for helping us along (instagram; @justinvandenbergartist)

I create my type of art as an escape from the world and immerse myself in beauty in all forms. I find beauty in strength of character and in strength of self and it has always interested me that in the evolution of our society the strength and sense of self worth in women has ebbed and flowed. At present we live in a time where women are clawing it back, but looking into the past there was a time when women, and in particular feminine traits, were worshiped a beacons of strength and I want to display that in my work.

Much of my art is revisiting memories from my childhood, making them tangible. The series “At the Bottom of the Garden” is an example of how children can find magic and wonder everywhere, even in places that as “grown-ups” seem dull. And there is logic to the underlying theme “if you believe, it is real”. This theme is explored in depth in the Neil Gaiman novel “American Gods”. 

I have written an artist statement on these current themes and I don’t want to bore you any further!

I hope you enjoyed my musings and you share you whys as well! Do you combine photography with other forms of fine art, or writing, or cooking or any other creative endeavours?

I would love to hear from you, and thank you for staying!xxxxx

I figured my first blog post should be about the first photo shoot for this year….. although as I think about it I will blog about some older work later on!!

I had the wonderful opportunity to meet the lovely Julia as she travelled around Australia. Julia has such an amazing look, it was easy to create a concept the really suited her look. What I had in my mind initially was….

Then between us we created this…

One of my favourite ever pictures!

I will share other pictures from this shoot in future posts!!

Thanks for watching!xxx